What is the relationship between traditional media and social media?

When you log on to facebook or twitter, you will often come across news stories shared and often commented on by your friends and acquaintances. One could say that the people you "know" online become your personal news editors. In other words, we use social media to find news, or the news find us via our friends. At the same time, as explained by Markham Nolan in this TED talk,  traditional media use social media to find and investigate news stories. Furthermore, in episode five of the HBO series The Newsroom, we saw how social media can be used by news producers to get in touch with the real people who are on the ground where important events are taking place - more or less anywhere in the world.

Write a short text where you sum up the main points of Nolan's talk and comment on the relationship between traditional and social media. Also, search online to see if you can find a good comment article about this and share the link to this comment in your blog post.

World news

This week we spent some time browsing world news. First, you were simply asked to check out the websites of news giants BBC, CNN, Fox News and Al Jazeera. After forming a first impression of these, you were to pick one piece of news that was covered by all of them and compare the coverage on the four websites. Now, write a post about what you found. What was the headlines, what images/ illustrations were chosen, was there differences in the language? Try to also comment on how detailed/ thorough the coverage was.  How nuanced would you say the various websites were in their presentation? What type of and/ or how many sources were used? Finally, give your  subjective opinion on which of these presentations of the news story you liked best and explain why. The picture is a clipping of the BBC front page today.

A visit to the Nobel Peace Centre

Last week we visited the Nobel Peace Centre and were given a tour of their exhibition about social media and democracy - be democracy. Write a post about this visit where you explain in your own words what the exhibition was about. What did you find interesting and why? Use one of the photos you took as an illustration and explain why you chose this photo. (This photo is a screenshot from the Nobel Peace Centre's homepage.)

Social media

Which social media can you think of? Which social media do you use? Write a short text where you start with introducing social media/ explaining what it is (feel free to use the definition you find on www.merriam-webster.com). Give examples of popular social media and how they are used and then go on to discuss the pros and cons of social media and social media usage. You may choose to focus on one or two types of social media, like facebook and/ or twitter (you can even compare and contrast), or you can write about social media in general. 

You can probably find useful information in the presentation made by the class: Social Media
The photo "Social media explained" is shared on flickr by Chris Lott.

Getting started

The general idea is that you create your blog in your own way, but here are some guidelines:

• Choose a title that has something (more or less anything) to do with you and/ or the subject International English.
• Spend some time figuring out the layout of your blog.
• Remember relevant illustrations for every post. You are encouraged to take your own photos!
• If you find images online, make sure to use images that you are allowed to share (for example, images on flickr are marked with symbols that tell you whether you can use them or not).
• Give all your posts a title.
• You do not have to share personal information (that is not the point of this blog), but you should aim to give your blog its own "character".
• Try to be creative!

The blog you now create is supposed to be a place where you reflect on topics that have to do with International English. In other words, you can write about anything from the English language to nuclear weapons, the media, the environment, the challenges of multiculuralism, a novel you just read or a film that you would like to recommend - and so much more. You can choose to only do the blog tasks I give you here, but I also hope that some of you eventually will begin to write relevant posts on your own initiative as well.  Your blog will be assessed with one grade in the first term and one in the second, and this will count towards the written grade in English. Good luck blogging! (The photo is my own.)

Why blog in International English?

...you may ask. I am tempted to reply with the title of a Cranberries (Irish band from the 90s) album that was very popular when I went to upper secondary myself: "Everybody else is doing it, so why don't we?". However, I think I can offer a more meaningful explanation than that. Obviously, in order to improve your writing in English, you have to write. So far you have handed in answers to the assignments to me, your teacher, and me alone. This is of course fine, but quite often what you hand in are interesting thoughts and perspectives on the topics and questions thrown at you, and I think you should share these thoughts with the world, or at least the others in your English class. I have previously used blogs with my Norwegian classes and what I have found is that blogs help students to:

• develop their digital competence.
• create multimodal texts.
• reflect on the topics and texts we work on in class.
• express thoughts and opinions.
• receive formal and informal feedback from teacher and fellow students.
• share with others.
• create texts that are more creative than more traditional essays.
• write more and thereby improve their writing. Creative and critical writing is important both in education and future jobs. You can read more about student blogging here (in Norwegian).
• take an interest in as well as learn from what fellow students write.

Your blogs will also give me as a teacher a more complete impression of you as students. Besides, International English is a subject that really invites us to gather, share, discuss and comment on information from various sources off and online. We are supposed to work with complex topics such as multiculturalism, intercultural communication, international challenges and the role of the media on the global scene. What is more logical than exploring these topics online? I hope your blogs can serve as a more meaningful and authentic context for your texts than our more traditional learning platform and I also hope you see the advantages in being able to combine your texts with images, videos and links to relevant material online. I am looking forward to reading what you have to say!

(The photo is my own.)

Welcome to our class blog interaction

Welcome to this International English class blog. Here I will share tips about relevant websites, interesting books and anything else that might be useful for you when working on this subject. Our subject page on itslearning is still our main "hub", but this blog and our facebook group will serve as additional (hopefully supporting) arenas. Soon I will post blog assignments here, and you are to do these assignments (some optional and some compulsory) by writing posts on your own International English blogs. I hope you will enjoy following this and each other's blogs this schoolyear.

I found this photo on creativecommons.org and this is the link.