Despite the fact that she was in the throes of the first week of a new term, St. Edward's University's Corinne Weisgerber was kind enough to answer a few questions for "Meet the Teacher." Although it's meant for her students, I'm a happy subscriber to Corinne's Social Media for PR Class blog, which always touches on interesting current events relating to PR... check it out, and check out her answers to my questions:
Q. How and when did you first get interested in blogging? What is the purpose of your blog? Are you using any other social media?
A. I started studying communication right about the time the Internet started taking off and as a budding communication scholar I was immediately intrigued by the changes these new communication technologies were bringing about. So I guess it was really more a timing coincidence that got me interested in the Internet and the study of computer-mediated interaction. In fact, up until that point I wasn’t very computer savvy at all. I knew that if I wanted to study online communication, I’d better start figuring out the web. I began by teaching myself HTML in the mid '90s – a time when knowing how to develop websites was a big thing.
I didn’t officially start blogging until I started teaching my social media class last year, although I had been maintaining a web presence through various personal and professional websites up until then. For my dissertation for instance, I created a website on which I regularly published qualitative research memos. It was a way for me to keep my committee members in the loop. I even included a form field that allowed them to send me feedback – you could say it was an early attempt at blogging.
My blog is the course blog for our Social Media for PR class. It is meant to explore emerging social media technologies and study their application in contemporary PR practice. I have played with the idea of starting my own personal blog plenty of times, but never seem to get around to actually implementing that idea… Part of the problem is that when you teach this stuff, you have to try out all sorts of social media and before you know it, you get sucked into yet another social network, or new web application. I am on Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and I subscribe to about 100 feeds which range anywhere from news sites, to blogs, podcasts, and social bookmark feeds. I am also an avid del.icio.us user, just got introduced to Blackboard Scholar, and use wikis and other collaborative tools in both my research and teaching.
Q. Tell us a little about your school and how PR is taught there.
A. Communication majors at St. Edward’s University can choose from one of four areas of specialization: Communication and Culture; Media Arts, Public Relations, and Advertising; Organizational Communication; and Rhetorical Studies. Students interested in the PR track take Intro to PR, PR Writing, Research Methods, PR Campaigns, and Internship. We also started offering a Social Media for PR class as a special topics course last year, and I’m very excited that we are about to remove the special topics status from that class and make it a core component of the PR curriculum. This doesn’t mean though that we don’t cover social media in other PR classes. Our Intro students for instance, are required to contribute case study analyses to a course blog, while our campaigns students use collaborative social media technologies such as wikis, mind mapping tools, and calendar applications to manage their teamwork and keep their clients informed about project developments. Our campaigns class (called PR for Nonprofit Organizations) is somewhat unique because it focuses on the special PR needs of the nonprofit sector. It is taught as a service-learning class and requires students to work with a local nonprofit to develop a strategic communications plan that addresses a PR problem or opportunity for that organization. This focus on the nonprofit sector stems from our university’s Catholic heritage and its mission to promote social justice.
Q. In what ways do you incorporate social media into the classroom? What would you most like to do that you aren't already doing?
A. When I first designed my Social Media for PR class, I thought of social media exclusively in terms of course content rather than thinking of it as a pedagogical tool. It was going to be a class about social media and it didn’t occur to me at first that social media held important pedagogical promises as well. It wasn’t until I started blogging, social bookmarking and using feed aggregators that I started seeing the pedagogical applications.
Since then I have incorporated various elements of social media into most of my classes. Last semester, I had my public speaking students embed videos of speeches on a course blog and critique them. In that class, we also relied on data visualization technologies such as tag clouds and word trees as a way to analyze the content of public speeches. This fall, my Intro to PR class will develop an interactive timeline of the history of the PR profession using a web application called Dipity. Some of my students will also be using social bookmarks to contribute course material to a shared course resources repository and to identify a person who shares their interests. My PR for nonprofit class will be developing their entire PR plan in a wiki, which will be accessible to the client and me (a great way to keep tabs on their progress!). We will also complete in-class writing activities in these wikis, and critique the work by pulling up the wiki page on the screen. I’ve become so interested in the pedagogical applications of these technologies that I will be leading a pre-conference seminar on the topic (together with my husband who also teaches at St. Edward’s) at the upcoming National Communication Association’s annual convention in San Diego.
Q. Do you have any advice for other PR educators who are considering starting a blog or getting involved in social media?
A. Just do it! Seriously though, that is the best way to get started. When I proposed our social media class, I actually knew very little about social media. All I knew was that it was a hot topic and that the PR industry seemed to be getting increasingly interested in it. I also felt that as a communication department we owed it to our students to expose them to the latest communication technologies and help them critically examine their social and cultural implications. The great thing about most of these tools is that they are very easy to use and don’t require users to understand every single little detail about the underlying technologies that make them work.
I would definitely encourage any PR educator who hasn’t already started blogging to do so. I think that if you teach your students about blogging for PR without having experienced its power yourself, you will be missing a lot of key points. My students didn’t learn about tagging, linking, and SEO from a lecture or powerpoint presentation, they learned about it when Google picked up one of their posts and catapulted it to its first page of search results for a key tag or topic.
Q. One of the things I love about your blog is that you're clearly a lot more computer proficient than I am, and you include a lot of multimedia. Where did you develop your expertise, and how do you manage to keep up?
A. As I mentioned before, I have no formal training in any of this. What I do know, I taught myself – mostly through trial and error. For instance, this summer I decided to figure out why everyone is talking about
Drupal, an open-source content management system. I hadn’t heard of it until a student mentioned it last year. So two months ago, I decided to give it a try and use it to build a webpage. Although learning my way around Drupal was frustrating at times, the end result was very rewarding.
In terms of keeping up with all the changes, I find that social media has actually made it easier to do so. I subscribe to a lot of PR and technology blogs, and follow people who share my interests on
del.icio.us. That’s how I hear about new technologies or interesting web applications. Another great source of information are my students. Since they know I’m interested in technology, they constantly tell me about their latest Internet discoveries or send me links to new sites.
