Our clasess had delivered online for weeks now and I can say it’s working so well. It’s still enjoyable to study like this because I have some interesting assignments. They are challenging because the discussion is not direct with our lecturers but also a really good example that online education could be interesting and useful.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to work well when I have to study from home and online because I’m really bad at managing my time. Especially when I don’t have that usual pressure. I mean I still have pressure because of course we have deadlines but sometimes I just forget that being home doesn’t mean I don’t have school. So I have to get used to this system but it’s okay. When a class is interesting it can still motivate you even if it’s online.
So now let’s see what exercises I enjoyed the most so far!
Breaking news assignment for the Breaking news and features class
I haven’t spoke about this class yet but I definitely want to later because as a journalism student I think this is the most useuful but also most challenging one for me. But now I just want to explain an exercise what we did. Our teacher gave us a brief of a fictional story but with a realistic story line. Then she act like an official spoke person in a press brief and we could ask like we are real journalists. And she connected with us in the whole time via videochat. Then we got a bit more than an hour to write a breaking news about the story. It was so interesting to have a real time pressure on us like in a news room when a news come in. I tried to focus ont he really important parts because a breaking news have to be short and contain just the most important information. It was the first time when I had to write something like this and I enjoyed it. Obviously in the real time it has to be faster but for now I’m glad I had a bit more time.
English as a foreign language presentation
This class was an additional module for the international students if they wanted to practice the language. I took it because I know that living in an english speaking country for months is the best way to learn the language but I need to study more grammar. In this class we have to make a presentation. We supposed to present them at the class in front of everyone but as you know now it’s not feasible. Doing a presentation is not a particular thing in universities but the reason I feel this one was a bit different is because we could choose any theme what we wanted it just had to be raleted to ireland and a bit to our own countries. Everyone in the class have chosen a serious case like the Brexit and the Northern Irish situation, drug issues, climate changing. My partner is a french girl and our topic is mental illness and the policies to prevent suicidal actions in Ireland, France and Hungary. Doing the research was a bit depressing to be honest because I never studied this field so deeply and at some point I was surprised. So this project was interesting for me because I get to know a bit more a topic which is really important to get to be known and because it feels good to be able to talk about it in a university environment. I have to add that UL is really care about mental illness because at universities it can be an existing problem, a lot off students suffer from the pressure of study well at the school but they also have to start to earn money and work at the same time, and have to deal with their personal life as well. So this time could be as difficult as much fun. And the other positivity of working on this was that we could do it from a distance because both of us is home now and we had to discuss the whole plan in another way. I think the result became pretty good even though we had some difficulties to reconcile everything on Whatsapp.
Fake news presentation for the Social Media and Society class
The main project for the Social media and society module is also creating a blog but we have to do that in partners and we could choose any topic for it. But because we are not doing that alone and there is less work with that blog than this one we have some smaller assignment during the term. The last one was an individual fake news presentation. We had to find a case and write about it. I’m really interested in the field of fake news I already had a class just about this at my home university. It’s a very dangerous and existing issue and people have to know more details about it and be aware, not just journalists but everyone. So it’s always useful when we study about them and I wish I had put some more energy into this presentation, but I enjoyed to do it and do the research about my case though. It was about an American actor who lied about an attack because of his skin clour and sexuality. It was a big news in the U.S. media for weeks but then it turned out he organized the whole thing. It was crazy how everyone became so upset about this and started to blame each other and targeted different groups. That’s why I think learn more about fake news is so important.
I hope this little summarise presents well that even though we got in a new and challenging situation, education can still be interesting if both side are working on it.
Journalism studies in Ireland 