Discover thought-provoking Communication topics in the 13th edition of "Media & Culture" with co-authors Bettina Fabos & Christopher Martin. These captivating new modules, featured in Achieve this December, shed light on a variety of topical issues -- in this video the authors explore one of those very topics: social media's impact on mental health. Exploring the evolution from its early days in 2004 to the present digital era,  issues like body dysmorphia and depression have spiked as a result of the online comparison-based ecosystem. This video offers insightful analyses of mental health challenges and offers some attainable small steps towards mitigating those issues.    ... View more

Media & Culture 13e authors Bettina Fabos & Christopher Martin discuss fascinating, salient Communication topics, as well as 1 of the 3 upcoming new modules that can be found in Achieve this December! In this video, they discuss the highly relevant topic of A.I., specifically: its history, the academic implications it could usher in, and its early prowess in detecting cat pictures!    ... View more

Using Achieve for the first time (or considering it)? We can help with that! Innovative Communication professor and director of student learning center, Matthew Ingram of Dakota State, has tips and tricks to make sure your early days using Achieve are smooth sailing. Best of all, he does it all in one minute!  ... View more

Love Attitudes: Myths and Maintenance American culture often equates romantic love, and the experience of “being in love", with passion. In this session, Dr. Kelly Morrison and Dr. Steven McCornack, co-authors of Reflect & Relate, Sixth Edition will discuss research on the six different "love attitudes" people possess and how these beliefs shape the lived reality of romantic relationships. They also will share in-class activities from their Interpersonal Communication course that can be used to enhance learning about romantic love and relationships, just in time for Valentine’s Day!   Access the recording today! WATCH THE RECORDING ... View more

Ron Becker, the new co-author of Media and Culture, breaks down his favorite new assignment for his Mass Comm. Students: Media Guilty Pleasures!    Watch the Recording RECORDING HERE ... View more

American culture often equates romantic love, and the experience of “being in love", with passion. In this session, Dr. Kelly Morrison and Dr. Steven McCornack, co-authors of Reflect & Relate, Sixth Edition will discuss research on the six different "love attitudes" people possess and how these beliefs shape the lived reality of romantic relationships. They also will share in-class activities from their Interpersonal Communication course that can be used to enhance learning about romantic love and relationships, just in time for Valentine’s Day!   Access the recording today! WATCH THE RECORDING ... View more

Are your students fooled by fake or manipulated images? Do you find that teaching media literacy is the main challenge in Mass Communication courses? Join Bettina Fabos, co-author of Media and Culture, 13th Edition, for a webinar where she talks about teaching students to critically read manipulated images, from photo retouching to digital deep fakes. Fellow co-authors Christopher Martin and Ronald Becker will also discuss both the legal and ethical ramifications of such manipulation. Request a copy of Media & Culture, 13th Edition.   Watch the Recording WATCH HERE     Even prior to the COVID pandemic, college students have struggled with mental health issues including loneliness, anxiety, and social isolation. Join Kelly and Steve to discuss the research on loneliness and social isolation, the connections to overall mental and physical health, and suggestions for using interpersonal communication to forge and fortify our connections with others to improve wellness in a post-pandemic world. Request a copy of Reflect & Relate, 6th Edition.   Watch the Recoding WATCH HERE Learning is a communicative process, but all too often the curriculum--from the learning outcomes and syllabus to textbooks and assessments--focuses on the delivery of decontextualized information, instead of fostering a rich intercultural exchange. In this webinar, communication professor Liz Martin (Palm Beach State College) shows how instructors can make the curriculum come alive for students by situating it within their network of relationships--interpersonal, professional, and cultural--to create diverse, inclusive, and engaging educational experiences. Learn more here.   Watch the Recording WATCH HERE ... View more

NOVEMBER 10TH | 1:00 PM ET Learning is a communicative process, but all too often the curriculum--from the learning outcomes and syllabus to textbooks and assessments--focuses on the delivery of decontextualized information, instead of fostering a rich intercultural exchange. In this webinar, communication professor Liz Martin (Palm Beach State College) shows how instructors can make the curriculum come alive for students by situating it within their network of relationships--interpersonal, professional, and cultural--to create diverse, inclusive, and engaging educational experiences. Learn more here.   Watch the Recording RECORDING HERE ... View more

OCTOBER 27 | 1:00 PM ET Are your students fooled by fake or manipulated images? Do you find that teaching media literacy is the main challenge in Mass Communication courses? Join Bettina Fabos, co-author of Media and Culture, 13th Edition, for a webinar where she talks about teaching students to critically read manipulated images, from photo retouching to digital deep fakes. Fellow co-authors Christopher Martin and Ronald Becker will also discuss both the legal and ethical ramifications of such manipulation. Request a copy of Media & Culture, 13th Edition.   Watch the Recording RECORDING HERE ... View more

Loneliness, unhappiness & the connection to interpersonal communication skills Loneliness is on the rise and has been since the early 2000s. With ongoing concerns about students’ mental health during the pandemic, it’s more important than ever to address the root of the problem: the lack of interpersonal communication.  Why are students more lonely and unhappy than ever? Research from psychologist and Macmillan Learning author David Myers found that while some factors like religion, volunteering and fitness have a slight impact on happiness, the thing that makes the most impact is having satisfying relationships. Not just romantic relationships, but also connections with friends, family, co-workers, and fellow students. The way to develop these meaningful, and sustaining relationships is interpersonal communication. Addressing the Lack of Interpersonal Communication in the Classroom It’s challenging to address lack of interpersonal communication when students are more dependent than ever on technology in many aspects of their lives -- from their regular access to social media to their remote classes while they were confined during the pandemic. The screen that has allowed them to connect with people is simultaneously isolating them as well as becoming a scale for self esteem (which is a concept worthy of an entire blog.) But there are steps instructors can take to help students to establish and enhance interpersonal communications in and beyond the classroom. According to Steven McCornack, Professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Sustaining relationships is a mental health imperative and interpersonal comms is a way to address it.” 8 Tips for Teaching & Developing Interpersonal Skills in Students Last week’s webinar about interpersonal relationships in a post-COVID world with professors and authors Steven McCormack and Kelly Morrison, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham hosted by Macmillan Learning introduced some steps that instructors can take both in and out of the classroom to help develop these skills in students. While some tips are specific to Communication classes, others can be used in just about any class. Here are eight tips: 1. Don’t start the semester with a “syllabus day.” Steven and Kelly start out class with a question:  “What is the most important thing that drives your life’s happiness.” This helps develop community within the class and gets the students to start talking. And, for their class in particular, it’s helpful to lead into the content as to why their course on interpersonal communication is important. 2. Use name tags in class for in-person classes. While many students can identify the faces of the other students in their class, not as many are familiar with their names. Having name tags is like opening a door to say hello, and continues throughout the semester to create community. 3. Have music on before class. Having music creates an environment that encourages conversations. Steven consults his son on a playlist so that he has the most current music on, whereas Kelly prefers more upbeat music. No matter the kind, music is a great conversation starter. 4. Gently push students not to use devices. While the screen enables students to connect with each other in the digital space, it is also very isolating -- and not just because students are looking down at their devices instead of engaging with their surroundings hindering conversations. Research correlates social media consumption and social isolation; it’s possible to plot someone's feelings of isolation by monitoring the amount of time per day they spend on social media, in large part because they’re doing social comparisons and feeling worse about themselves. 5. Use the “introduce yourself to a stranger” assignment. This assignment asks students to introduce themselves to a specified number of people they hadn’t met before either every day or every week. The assignment aspect of it gives students a valid excuse for approaching someone they didn’t know and starting a conversation, helping to remove some of the shyness and intimidation some students may feel. This has led to many students finding common interests or even making new friends, helping them to feel less lonely. 6. Advise students about Self-Discrepancy Theory. The theory purports that self-esteem, in large part, derives from how we compare ourselves to two standards -- who we believe we should be and what we believe the ideal is. Students’ own self-concept will benefit when they are mindful of their inputs and understand that social media should not function as a scale for self-esteem because many things being posted are fictional and non-attainable. Empower students to know that they alone have the power to change the comparisons, as they reside in their own thoughts. 7. Help get conversations started. Students can engage with each other in discussion boards or in breakout rooms, giving them the ability to connect with and learn from each other. Instructors can use ice-breaker questions like “what would the title of your life’s story be, and why” to allow students to better get to know each other. 8. Use video. In addition to being more efficient than sending emails back and forth for hours on end, video conferencing with students helps to build connections with instructors and each other. Instructors can meet with students individually or in small groups. In asynchronous classes, video introductions can be used to allow students to get to know each other and discover common interests.  How Do You Promote Interpersonal Skills in Your Classroom? As an Interpersonal Communications instructor, Kelly opens her classes by underscoring the importance of having sustaining relationships, and the steps outlined above are some ways to nurture their development, but that’s just one of many options. These eight ideas are some of many designed to help support the development of interpersonal communications -- leading to happier and more successful students. The close relationships that students develop, more than money or fame, are what keep people them throughout their lives. “The way that students can get there is through interpersonal communication,” she noted. What tips or activities do you promote in your classroom for helping students develop interpersonal communication skills? Tell us in the comments below! To watch the full webinar and access the slide deck, click here. Learn more & request a copy of Steve and Kelly’s new edition of Reflect and Relate: An Introduction to Interpersonal. ... View more

October 4th | 1:00 PM ET   Even prior to the COVID pandemic, college students have struggled with mental health issues including loneliness, anxiety, and social isolation. Join Kelly and Steve to discuss the research on loneliness and social isolation, the connections to overall mental and physical health, and suggestions for using interpersonal communication to forge and fortify our connections with others to improve wellness in a post-pandemic world. Request a copy of Reflect & Relate, 6th Edition.   Watch today WATCH HERE ... View more

by Allison Cottrell, Summer 2021 Marketing Intern at Macmillan Learning In my senior year at Grinnell College this past fall, I finished my mathematics major with a course in Numerical Analysis. While I usually felt represented as a female mathematician in my time at the college, I encountered an image in that course’s textbook that made me reconsider how I’d been interacting with my math texts up to that point.  Now, almost a year later as Marketing Intern for Macmillan Learning, I still think about the image, its placement in that textbook, published in 2006, and its influence on my learning experience.  I encountered the image when I was almost done with the term. Our final project was to explore a chapter we didn’t cover in class, learn it ourselves, and write an essay telling that chapter’s story. For no particular reason, I chose the chapter on the Discrete Cosine Transform used in image compression.  I knew nothing about the transform beforehand, and I was proud of myself for being able to tackle the content relatively on my own. I think this was the point of the project--to show us that we now each had the skills to understand content on our own--and the project succeeded in that respect. But, this chapter also included the image “Lenna,” a photo widely used in image compression. At first glance to me, and I assume most others who encounter the image, it’s just a photo of a woman wearing a feathered hat.  But, this image has a more complex history. It only started as the image compression standard in 1973 when three men were looking around for a photo to use for a conference paper. So, they turned to a recent edition of Playboy, chose this “Lenna” image from a centerfold, and used it without another thought. (See the image here.) At the time of first reading the chapter, I didn’t know this. My head was swimming with image compression and matrices and proofs I didn’t quite understand. I took the image, as presented in a text I was told to trust, without question.  I was able in my paper to choose a different image to demonstrate the algorithm, so I picked an image of my dog. As a surprise to no one, it was not hard to choose an image outside of Playboy. Turns out, there are many other images one can compress, if they care enough to do so.  My professor sent out an email about the image towards the end of the semester with a reassuring note on inclusivity in science, but the image shouldn’t have been in my textbook. As a student, I could not have learned the needed material in the time and space of that class without encountering that image. Once I knew the history of the image, it changed the way that I experienced the chapter in a distinctly negative way.  I still learned the chapter, I still wrote my paper, and I was still proud of myself and the writing I produced. But, I could have produced it without this line of research into the Lenna image. Images in texts always matter, whatever the discipline. Context didn’t leave the room when I opened my Numerical Analysis textbook. As a female mathematician, I want the images of women in my math textbooks to be female mathematicians, not images from Playboy. ... View more

April 7 | 2:00 PM ET   Would you like to have all your student speeches in one place? What about the ability to easily grade, provide feedback, and enable peer review? All while utilizing the same recording and sharing methods you currently employ like YouTube links and Zoom Cloud integrations? GoReact is the gold standard for speech recording, upload, and assessment.   Watch today WATCH HERE ... View more

Watch as Speech Craft author Joshua Gunn discusses everything from teaching during a global pandemic, diversity and inclusion in the classroom, public speaking,  and even which superpower reigns supreme. Interested in requesting access to LaunchPad for Communication titles? Fill out the form here.  ... View more