Welcome to the Hashtag Classroom

I applied for a Quinnipiac Innovation Grant to develop The Interactive Courses as a larger part of the University’s core curriculum, both graduate and undergraduate. I didn’t get the grant, but I think my proposal to use the open Internet and social media as the foundation for teaching inquiry is still worth a read:

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Quinnipiac University is a leader in both online learning and online presence. As an institution, it is well-positioned to serve as a positive model for social media use as a communications tool. To that end, it is the ideal place to create an open social media and Web-based communications course as part of its core curriculum of inquiry for all students.

Social media’s reputation has declined in the last few years. The cofounder of Twitter, Evan Williams, recently called the Internet “broken” in The New York Times. We think of Twitter as a den of online trolls and bots, fear the effects of Instagram on our children’s self-images, and regularly debate whether to close our Facebook accounts. The hand wringing over the World Wide Web is at a zenith.

Yet we haven’t stepped away from any of these institutions. The President has not. The former President has not. Both the current President and his predecessor reached the office through the Web and continue to use it as their platform. Our leading voices in journalism, science, art, and media are equally engaged and enthusiastic. Breaking news articles right now are often embedded Twitter conversations.

Every medium born in the last two centuries has faced criticism in its infancy only to foster artistic masterpieces in a few short decades. Who imagined two decades ago that television shows would become the literary equivalent they are today? Who could know how all mediums—radio, film, photography—would be transformed by the Web?

Twitter isn’t going anywhere. More university courses experiment with it and every other social media standard with each passing semester.

The world’s first global conversation offers unprecedented access and dialogue to all walks of life. It has already brought problems to light, given minority voices a platform, and changed minds and our society. From Humans of New York to McSweeney’s to Serial, the model examples and masterpieces of online communication already exist. Quinnipiac is the right place to highlight the good over the bad.

The Course History

Chaos requires order—a system—and luckily we already have one. We have a lesson plan that encompasses every aspect of the Web and social media in all of their innovations. For the Web itself is not a medium, it is all mediums, and all mediums are best understood, taught, and employed through the classic rules of language, good communication, and inquiry.

For eight years at Quinnipiac, I have taught the Writing for Interactive Media course for the Interactive Media Program in the School of Communications. Phillip Simon hired me in 2009, when the ink on my graduate writing degree was still fresh, to teach and evaluate whether ICM’s writing course should be saved from the chopping block. At that particular time in the Web’s timeline, everyone wanted to know: are books, writing, and lectures still relevant?

While the University has become comfortable with Blackboard, my students and I have remained outside any learning management system, on blogs, on Twitter, on Instagram, protected by pseudonyms, and connected by hashtags. Currently we’re asking: is social media still significant, constructive, and safe?

Not only are writing and the Web the most important tools of the moment, our recent questioning of both is an illustration of their new dynamism and our opportunity. I have found writing lessons to be the perfect framework for students to understand today’s most pressing online fears and possibilities. I redesigned the ICM 506 course to ask: what does the Web make irrelevant and what does it make essential?

I use Twitter to reinforce the writing process and clarity of message. I use Wikipedia to examine our new relationship to knowledge, data, and facts. I use Facebook as a forum for research, hyperlinks as calls to the imagination, and search algorithms to highlight logic. In my module “An Avatar is the Perfect You,” I use autobiographies and resumes to explore how the Web changes our understanding of identity.

Language and narrative have always given individuals meaning in a frenzied world. Now those narratives flourish in our more creative hands and polarize us if we are not careful. Students have more anxiety these days because the path forward is less clear and more dependent on their choices. They must decide what they believe and then take those ideas out into the world.

My course blog for ICM 506 is called TheInteractiveVoice.com. It is a set of 14 modules that works individually with each student to find a rough draft of their personal voice and then challenges them with nothing less than the interaction of the rest of the world. This is experiential learning on a whole new level.

Teaching three different types of Quinnipiac students—undergrads moving right into graduate school, veteran communicators returning to school, and medical students—forced me to create a course that could help all kinds of people with all kinds of goals. Luckily, everyone needs to work on writing and everyone needs to grasp the Web to succeed.

I eventually modeled the course on Barzun and Graff’s The Modern Researcher, Columbia University’s classic textbook on inquiry for every one of its grad students.

The Innovative Proposal

I taught ICM 506 in the summer and fall semesters of 2016 and 2017, and expect to follow this same schedule in 2018.

I propose to use the spring 2018 semester to research the possibilities of an open social media and Web-based communications course here at Quinnipiac by meeting with faculty and staff from relevant departments and creating a full proposal, budget, and timeline for an interdisciplinary team of collaborators and the implementation of a trial semester.

I am eager to share my ideas and hear feedback from faculty and administrators in the ICM program, the larger School of Communications, Writing Across the Curriculum, The Center for Teaching and Learning, the Foundations of Inquiry, Personal Success Plans & ePortfolios, and the President’s Office, among others.

The Student Evaluations

“I am a journalist who has written at a high level for 30 years and has received numerous writing awards. I was skeptical at what I would take from the course. My skepticism was unfounded.”

“The most valuable thing I learned from this course is my understanding of what needs to happen to develop a writing voice of strength, clarity and fairness. Taking the chance and having the courage to let that voice be heard through writing is also a key element. Robert Kalm was always pushing and probing us to be better, mostly through self-examination.”

“I liked Professor Kalm’s style of teaching. It allowed for openness, interpretation, and creativity, which is a style that was never presented to me by other professors during my past studies. I dreaded taking a writing class, but this class kept my interest and taught me something new each week. I looked forward to writing and hope to keep up with it after this class.”

“The most valuable thing I learned in this class was the ability to think ‘outside the box’ and to write concisely. Written communication is something that we all take for granted. We assume that whatever we write will automatically be understood by the person reading our thoughts. Not so. This class teaches you to shape your thoughts and put them to paper in an incredibly effective way.”

“This was a great class for me, as I had burned out on writing in my professional life and had grown to dread it. This course reminded me of all the reasons why I liked writing at the beginning. The course materials and the lectures were spot on and motivated me to keep going and to try new approaches. I would highly recommend it!”

“I enjoyed his weekly written lectures because they were thought provoking and unique. I will go back to them now that the course is over because I feel I can keep learning from his ideas.”

The Course Links

The 506 course site: http://theinteractivevoice.com/
My course Twitter: https://twitter.com/prof_kalm
My course hashtag: https://tagboard.com/506iv/152565
My LinkedIn resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkalm/