Teaching PR

I have two reasons for starting this blog. First, it will give me an opportunity to reflect on my teaching and ways I can improve it. One of the benefits of teaching at the university level is the freedom to do what we think is best in the classroom, but one of the drawbacks of that freedom is that there are few formal structures for helping us evaluate how it's working (end-of-semester student evaluations being the most common). By helping me focus on teaching on a more daily basis, this blog will be a success even if no one but me ever reads it.

However, I hope it will also give non-academics a glimpse into what we do and why we do it. In the last few weeks, I've seen several blog posts about how students are unprepared or unaware about blogging. And people seem to want to blame faculty for it. Yet at the University of Georgia, at least two of us teaching in the Ad/PR department (myself included) are using blogs as classroom tools-- so I know we're doing more than people realize. Moreover, some of my students who read those posts said that they have learned about blogs in various classes, and one even argued that students have a responsibility to learn something about blogging whether or not their professors have discussed it in class!

Perhaps this blog can clear up misconceptions, and perhaps people's comments on what I'm doing can help me help my students. Thanks for checking in!