One of the classes I’m taking this semester is called New Media Writing, a fun 3000-level class offered by McDaniel’s English department. I took this class, in part because it would fulfill the last requirement I needed to fulfill for my writing minor, but also because I’m pretty darn interested in new media and writing for digital contexts.
New Media Writing is not your average English class. While we do have some discussions in class, we also have discussions on Twitter using class hashtags. Each week, we use a new hashtag (this week’s hashtag was #eng3307wk6–the last number in that hashtag changes depending on what week of class it is, so we’ve had weeks 1 through 6 now) and everyone is assigned a new role. Some people are assigned to tweet terms, others are assigned to connect what we’re learning to other related articles they find online, and others are assigned to be critics, meaning that they tweet critiques on what we’re reading and watching for class. Regardless of my assigned role for any particular week, I tend to tweet as all three roles because I think tweeting for New Media Writing is a ton of fun. I’ve also been known to tweet important points from class lectures and class inside jokes.
Here’s some Almond Breeze coffee that accompanied me to New Media Writing on National Coffee Day earlier this week.
One of our major projects for this semester has been to create what our professor calls “nichepertises,” areas of “expertise” related to McDaniel or Westminster in some way that we’ve created Twitters and Tumblrs for. We’ve also been given the choice between Pinterest or Scoop.it as a third social media platform to promote our brands on. The goal of the project is to learn how these different social media sites work, how to write and create texts for them, and to create a brand across these platforms. There are students writing about things from hammocks to study spots to how to survive a zombie apocalypse on campus.
My chosen niche has been coffee, and I’ve appropriately titled it “McDaniel Coffee.” While my original plan, in part, was to go around and write about and review local coffee places, because I had to send my car to the shop for a few weeks, I retooled my focus to be on just learning more about coffee instead. I’ve also tried to figure out and document what sorts of coffee people on campus are drinking.
I’ve created a Twitter, a Tumblr, and even a Pinterest for the class, and you should totally follow me!
Overall, I’ve learned a lot from taking New Media Writing–and all of that learning hasn’t been just about coffee. I’ve learned strategies for blogging (strategies that I hope to use for blogging here), I’ve learned about social media sites I’ve never heard of, and I’ve learned a lot about what new media is and how it works. Before taking this class and my senior seminar (which also has a tech/new media bent, being about webcomics), I hadn’t even realized that new media studies is an entire field and an academic one at that.
These days, everyone is surrounded by digital media. And knowing about these media and how to use them is invaluable.
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