I must say that in short amount of time, we have covered a wide range of topics. We discussed deviant behavior, serial killers, movies, music, the news, copycat affect, fallacies and a lot of other things. Of the topics talked about in class, I must say that my favorite was when we were talking about serial killer and the copycat effect. I liked seeing how some people really do things that they see done in tv or on movies and think that they will be able to replicate those things without getting caught. I also like this topic the most because it allowed for the most conversation and reflection about what causes people to do what they do, and if we as society can really place the blame on the media or if each person acts on their own. I didn’t like the fallacy topic as much as I enjoyed the others. This is because everyone knows that the media has an impact on everyone in some way or another, so trying to pinpoint which fallacy one falls into is not interesting to me. I also thought the reading for this topic was extremely boring as well, which made me even less interested than I was before. I would however like to see the topics about movies and music expanded. I think those were the most interesting broad topics because they have so many things that can be discussed in terms of justice and the media, but because they were the last things we talked about, we didn’t get to discuss some of the other important issues in each of these mediums. If I were to teach a class on media and justice I would focus on the broad categories of media, so music, television, movies and internet. There would be some reading for each of the topic areas as we discussed them, but for each topic I would take some examples and our class discussion would come out of examining those examples and identifying where the justice issues lie within those examples. I would keep the blog assignments, but I would use them as a forum for the students to talk about anything justice related. As long as the blogged twice a week about a justice issue, I wouldn’t care what the specific topic was. I think this would make more people write freely, because they wouldn’t be so worried about structuring what they say to fit a rubric. But that is how I would structure my class.
I liked your idea about blogging freely. While the specific topics allowed me to narrow my thinking, I feel as though it did not allow me to put more thought into the topics. Instead, I just wrote the basics of what was required.
ReplyDeleteI think that the copycat effect section was interesting as well. You never would believe that people actually are so influenced by the media that they imitate some of the things they see. The different viewpoints that were brought up in regards to this during class helped to open ym eyes about some of the reasoning behind the senseless copycat acts. Overall, I can't say anything bad about anything that we went over being that it all was interesting.
ReplyDeleteI said the same thing as you about music and film. I enjoyed what we covered in class, but I would have liked to cover more topics besides Marilyn Monroe and Blood Diamonds. Still, I loved that we covered such a wide range of topics just like you said.
ReplyDeleteI like the blogging freely idea too. I agree that blogging freely might be a better idea because then people wouldn't have to worry about if they covered everything they were supposed to & could just express there opinion about an idea. I also really liked the wide range of topics too but like you said I would have liked to discuss movies & music more.
ReplyDelete