BSU media project

I have emailed everyone with their feedback and grades for the media directories.

I think that you all did really well on that project.  The directories were generally very good: they give a really good overview of the media industries in the region.  Hopefully you found the experience useful both in terms of your understanding of the media industries, but also in terms of basic web authoring.

Well done.

James

This week, you will be allocated your groups for the second assessment.

Once the assessment has been described, you will need to get your group blog up and running.  You should:

• Introduce yourselves to each other
• Make sure you have each other’s contact details
• Go through the assessment together and ask me any questions

One of you will then need to set up the blog and invite the others to join using the USERS function

This workshop is dedicated to self and peer review of your media directories. The outcomes of your reviews will form your research blog for this week.

You should look in detail at five of your colleagues media directories

In your research blog answer the following questions for each media directory that you have looked at:

1: What worked best about it, and why?
2: What could be improved, and how?

Then complete the following questions for your own directory:

1: What did you learn about researching media organisations online?
2: What did you learn about the media industries in the South West?
3: What did you learn about writing for the web (both in terms of technical skills and design issues)?
4: What were the biggest problems that you faced in completing this assessment, and how did you address those problems?

Finally… list three areas of media production that interest you.  This will help in creating the teams for the next part of the assessment.

This week we are going to continue to familiarise ourselves with this blog tool.  In order to do that, you will do the following:

• Finalise your template and home page
• Add some external links on a blogroll
• Create a new page containing text, links, tags and embedded media

To do this properly, you are going to take advice from Mike Johnston’s excellent guide to student blogging.  Mike is using Blogger, which is an alternative blog tool to Edublogs, but the principles he outlines remain the same.

This is the blog for MC4005: Media Project.  Once the module is up and running, each group will be allocated an area – you ‘ll be able to see it in the tabs at the top of the page.  That is where all your work will be placed.  The aim is to produce a web resource that will provide information on what media industries exist in the South West, where they are, what they do and how they fit into the wider media economy.

No-one expects your blog to be perfect at first, but it should be a professional-looking resource by the end of the year.  I can’t tell you right now what it might contain – since that is all part of the learning process.  What I can tell you is that since this is a group project, everyone in your team will be expected to contribute equally to the work.  One advantage of using a blog is that everyone’s contribution can be seen from the amount of material they upload and the number of changes that they make to existing pages.

You should see this project as developing a number of the key skills that your degree should provide you with: the ability to research media industries, team-working skills, experience in the effective use of web 2.0 tools and so forth.  This may not be a conventional module, but it will demand as much commitment and hard work from you as any other – perhaps even more.  However, at the end of it you will have a piece of work which you can share with others – even potential employers – and which will demonstrate that you not only understand how media industries operate, but are able to use new media tools to communicate your knowledge.