Kaye Sweetser, Karen Russell, Mihaela Vorvoreanu and Robert French offer class assignments for PR educators to consider:

Class blogs

• Using Blogger or WordPress, add each student as an author.
• Russell instructed students to make a post or comment at least five times during the semester. In the beginning, Russell frequently posted helpful links and class-related examples. As the semester progressed, students felt more comfortable posting.
• Sweetser encouraged students to use the blog as a way to react to relevant issues. It’s a nice way for students to build their online portfolios.
• French commented that blogging should be part of every class, as PR students can never have too much practice writing. He asks students to comment on PR practitioners blogs.
• Vorvoreanu looks at a class blog as a body of knowledge. A group of people can learn more together than one person can alone. At the end of the semester, she burned each student a disk with this “body of knowledge.” She asked each student to read a book and post a “thought paper” on the blog.

Individual student blogs

• It’s important to engage the blogosphere beyond the class.
• Don’t just write a self-reflection. Take advantage of the “community.”
• Vorvorneau has students post at least once each week. Some posts should be related to class material and apply PR theory.
• Give students the option of keeping a semester-long blog and opting out of one of the exams.
• Teach students to learn the culture before they begin writing. Keep quiet, learn and then write when comfortable.

Grading general posts

• Subscribe to all via RSS.
• Comment.
• Give a word limit (150-350 words).
• Write in AP-style.
• Include links, hypertext. Avoid “click here” hypertext.
• Set up Blogger to notify you each time a comment is made.

Organizational blog posts (students blog as the “voice” of an organization)

• Should have a good title for SEO.
• Include links.
• Be ethical. Be transparent.
• Humanize the organization.
• A press release is not a blog post. Tell a story or interview an employee.
• Be conversational.
• Engage the community.
• Example from GM’s FastLane Blog

Tags: college students, edelman, Grady College, new media, social media, UGA, ugaedb08

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Edelman Digital Bootcamp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.