Life in Academe
Events and experiences that remind me that I’m a professor and I love working in higher education.
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Constructive Criticism for Faculty?
Books such as Academically Adrift, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, and The Marketplace of Ideas critically examine the role of colleges and universities. One of our issues on campuses around the nation is that we don’t take such criticism personally. But should we? Should recent analyses of higher education shape the way university…
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Google Images doesn’t own images
Google Images is an excellent tool for searching and finding images from across the Internet. Unfortunately for students, the image’s appearance in a search does not authorize its use. I recently wrote an article titled Photos and Copyright Law in which I advocated for appropriate citation in student projects. One issue with citation has emerged…
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Event Hashtags: Lessons Learned from NCA
The National Communication Association (NCA) may have gotten it right – according to its Twitter followers. With the consecration of the #NCA11 hashtag, for this year’s conference, attendees on Twitter might finally be pleased with the selection. However, use of alternate hashtags by the association Twitter account threatens to upend the discussion once again. A…
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Photos and Copyright Law
If you find a photo and place it on your website, in a paper, or use it as an image in some other document, be careful. More likely than not, you are in violation of copyright law. My rule for photos: if you didn’t shoot it with your own camera, draw it with your own hand,…
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Paying it Forward
Shannon Hames is using her degree to inspire youth to access, explore, and experiment with digital media. Hames, a graduate of the Knight School’s Masters program in Organizational and Strategic Communication, works with Right Moves for Youth, a Charlotte-area school-support program. She has taken her learning back to her job and to the community she…
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Becoming Blog Savvy
Ariel Hooper, now an alumna of Queens University of Charlotte, wrote this piece about her experience in my integrated strategic communication course for the Knight School of Communication website: Becoming blog savvy At the beginning of the Spring 2011 term, students in Dr. John A. McArthur’s Comm306: Integrated Strategic Communication class were assigned the opportunity…
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What can I do with a Degree in Communication?
Parents of prospective students often ask me the same question: What kind of job can you get with a communication degree? As the director of our undergraduate programs, I often respond that the possible answers are many, diverse, and can be highly rewarding. I created this wordle display for the Knight School of Communication website on…
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Usability + Design = User Experience
I have stumbled along this sometimes somewhat stony path: from an analysis of users’ perceptions, to the notion of user satisfaction, to user experience… [alongside] some of the attractive theories that may have led me and others astray. -Dr. Jurek Kirakowski Clemson University’s MATRF, Usability Testing Center, and student chapter of the Society for Technical…
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Milton Friedman and corporate responsibility
The corporation’s only responsibility is to make money and sell products so that people can be hired and paid. It is the job of the individual, not the company, to serve society through philanthropy.” – Milton Friedman, Univ. of Chicago Professor Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences In an age where information lies…
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Writing the Media Release
Even through the fast shifts toward online media, the press release remains a staple of the strategic communication industry. However, it has taken on two similar but divergent forms: the media release and the story release. A media release (or news release, or press release) is the traditional format for announcements to the media. Conversely,…
J.A.McArthur 