COMM 150: Getting ready for the midterm, Wednesday, Nov. 2

Updated Tuesday, 8 a.m. Please see the draft of this year's midterm questions. I have streamlined and focused the 50-point question more closely, and I have added a 25-point question on CPM.

As I announced in class Friday, our midterm will be Wednesday, Nov. 2. I will post a final draft of the questions by Wednesday, Oct. 26 (a week ahead of time), but in the meantime I will post draft copies of the assignment sheet as I go along. That way, you can start working on it ahead of time. It is an open-book essay test, and you can bring a final draft to class on Nov. 2. (Or, better, bring it in on a flash drive, give it one last edit and print it out in class.) Or you can write it in class during the scheduled 50-minute period. I will follow the same procedure for the final exam, and you can consider this as a dry run for the final.

How to study for the midterm

Since it's an open-book test, you are very strongly encouraged to open the book! - i.e. to consult John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication" and to include a lot of quotes. As you quote from Vivian, it's a good idea to put the page number in parentheses after the quotation. But I don't demand a Works Cited or References page. You can also find material on the Mackerel Wrapper (for an example, see the item from Libya linked below in this post). Use examples from your reading in Vivian and the blog, as well as your own knowledge and class discussion, to support your points. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing. So go back over Vivian and the blog to find examples you can use to support your generalizations.

How to write the essays

A good strategy for essay tests, one I developed in grad school, was to answer the question with facts from the text(s) and lecture notes, i.e. parrot the conventional wisdom, and then to go on and give my own opinion and analysis of the issues raised by the test question. But even when I was stating my opinion, I learned to always back it up with facts, statistics, quotes and examples. Even? Especially when I was stating my opinion! Your teachers are probably looking for two things when they grade a test: (1) your command of the basic facts; and (2) your ability to analyze and evaluate the factual information. So give 'em both.

In a word, be specific. Clobber me with facts. In other words, be specific. At the risk of sounding repetitious, always be specific.

What's going to be on the test?

Last year's midterm in the same course will give you a good idea of the format, and one of the questions will be the same.

I'm still drafting this year's midterm, but it will include the following questions:

1. A 50-point essay. While I don't have a final draft yet, it will include the following related points: (a) How does the technology of different media platforms (e.g. magazines, TV, sound recording, the internet) influence the content of messages? (b) How do the media influence the way we perceive the world? HowTo what extent do they allow the creators of content to bypass the media consumers to function as their own gatekeepers? How does the technology of communication infaluence the way you perceive the world?
   
   
2. A 25-point "self-reflective" essay. Here's last year's: "What have you learned about mass communications in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In answering this question, please feel free to look at the “Tip Sheet on Writing a Reflective Essay” linked to my faculty webpage at http://www1.ben.edu/springfield/faculty/ellertsen/reflect.html. In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make." I will copy and paste this into this year's test.
   
   
3. A 25-point short essay on a more focused topic. It ask about something specific (there's that word again) and how it relates to one of the main themes of the course like cross-platform convergence or market segmentationa. I'll probably take it from the section of the book on the history of print, sound and motion media, but I'm still rereading it and haven't decided yet. I'll ask about CPM - how does Vivian define it, and how does it work in the example he gives? How does it influence content in other media? How, specifically, do radio advertisers use formats to lower CPM by reaching targeted market segments?

In the meantime, here's a story that gives an example of how a media technology changed the way we perceive the world. During the weekend, Esther Addley of the Guardian.co.uk website in Great Britain noted that the death of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi was broadcast to the world via a mobile phone picture. She added:

If television has made it difficult for governments and armies to control the news of political deaths, mobile phone cameras and social media have made any such hopes almost impossible. The US government might have refused to release images of Osama bin Laden's body, but al-Jazeera, Twitter and a cheap mobile phone handset made that decision irrelevant in Libya.

Addley's thoughts on the subject, in turn, were picked up by a paper in Australia and relayed to the world under a headline "Click: How mobile phones and social media broke the news." How do aher story and the news of Gaddafi's death relate to Vivian's discussion of the 2009 "Twitter Revolution" in Iran, the Arab Spring or this month's Occupy Wall Street demonstrations?