Tech Tuesday: A New LaunchPad for Your Pocket When A Pocket Guide to Public Speaking came out in it’s 6th edition last fall, it’s LaunchPad got so much more than just a refresh. It’s a totally revamped experience for your students. Let... 
Tech Tuesday: LaunchPad gets even more Interpersonal With a new co-author, a new chapter on Gender Communication, new Making Relationship Choices case studies, and new Video Assessment tools, Reflect and Relate, along with its corresponding LaunchPad, offers more interp... The Three C's of Fake News As insults go, “fake news” has not yet reached the point of vacuity of, say, “your mother wears army boots.” Because of its excessive and less-than-strategic usage, it is edging into clich&eacu... 
Tech Tuesday: Dive into Digital with Personality Macmillan’s first edition public speaking text, Speech Craft, has a personality of its own. Fittingly, its corresponding LaunchPad reflects that personality, as the book’s author, Joshua Gunn helped develo... Tech Tuesdays: Video Assessment Program Video is a crucial feature across all Communication courses, and Macmillan wants to make it easy to implement, effective for students, and, hopefully, fun to use as an instructor! The Video Assessment Program ... Advertisers take refreshing approach to sexuality and gender in campaigns By Ernest L. Wiggins Though a journalist by trade, I developed an abiding interest in persuasive communication during graduate school. I have formally studied the intersection of media messages, group ide... The End of the Summer of Media Merger Mania The summer of 2018 has been a momentous one for media merger mania. Although this sounds like a topic for a high-level economics course, the approved and proposed media mergers involve a number of name-brand companies... 
Teaching Tip: Turn Your Classroom Into a Newsroom In my journalism classes, I used to teach using the building-block method. I would set up my class in chunks: present the material, assign a story, require follow up reports and peer reviews, and have students turn in... 
Teaching writing with group work USING GROUPS TO TEACH WRITING Some see writing as a solitary process. Some teach it as a solitary process. However, teaching writing as a group activity lets students explore how others approach learning the craft, a... Class Activity: Social Advocacy Exercises Goal: To get students thinking about ways in which they can advocate for social change. Examples include crafting social media campaigns, researching non-profits and causes, and crafting persuasive messages. 1... 
The Black Mirror Effect It is 11pm on a Tuesday night. Tomorrow morning is the big presentation you have been preparing weeks for and you make moves for an early bedtime. You set the alarm on your phone and plop right into bed. The room is n... 
Coco, Olaf, and Disney's Attempts at Representation The new Disney/Pixar film Coco has topped the box office for three weekends in a row, and is well on its way toward passing Justice League and becoming the biggest hit movie to come out during the mid-November-to-mid-... 
Class Activity: Find the Fallacy Goal: Although many people would find the observation fallacious, most of us are guilty of fallacious reasoning. Because we tend to think “enthymematically”—that is, with skips and leaps instead...
