Professor John Morello’s Communication 370 course (or “Communication and the 2008 Presidential Campaign”) provides a really powerful model for using a course as a video publishing platform, a space for critical media studies, as well as a forum for discussion about the election as it unfolds. Each of the students in this course created their own short speech in support of their candidate of choice (you can see examples here), which were then posted on a third-party service of their choice and embedded on the course blog (see the technical guidelines for this process here).

Yet, the videos were only one part of this course, there was also the on-going campaign commentaries, dissection of campaign ads, as well as timely discussions about the political implications of the economic crisis. All of which made for a dynamic and open forum leading up to election night. And when I say open, I mean open. Numerous comments and discussions on the site came from people that were not part of the class (or even the UMW Community), but were still intensely interested in discussing the election. The fact that both Barack Obama and Sarah Pallin campaigned in Fredericksburg during the final stretch made this course all the more discoverable and relevant to the local community.

But what’s really engaging about the way professor Morello used this space resides in how a web-based course site quickly transformed into an open forum that not only allowed the students to bring in relevant resources from all over the web effortlessly, but also encouraged the class to both create web-based media and engage their classmates and the community out in the open.