PR Student Blogging :: We need your input, please.

Along the lines of that famous phrase, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”, I come seeking your time. So, brothers and sisters, please consider this appeal.

This is a follow up to my previous post. I am reaching out to active PR practitioners seeking input on how to improve our classroom blogging experience.

We request your advice and criticisms. Comment below or post in your blog and trackback to this post. Actually, posting in your blog will be better. It will help us reach more people and gain more insight.

This project serves two purposes. First, my students will benefit from your opinions and I may improve our process. Second, the HigherEd BlogCon is approaching in April 2006. I would like to point other educators to your ideas (in your blogs or here) in an effort to encourage more faculty to consider a classroom blogging experience.

I have tried to make it brief, while providing a good idea of what we are looking for in your suggestions.

We have been fortunate to receive many kind compliments for our class blogging efforts over the past several months. We are deeply grateful for all of your support.

What we need now is an evaluation and guidance from the PR practitioners in the blogging and social media community.

We seek to learn your opinions on the following:

(a) if you believe college PR students reading and blogging about PR practices is a viable and valuable endeavor,
(b) what are the key concepts/lessons that should be included in such an exercise,
(c) how will a future employer react to a student’s PR blogging efforts,
(d) what tactics by the students will best exhibit PR knowledge through their blogging efforts, and
(e) anything I have left out.

Please give us the good and the bad. Feel free to criticize our past efforts and make suggestions for the future. Focus on me for the negative, if that makes it easier. I know it can be uncomfortable to critique the students when you don’t really know them. And, I’m pretty protective of them. That may not be a good thing, but it is the way I am. After all, I am ultimately responsible for their experiences in all of this. I am truly open to the critiques.

For your information, here is a brief idea of how I have been going about this process.

My goals are to first send them out reading other blogs. Then, make them write about PR issues/trends. Along the way, they should begin to make contacts with other bloggers. Get to know the wide variety of PR bloggers out there and understand their interests.

The students should develop an understanding of the diversity of PR practices across many industries. Students should see how those bloggers post about issues and how they analyze them, too. My student’s posts should, in a perfect world, show that they can dissect PR issues, analyze them, apply them to real world examples they may experience later in professional life.

Finally, the students need to illustrate to future employers that they understand social media and they need to make a good impression. Ultimately, I hope that they illustrate having actually thought about PR beyond the classroom.

Every day I find myself re-evaluating this practice and trying to determine the best path to follow. Certainly if you appreciate our efforts, feel free to express that. But, we will be much better served by your statement of what we should be doing to make the classroom PR blogging practice valuable for students.

I deeply appreciate your consideration of this request and hope to read a post in your blog, or comment in on this post, about what will make a student’s PR blogging experience most valuable for their future careers.

If you post in your blog, please tag the post as PRedu and trackback to this post in my blog. Here is the tag: PRedu

Here is the trackback link.

Sincerely,

Robert French

Related sites:

HigherEd BlogCon: http://www.petersons.com/blogcon/
HigherEd BlogCon Wiki: http://higheredblogcon.editme.com/

PRblogs – Student blogs: http://www.auburnmedia.com/prblog/

Syllabus for Style & Design – http://pr.auburnmedia.com/syllabus/