Last week I attended (and Tweeted about) some great sessions at the AEJMC meetings in St. Louis. This will be the first of a series of posts highlighting what I saw and heard.
This post looks at the award-winning creative projects from the Visual Communication Division. They include everything from a couple of civil rights documentary projects to teaching techniques for PR and media law classes.
- Joel Beeson’s team from WVU produced the top prize winning multimedia documentary project Soldiers of the Cornfield. The project tells the story of the only war memorial honoring the African American soldiers of World War I, located in the small town of Kimball, West Virginia.
- Berkley Hudson, University of Missouri, has been working for years on curating and preserving a massive collection of Mississippi photographs taken by O.N. Pruitt. Some of these images were on glass-plate negatives. Among the challenges Hudson faces is finding storage facilities, preserving negatives damaged by storms, and dealing with the tax code. Absolutely fascinating.
- Cynthia Nichols, Oklahoma State U, had a PR class that was getting bored with canned assignments. So she put them to work developing a campaign to promote a flashmob dance event to popularize the university’s new logo. A great project to engage students and teach them PR campaign techniques.
- Francesca Viola, at Temple U., presented on using a group blog to get students talking about First Amendment issues. She said she started the project, Blogging for Justice, because she said that the best way to teach journalism students anything was to have them produce a project.