Thursday, November 15, 2007

UMD is getting ahead of the curve

Last spring, I had an interesting discussion with a senior UMM administrator regarding her ideas on taking advantage of our communications facilities on the UMM campus (television and radio in particular) and create a full-fledged communication major degree program. I'm all for that, not only because it would generate growth in student numbers in the humanities here at UMM, but we are more and more becoming mass communicators - on a global scale - with blogging, social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace, and through the venerable personal website. It would also provide us with valuable student employment opportunities (everyone should benefit, right? :-])

A story was emailed to me today by University of Minnesota Duluth Alumni Association regarding an innovative collaborative project between their student-run radio station and their college of liberal arts to allow hands-on studio and industry courses to be taught on their FM radio station. They have previously developed print and web-based journalism components. I think this is exactly what our administrator had in mind; using technology to become a well-rounded, global communicator. Detractors in the liberal arts would say a program like this could be seen as 'technical.' But what other program can be multidisciplinary as mass communications?

Here is the story. Enjoy!

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