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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Spring 2011 Student Blogs
In my Integrated Strategic Communication course, students are required to engage their blogs with other blogs (outside of our class) related to public relations and strategic communication. I often recommend student blogs at other universities for this assignment. Here are some links that may be helpful. Be sure to check out the “Blogroll” section of…
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Made to Stick (Heath and Heath 2007)
Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die (Heath & Heath, 2007) To make the book stick in our minds, Jim Shoff and Miranda Ervin turn back to an interview with the authors on NPR. “The curse of knowledge is the arch-villain in our book,” they say. “If you know something, it’s hard to…
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Employees First, Customers Second (Nayar, 2010)
Employees First, Customers Second: Turning conventional management upside down (Nayar, 2010) “Usually business books focus on the what,” says Stacey Randall. “This book is focused on the how – the process.” Employees First, Customers Second is a vehicle for transparency in an organization. Nayar describes the process utilized by his company, HCL, to create a…
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Feedback for New Bloggers 2.0
Blogging can be a daunting task for those who are new to the practice. Here are some general notes I’ve compiled after reading the first week’s blog posts in my integrated strategic communication course, followed by five tips for improving our blog community in this course. Source Citations: If you use a quote from any…
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When Egypt Went Dark
“Media can instigate change, but media cannot topple governments. People topple governments,” remarks Dr. Mohammed el-Nawawy to a standing-room-only crowd that gathered to discuss the precarious situation in Egypt, a country el-Nawawy calls “the heart and center of the Arab world.” On Friday, January 28, 2011, the Egyptian government shut down 90% of Internet access…
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Engage! (Solis, 2010)
Engage!: The complete guide for brands and business to build, cultivate, and measure success on the new web (Solis, 2010) I assigned several books for a graduate seminar in Digital Strategic Communication, taught at Queens University of Charlotte in the Knight School of Communication’s master’s program. The favorite, by far, was Brian Solis’ Engage! In…
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Wikinomics (Tapscott & Williams, 2006)
Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything (Tapscott & Williams, 2006) Premised around four major ideas of a new economy – (1) Openness; (2) Peering; (3) Sharing; and, (4) Acting Globally – Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything suggests that mass communication turns the traditional inward business model toward an outward focus. The authors point to…
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What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (Gee, 2007)
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (Gee, 2007) James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy is less about video games and more about a theoretical approach to education, says Kristen Odell. The concept behind the book is a discussion about learning, arguing that…
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Blog Rules (Flynn, 2006)
Blog Rules: A business guide to managing policy, public relations, and legal issues (Flynn, 2006) The discussion surrounding Blog Rules: A business guide to managing policy, public relations, and legal issues by Nancy Flynn highlighted using business blogs as an internal tool for top-down communication. Flynn suggests that companies treat blogs as archives, ensure corporate policies…
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Naked Conversations (Scoble & Israel, 2006)
Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers (Scoble & Israel, 2006) “We wished we read this at the beginning of this class,” say Amy Martin and Shannon Hames about Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. But, says Martin, there remains a big split between people…
J.A.McArthur 