Copyright (c) 2013 Boise State University All rights reserved. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs Recent documents in Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations en-us Tue, 21 May 2013 10:31:38 PDT 3600 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/60 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/60 Tue, 21 May 2013 08:52:40 PDT Developing ways to improve young people’s news media literacy has been the focus of much recent attention among scholars, educators, and news professionals. Common definitions and approaches, however, have been scarce, making it difficult to compare and analyze curriculum effectiveness and research results. This project sought to create a measure of news media literacy that can be used to further our understanding of what constitutes news media literacy and to help validate and improve education and training.

]]> Stephanie Craft et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/59 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/59 Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:45:51 PDT One of the challenges of traditional student learning, from an instructor's perspective, involves achieving an understanding of how students learn. Q-method is an effective approach to improve understanding of human subjectivity, and, as this research suggests, it is an appropriate tool to assist educators to better understand how students learn. In particular, Q-methodology provides the educator with a robust tool to assess student learning styles. This paper adapted an existing learning style instrument to a Q-method analysis in an introductory geographic information system class. The analysis resulted in three learning groups: lone pragmatist, explorer, and synergistic. These three learning groups are described. The paper concludes that the use of Q-method can deepen understanding of students' learning skills and improve instruction through more balanced and learner-focused curricular approaches.

]]> R. Trevor Hall et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/58 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/58 Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:01:58 PST The exhibit was held from October 11 - November 4, 2012 at the Boise State Student Union Gallery. Featuring 21 digital picture/graphic works on canvas and a video installation work for the public, Daehwan Cho utilized metaphor creating ambiguity to distort literal meaning and strengthen poetic implications.

]]> Daehwan Cho http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/57 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/57 Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:09:32 PST John G. McClellan et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/56 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/56 Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:11:30 PST The recent surge in reality television programming has provided a window into the worlds of women struggling with parenthood and personhood. Motherhood has undergone the same blurring and fracturing in the media as other gender-based identity categories.¹It is depicted as a quest for personal completion, and female behavior is regulated and normalized through examples of appropriate mothering. These women serve as both role models and warnings, allowing viewers a fly-on-the-wall perspective of family functions and dysfunctions.

]]> Mary Frances Casper et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/55 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/55 Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:17:48 PST This issue of Medien & Zeit follows up a range of case studies aimed at revealing communication histories that were analyzed in Part I, studies conducted in light of geographical and cultural borders. They highlighted historical artifacts; examined their availability in university curricula and research centers; addressed for different countries the status and history of communication history as an academic profession; and highlighted strengths, limitations, and prospects awaiting a distinctly European account of the historical record. Such scholarship seeks to uncover history. Part II aims to turn the matter around, showing how history might inform scholarship. Here, four essays examine theoretical shifts as appropriate to historical shifts that produce rereadings of communication history. Specifically, shifts in historiography from the national to the transnational address the thematic question, "What is European Communication History?", with theoretical issues and recommendations that take note of the recursive, EU-era problem of the nation in a transnational milieu. Essays in Part II trace this recursiveness to earlier times, preceding the formation of today’s Europe, and locate it along lines — theoretical and material — of communication and media history. Each essay offers ontological and material reasons to reconceptualize European communication history as a transnational project. Three of the four authors make distinctly different cases for communication history as transnational history, suggesting, at the very least, that "the national" cannot and, in fact, has not developed within the geographical borders of the nation. A fourth essay offers reflections on the conduct of European communication history beyond the shift from national to transnational frameworks for theory.

]]> Ed McLuskie et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/54 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/54 Wed, 30 Jan 2013 09:37:12 PST This two-part special issue¹ on “European Communication History” involves authors from a variety of linguistic traditions in a journal usually appearing in German. While Medien & Zeit has published in English before, we note that authors find themselves leaving behind their primary linguistic homes. The act is a move beyond borders even when indigenous materials of historical research may defy the linguistic inflection. This is not to say that a decidedly “European history” is embraced by all authors in this volume. Ambivalence in suggesting commonalities across multiple cultures and nationalities has both academic and societal precedence. Moreover, historical research offers its analyses while political and economic circumstances chart directions and erect barriers between cultural groups and nation-states. In the midst of struggles to keep transnational dimensions afloat, harder lines shape EU nations as conservative movements display an ironic transnationalism through diffuse but recognizably cautious orientations vis-à-vis many faces of diversity and economic similarities. Research offers its claims on whether “Europe” can be a baseline category for communication history while European identity confronts pulls from two opposed directions: familiar lands of the past and uncertain globalization going forward. “Europe,” “history,” and, here, “communication” each lean into contemporary debates as soon as their respective definitions and elaborations appear. “History” refers to indigenous but also mutually defining cultures. “Communication” means struggles for solidarity or the means of transmission and influence, welcome or otherwise. This range of problematic definitions and situations produces replies as this journal asks, “What is European Communication History?”

]]> Ed McLuskie et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/53 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/53 Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:04:09 PST Relatively submerged conceptions in the history of communication studies often stand as an alternative set of perspectives on communication waiting to be mentioned and developed. Some provide a basis for more critical, more humanist, lines of inquiry for the academy, its students, and others. Perhaps one day introductory textbooks for the general as well as specialist student will have abandoned the usual technical renditions of communication to create alternative histories of communication studies to include conceptions proposed here.

]]> Ed McLuskie http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/52 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/52 Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:28:31 PST How do media systems come to be structured in different ways? Through a comparative historical institutional analysis of the origins of broadcasting policy in the United States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, this study examines reasons private, commercial interests dominated the U.S. system while Britain granted a monopoly to the publicly funded, noncommercial BBC. Policy outcomes at this critical juncture were contingent on different path-dependent notions of the public interest as well as temporal sequencing. Through an analysis of primary documents and secondary literature, this study considers the implications of these different approaches for modern communication policy and democratic society.

]]> Seth Ashley http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/51 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/51 Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:54:08 PST Using a framework previously applied to other areas of media literacy, this study developed and assessed a measurement scale focused specifically on critical news media literacy. Our scale appears to successfully measure news media literacy as we have conceptualized it based on previous research, demonstrated through assessments of content, construct and predictive validity. Among our college student sample, a separate media system knowledge index also was a significant predictor of knowledge about topics in the news, which suggests the need for a broader framework. Implications for future work in defining and assessing news media literacy are discussed.

]]> Seth Ashley et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/50 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/50 Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:21:43 PST Critical media literacy demands understanding of the deeper meanings of media messages. Using a grounded theory approach, this study analyzed responses by first-year college students not currently enrolled in formal media literacy education to three types of video messages: an advertisement, a public relations message, and a news report. Students did not exhibit nuanced understandings of message purpose or sender in any of the three types of messages, and had particular difficulty distinguishing public relations and news messages. These results suggest a media literacy curriculum addressing distinctions between media formats, with emphasis on analysis of message intent and point of view, is needed.

]]> Seth Ashley et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/49 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/49 Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:06:52 PDT During the 1960s in the United States, Hugh Duncan produced several accounts of a forgotten theory of communication, accounts in turn forgotten in the theory's country of origin. There, American communication studies well before the twentieth century drew to a close knew of its label, "symbolic interactionism," but its perspective and sensibility were largely forgotten, at least twice during the century. Duncan's thesis of communication and social order was not generally recognised for its sustained effort to bring the study of authority, hierarchy, and power into the centre of communicative interaction. A way to develop a communication theory of society, Duncan's work became a critique of communication research in the wake of the forgotten tradition he attempted to resurrect. The field had conceptually forsaken the idea of communication to disconnected concepts, for which Duncan equally faulted seminal European scholars who, nevertheless, offered the best explanations for the ordering of society until the arrival of symbolic interactionism and its cousin, philosophical pragmatism. This essay highlights Duncan's communication theory as a theory of society, and proposes a critical appropriation of this alternative in the history of ideas, one that warns of assumptions risked whenever communication is theorised without and with attention to power.

]]> Ed McLuskie http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/48 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/48 Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:00:25 PDT The theory of communicative action is less associated with the idea of peace than with the cultivation of infrastructures for democratic interaction on the model of reasoned reciprocity. The theory is also marked by reflexive and historical attention to its distance from practice, thereby associating the theory with the critical diagnosis of the age. Such associations invite an action perspective on peace as a critical project oriented toward reasoned discourse. The paper explores the contributions of the theory of communicative action by taking one of its fundamental assumptions as a starting point: the recurring theme of mutual recognition. By exploring extensions of this theme into articulations of democratic and rational discourse, the paper offers mutual recognition as a basis for the theory as a communicative idea of peace for the continuation and development of peace studies.

]]> Ed McLuskie http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/47 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/47 Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:29:49 PDT Bourdieu's field theory suggests that the rise of the Internet and blogs could generate a shift in the journalistic field – the realm where actors struggle for autonomy – as new agents gain access. This textual analysis of 282 items of media criticism appearing on highly-trafficked blogs reveals an emphasis on traditional journalistic norms, suggesting a stable field. Occasional criticisms of the practicability of traditional norms and calls for greater transparency, however, may suggest an emerging paradigm shift.

]]> Tim P. Vos et al. http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/46 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/46 Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:01:12 PDT The city is a complex and nuanced collection of symbols, actions, interactions, and meanings rife for analysis at any given moment. Rhetorical scholarship adds unique insights into how such meanings are constructed, interpreted, and enacted. Much of the foundational research in the field of communication traces back to McGee's¹ disciplinary transition "from rhetorical materialism to rhetoric's materiality."² As Biesecker and Lucaites point out, this critical discussion has led to understanding rhetorical objects as on a "continuum of rhetorical influence that extend from the most concrete incidence of microrhetorical experience to increasingly abstract socio- and macro-rhetorical experiences".³ It is my contention that by highlighting the interconnectedness of conceptual and material experiences in everyday life, it is possible to engage in a more complex discussion of public place and/or space as both experienced objects of meaning and sites alive with meaning-making.

]]> erin daina mcclellan http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/45 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/45 Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:53:48 PDT This study examines a recent eruption of news about astrology. For a theoretical lens, it uses contemporary research on how traditional news values might allow what some have labeled "mystical" ideas to maintain public acceptance in spite of scientific evidence against them. As a contrast to that approach, a different perspective by Neil Postman is provided, an approach that suggests the dominant media of our culture will have as much impact as will professional practice in determining the nature of our messages. In investigating a group of news stories that questioned the validity of key astrological principles, the current study finds reporting did not provide significant scientific basis for dismissal of the belief. The two theories for analyzing this case provide very different insights, however, especially regarding the extent to which journalists (and media) play a role in promoting empiricism and discouraging mysticism.

]]> Rick Clifton Moore http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/44 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/44 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:07:41 PDT Recent research highlights the complexity of virtual work and calls on researchers to examine virtual work as more than simply doing a job, but as negotiating a state of being virtual (Leonardi, Jackson, & Marsh, 2004; Long, 2010). A similar call has been made by virtual ethnographers to move away from cataloguing the differences between virtual ethnographic practices and co-located ethnographic practices and instead reflexively reconsider how and why to conduct a virtual ethnography (Hine, 2005). This chapter responds to both calls by exploring how virtual workers communicatively construct distance not as geographical absence, but as presence (Leonardi, et al., 2004; Broadfoot, Munshi, & Nelson-Marsh, 2010). Based on this knowledge, the chapter then develops a heuristic methodological framework that embraces reflexivity as a starting point and privileges communication as the mode through which virtual work is constituted and through which academics arrive at a deeper understanding of both virtual work and virtual ethnography.

]]> Natalie Nelson-Marsh http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/43 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/43 Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:41:57 PDT Ed McLuskie http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/42 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/42 Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:41:33 PST John G. McClellan http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/41 http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/communication_facpubs/41 Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:33:44 PST Natalie Nelson-Marsh