Can research methods be fun to teach? So advocates Dr. Margaret Bates, who cites examples of the benefits of focus groups and social media that allow people to feel safe and open up about themselves and their research topics. Using a Dodge commercial and other short video clips, Bates remarks on the significance of participant observation; content analysis, parallel to counting; and the interesting collapse of context in examining how people interact with media.

Dr. Margaret Bates, an alumna of Teachers College, is currently a part-time faculty member at The New School in the Media Studies and Film Department. Previously, Dr. Bates was Associate Professor and Director of Foundations, Media and Communication Arts, The City College of New York. Prior to that, she was marketing consultant for the New York Media Association and Group Account Director for THINK New Ideas. She joined THINK after being the Director of New Business Development at AT&T’s digital production studio, Downtown Digital. She also led the production of an eight-month on-line test of interactive television as well as the development of prototypes for market trials of ITV. Before that she was vice-president at Humanware/New Product Development at Citibank and held the same position at Videodisc Publishing, Inc. She has published online about web activism.

Referencing Our Guest Talk, The Use of Youtube in Teaching Media Research Methods, with Margaret Bates, Monday, 12/13

Video by Michelle DeLateur

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At this year’s Baruch Teaching and Technology conference, I attended a session on how to insert RSS feeds in Blackboard.

For those unfamiliar, RSS or Real Simple Syndication is a feed format that can be aggregated with a reader like Google Reader or on a website, like in Blackboard. Once you subsribe to a feed from a blog, vlog, Twitter or any URL where you see the RSS symbol (shown above) in your browser, you’ll be able to monitor all new content without ever visiting the source.

An amazing amount of content on the web has an available RSS feeds. The U.S. Department of Education, PBS Video, the Library of Congress, Inside Higher Ed and many more sites provide content that may be applicable for a course. My favorite, though, is RSS feeds from research databases. For example, Ebsco, the vendor that hosts Eric,  Academic Search Premier and others, allows users to create a search or journal alert and then subscribe to that alert via RSS. This means that a professor could, for example, pull all new articles on “cell phones in the classroom” or all articles from the journal Education Week into a Blackboard course.

For those who did not get to attend the Baruch conference, you’re in luck. I found many tutorials on Youtube that show, step-by-step, how to aggregate RSS in Blackboard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gaeibmikvg

On a side note, TC instructional staff who wish to teach a course in Blackboard should send an email to the registrar@tc.edu and include:

1) the course ID
2) the official course title
3) the section #
4) the CRN.