Magazine Awareness

During the current research project, I noticed that many of our students are unaware of the weekly news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. When I used Time magazine in a written example, some students thought I meant "the time" in the bib format, which they found confusing. This lack of awareness stunned me, but it did given me a good idea for the next research paper in the winter. I am going to display a bundle of these magazines in hard copy in the room and create an assignment in which the students work in small groups or pairs to deconstruct the organization of these magazines. After I discussed this with Fran, she found a good link from Harvard about differentiating general magazines from journals which I will use next times as well. As long as I have been doing this, I find I need to re-examine my assumptions about existing knowledge - especially about print!