Welcome back: COJO grad speaks at convocation

Every department has its "stars" - students who excel in the classroom while at UW and former students who rise to the upper echelons of their career paths. Many are successful while attending UW. But that's no guarantee they will excel in the workplace, especially in the current economy.
One COJO alum who stood out both as a student and as a graduate is Dan Haley, a 1992 journalism graduate. Dan will be the keynote speaker for this year’s Keith and Thyra Thomson Honors Convocation on Oct. 9 at 2:30 p.m. in the College of Arts & Sciences Auditorium.
Dan is the editorial page editor for the Denver Post, the biggest newspaper in the Rocky Mountain region. Before that, he worked as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers in Colorado and Wyoming, including for the Gillette News Record.
I remember Dan from when I first came to work at UW in 1990. At that time, he was the sports editor for the Branding Iron student newspaper. He was a student in one of my classes before he graduated. I recall that his writing stood out from his peers, and that he wanted to work for newspapers. Both of those attributes seemed to guarantee that he would have a respectable journalism career, I thought at the time.
But I never expected he would become editorial page editor of a metro newspaper.
I've seen Dan a few times since he left UW. He taught a summer class for the department a few years back. More recently, he was president of the UW Alumni Association, which required frequent visits to campus.
Welcome back again, Dan. Enjoy the spotlight at the honors convocation. You've earned it.

Teaching online: Cyberlearning has pluses/minuses

Somebody once told me that the best thing about teaching online classes is that you can work in your pajamas.
I won't admit to ever wearing PJs while teaching, but I will admit that I will never wear a necktie while teaching online.
I've been teaching two online classes - Public Affairs Reporting and Investigative Reporting - since 2006 during fall semesters. This is the third time I've done Public Affairs, and there has been a steady increase in enrollment. The first year, 16 students signed up. The next class there were 19 and this year there were 26 students enrolled at the start of the semester.
In informal surveys that I send to students at the start of the semester, they are asked what they like and dislike about online learning. Their responses are enlightening.
"I enjoyed the freedom of being able to access ‘class’ from various locales. I did not, however, enjoy the detachment I felt from both my classmates and my prof in lieu of a real classroom," said a woman in this semester's class.
"I liked online because I can do things in my own time. I like that I can set aside my own time to do things and having online lets me manage some more credit hours," said another woman.
However, she added, "I disliked online, because sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly what the teacher wants. I like having face to face interaction, because I think I understand things more clearly."
A male student echoed that dichotomy: "I liked how you could set your own schedule, the class fit to you instead of you always having to fit to it; I found it hard when I needed to contact instructor because in a face-to-face if you are still confused you can ask them right there where in an e-mail you have to send another and another until you have the answer."
Surprisingly to me, their likes and dislikes are similar to my own as the instructor. The convenience of teaching whenever and wherever I please are two of the main draws for online instruction for me.
However, I am convinced that many students will not learn as much in an online class because they need the face time and hands-on instruction that can only come from a classroom environment. However, research has shown there is no difference in performance for students in online vs. traditional classes. Essentially, students learn as well online as they do in live classrooms, according to studies.
I try to include as much interaction as possible in online classes. We hold weekly live chats in real time. There is a threaded discussion each week in which students post comments to a question and interact with each other by posting responses. And students can and do e-mail me all the time.
One reason that I developed the two journalism classes offered online is so students at the UW-Casper College campus can take required courses without having to come to Laramie, or without me having to drive to Casper.
Besides Casper, students in my online classes have been based in Colorado, Jackson Hole, Gillette and even Hawaii.
Online classes will probably continue to expand in the COJO Department because there is demand for them from students and UW administration.

COJO changes: Faculty take new posts

There will be some changes in the COJO Department when fall semester begins later this month. Two faculty members are moving to new jobs that will affect the department.
Tracey Patton, associate professor, took over as director of the African-American Studies Program on Aug. 1. She will continue to teach three classes a year, including her popular Cross Cultural Communication course that has raised money for an orphanage in Africa.
Tracey also was director of graduate studies in the department. Dr. Michael Brown will resume that role.
At African-American Studies, Tracey replaces Gracie Lawson-Borders, who also is an associate professor in the COJO Department. Gracie moved from AAST director to associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences on Aug. 1. As associate dean, she no longer will be teaching COJO classes. Those include Media Convergence and Minority Media Ownership, which I consider crucial classes for our journalism majors.
We wish them both the best of luck in their new endeavors.
However, their departures coupled with the hiring freeze at UW will impact students. After a couple years of requests, the department finally obtained permission to hire a new journalism professor. We had to shut down our job search after budget woes forced the university to make budget cuts.
As a result, we won't be able to offer as many courses, particularly in journalism, as in recent years.

Conferencing: A trip to Grand Targhee

Two weekends ago, I was in Grand Targhee, Wyo., to present a paper at the 23rd Visual Communication Conference.
While conducting research is not part of my job description, I occasionally write a scholarly article for publication in journals or to present at an academic conference. Tenure-track and tenured faculty at UW are required to publish, but I do it just as a mental hobby to keep my brain functioning at an acceptable level.
What I've discovered about academic writing is that it's a lot harder to get published in a journal than it is in a newspaper or magazine. Before coming to UW, I did a fair amount of freelance writing and had stories published in such places as the Boston Globe newspaper and Fly Fisherman magazine.
Those stories were probably read by thousands, possibly tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands (in the case of the Globe). In contrast, an article in a scholarly journal may attract an audience measured in single or double digits.
So figure out why there is so much prestige in being published in academic journals. Never have so many worked so hard and stressed so much for so little audience.
In any case, my paper was entitled "Tapping the Collective Unconscious on Page One: Two Case Studies of Traditional Community-newspaper Flags." The study looked at the flags of the Glenrock Independent and Guernsey Gazette, both weekly newspapers in Wyoming. The research applied Jungian analysis to try to explain how the artwork in the two flags taps into the collective subconscious of readers in both towns. If interested in the details, here is a link to the article.
I kind of felt like a dinosaur at the conference, where many participants were exploring some cutting-edge, 21st-century topics such as visual memes, technology dissection, veromones, Second Life, etc. The Viscomm conference attracts a wide range of experts, including journalism faculty and grad students, artist types, and other educators and researchers.
The COJO Department hosted the conference this year, and three of our graduate students and four of our faculty presented research at the conference. Although it rained three of the four days, Grand Targhee was a beautiful, visually stimulating locale for the event. The highlight for participants was a cookout at a local dude ranch that included wagon rides through herds of elk and bison.
For people who came from as far as California and Rhode Island, Viscomm 23 was about as Western as it gets.

Summertime: When the learning is easy

Summer classes are under way at UW, and I'm teaching two classes during a three-week session. Online Journalism is in the morning, and Graphics of Communication is in the afternoon.

The three-week classes are kind of an endurance race - can students and faculty last three hours, 10 minutes per class Monday through Friday for three weeks? Can you cram in everything you'd cover during a normal 15-week semester into 14 days (no classes on Memorial Day)?

My observations after years of teaching in summer is that students actually learn better in three weeks than in 15. I base that on anecdotal evidence as well as on their actual performances.

For instance, last summer in Online Journalism, the average final grade was 85.3 percent. This spring, the average in the same class was 82.5. I didn't run a statistical analysis on the grades to see if they were significantly different, but judging by the gap, I'm willing to bet they were.

What accounts for the difference, I think, is that students are only taking one class during summer and are able to focus all of their attention on that single subject. During a regular academic semester, full-time students are taking 4-6 classes and their energies have to b e divided among all of those courses.

While summer classes can be intense, they also seem to be better learning experiences. Higher education should consider revamping the old semester system into three-week sections, during which students would take just one class in each section.

Graduation into the real world

Graduation is a time for celebration, and there were lots of events at the University of Wyoming at the end of the semester to put people in the mood.

First, I attended a luncheon to honor the finalists for the Spitaleri Award given to the top female student at the university. Hanna Bush, a senior in journalism from Gillette, was a finalist, and I attended the lunch with her and her parents. Hanna didn't win the award, but the recognition of being one of the top seven women out of the entire senior class is truly an outstanding achievement. And the lunch was pretty good.

The next week, I went to breakfast with Hanna and her parents (they put in a lot of driving!) to honor the College of Arts and Sciences top 10 graduating seniors. Dean Oliver Walters and his staff put on a nice spread, and I ate way more than usual for breakfast that day. By the way, Hanna also was editor for the Branding Iron this past year.

Last weekend, the winner of the first Larsh Bristol award for photojournalism was honored at the UW Alumni House. UW student Joe Riis had a public show of his photography funded by the Bristol award. Larsh Bristol was an alumni of our journalism program, and his friends set up this award after his death. Riis has done some incredible work documenting the migration of the Jackson Hole antelope herd. His work is also being funded by National Geographic, which gives you some idea of the quality of his photography project.

Hanna and Joe are just two of the remarkable students you will find at UW. I think you'll be hearing more about them in the future.

Roller derby mania hits Laramie

Last weekend there were two sporting events in Laramie - the University of Wyoming spring football game and the first-ever bout for the Naughty Pines roller derby team.

Guess which event attracted the most fans?

The roller derby sold 730 tickets at $10-$15 apiece. It was a sellout. Meanwhile, only about 400 fans turned out for the Cowboys game, which was free. As many as 1,000 fans may have attended the derby because a lot of comp tickets were given away.

I'm not going to predict that roller derby will always outdraw UW football, but I was amazed at the crowd for the debut event. People had to park as far away as the Rec Center and walk through drizzle and rain to the ice arena where the derby was held.

Many people probably didn't know the rules, but that didn't stop the crowd from getting loud and crazy, ringing cow bells and stomping feet on the steel bleachers. Even though the Pines got creamed by the more experienced Denver squad, they never lost the support of their fans. It should also be noted that Denver had a ringer - their best jammer previously was a competitive speed skater.

Beer sales helped fuel the crowd, no doubt. The Altitude had a table with kegs of wheat beer and IPA for the older crowd and the ever-popular Pabst's Blue Ribbon for the college set. In future bouts, the beer situation needs improvement. There were only two servers and people spent more than 20 minutes in line. Altitude needs at least twice as many servers next time.

The Naughty Pines originated in the COJO Department with some graduate students and administrative assistant Sue Benson. Judging by their initial outing, the Pines were a rousing success.