So, I’ve started keeping a blog for my New Media class. This is an elective class that meets twice a week that has for the last few years frustrated me because the practice side of the class (making short films) has gone great, but the theory side (thinking about media critically) has been less than I’d hoped for.

Blogging seems like a good solution. Today’s entry was a good question, albiet somewhat vague… 1) What role does mass-media play in your life and 2) what influence does it have over you?

It was a deliberately open-ended question, and as you can see, the answers run from well thought-out to "Why is Lehmann making me do this when I really just want to check my Yahoo Fantasy Baseball team?"

But it’s not a bad opening salvo, methinks.

My goal for this blog is ask the kids to, once a week, deconstruct a piece of media — TV show, movie, magazine — and critically analyze it. I’m still thinking about what the questions that I include in that critical log are, but I think that a) it’s a great exercise to have to do — one I will try to do myself — and b) by making it a public blog instead of private forum, we create new media while critiquing it, which is cool.