By Jacqueline Minelli & Brittany Aufiero
- What was your activity? Please be specific on what you asked the class to do and what you hoped it would accomplish.
The topic of the activity Brittany and I created was about the media and political campaigns. It was separated into two parts. The first part of the activity, we broke the class into groups to discuss the different outlets where they receive their political news. We had them rank these outlets based on the frequency they use them and how trustworthy they felt the sources were. Then we had each group discuss their sources and why they felt certain ones were more trustworthy than others. We found that the top two outlets each group picked was social media and digital news. The second part of the activity Brittany and I held elections. We were both candidates running for president. We broke the class into two groups. Brittany represented the Republican party and I the Democratic party. We had the class think of ways to help us gain more supporters for our campaign using social media, mobile media, etc. Then each group presented their strategies for helping us get more voters. What we accomplished was to have the class think about how they receive their political news and think about which sources are reliable in getting trusted information. We had them use their creativity to think of strategies to help us gain more support in our campaigns.
2. Did you think it was successful?
Yes, overall I think it was successful. We presented the class with a slide show that deepened their knowledge of media and political campaigns by our research and examples. As well as our activity allowed the class to break into groups to discuss their ideas. The groups presented us with great strategies for getting us elected. I was very impressed with the groups and their feedback.
3. Did it achieve your implied goals?
Yes, we achieved our goals. The class seemed to all understand the topic and were engaging in the discussion. We had everyone share their ideas by breaking into the groups and presenting them to us.
4. What did you learn from the experience?
We learned from the experience that the class uses social media the most to learn about the news but uses trusted sources from digital news and print news to get more accurate information. Also, we discussed how political campaigns are changing due to the use of media.
5. How would you take this project further as a research tool and what results would you hope to achieve?
I would take this project further as a research tool by having more studies that were conducted like the one mentioned in the article comparing 2014 to 2010. By having a larger group of people involved it would provide us with better information. I would hope the results would show more young people getting involved due to social media. Social media is used by the young and old generations so hopefully it would show an increase in participation in political campaigns. One way I have seen this so far is when an election just happened all over social media people were posting filters with “I voted” or “did you vote” as a caption.