 |
|
|
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., Revisited
Edited by
Luigi Manca and Gail W. Pieper
5/23/1999 draft
Acknowledgments
We thank the following members of Benedictine University's spring 1997 Advanced Editing for Print class: Mark Dinos, Melissa Dowell, Lynn Guinta, Chris Lyne, Carmen Manly, Rose Ricetti, and Elizabeth Summers. Their editing and indexing of the MacLean papers is deeply appreciated.
Contents
Frontiers of Communication
Research
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
1966
A View of Perception and
Communication
Malcolm S. Maclean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
1966
Communication Theory, Research,
and the Practical Affairs of Man
Malcolm S. Maclean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
1966
Suggestions for Revision in Our
Training People in the Field of Journalism
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
December 14, 1966
The University,
the School of Journalism, and Education for
Communication
A Paper for the Educational Policies Committee
Malcolm S MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
January 19, 1967
Position Paper for the Ad Hoc
Committee on Media Evaluation, Association for Education in
Journalism
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
American Business Press
Speech
Malcolm S MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
May, 1967
On the Education of Responsible
Newsmen
Malcolm S MacLean, Jr.
University of Iowa
May 8-11, 1968
An Approach to Communicatino Theory
through Simulatino
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., and Albert D. Talbott
University of Iowa
December 1969
Journalism Education at the
University of Iowa
Malcolm S MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
April, 1970
Communication,
Experimentation, and Growth
Malcolm S MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
October 28-29, 1971
Journalism Education: Whence and Where
To
Malcolm S MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
June 1972
Questions of Evaluation of
Instructional Simulations and Games
Malcolm S MacLean, Jr.
Albert D. Talbott
April 17-20, 1974
Peace, War and Communication
Malcolm S. MacLean
International Communication Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 1973
Frontiers of Communication
Research
by
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
Gallup Professor of Communication Researc
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
Presented at the
1966 Journalism Institutes
University of Wisconsin
The "Frontiers" title is one which promises excitement and adventure. It suggests new breakthroughs. It may even give license now to ream the whole of our field up and down or perhaps just to present a few of my own caustic views.
In his excellent paper, my colleague Dr. Carter mentioned Berelson's attempt several years ago to bury us all. A very curious thing that was: the Berelson who at that time concluded that all the
real communication research had already been done by Lasswell, Hovland, Lazarsfeld, and to some extent himself later along with Steiner discovered that there were very few hard findings in the field. This would have been true, I think even had they included the Journalism Quarterly among their sources, which, of course, they should have done.
My own conclusion, as I survey the field of communication research, is quite different from Berleson's. I am convinced that we have done very little communication research, that we are very much at the beginning rather than at the end.
I also think that most of the research we have done has been done at too advanced a stage of precision-as though we presumed much more theory than we have. Let me explain something about what I consider to be phases or stages of communication research. I bother you with this only because I have found that there are some who do not share my view of research progression.
Generally, I see science not as a particular method but as some sets of relatively systematic ways of learning. This does not mean that all the ways are highly systematic but only that the sets are systematic in that, for one thing, the methods within them generally increase in precision as the theory becomes more exact in its prediction.
I'll illustrate with one kind of sequence which might, say, consist of these stages or phases: (1) problem recognition, (2) exploration, (3) discovery and invention, (4) field survey, descriptive and correlational, (5) laboratory-controlled experimentation, and (6) controlled field experimentation. As with any scheme of this kind, there are problems of overlap and, in the usual program of research, the sequencing is not all that neat.
Problem Recognition
Recognizing a problem when you see one seems like the easiest of jobs. Yet, if we recognize a problem clearly, it means that our theory is quite advanced, and so our problem is well on its way to solution. What we usually do recognize are some symptoms of things not going very well.
Reminds me of the story of the woman whose brother insisted that she go see a psychiatrist. She finally got an appointment.
"I really don't think I ought to bother you," she told the psychiatrist, "but my brother thinks I have a problem. It's that I just love pancakes!"
"Well," said the psychiatrist, "I don't see anything wrong with that. I like pancakes too."
"Oh, you do!" the woman squealed with delight. "Then you must come to my house. I have trunkloads of them up in the attic."
Many of the problems we work with in communication research remain barely recognized and poorly defined. We researchers find that many practitioners cannot define their problems in terms that make sense to us. And when they do, we are prone to dismiss them because they don't fit the research tools we like to use.
Exploration.
When you don't know very much about something, exploring it seems like the natural thing to do. You kind of wade in and feel around. You observe. You interview in depth. You go through the experience yourself and try to analyze it. You use tricky projective techniques. You read fiction and nonfiction of sensitive writers describing relevant experiences. You begin to get a feel for how the process might work with just one person. You begin to see how situations make a difference. You begin to see things as others see them.
Much of our communication research so far is apparently so cocksure of the way things go that you wonder why we needed any research in the first place. The closest many studies get to any exploring is a pilot, but usually so structured that there is little room for change.
When we make proposals for grants, we seldom put in much time or money for exploring. If we did, it would look as though we really didn't know much about the problem, which we usually don't. But we can't afford to look stupid, especially when we are asking somebody for money, so we have a cover-up called a review of the literature. This literature usually has only a trivial relationship to the problem, if indeed we have been able to define that very well with so little exploring. Or we may have defined it rather exactly as a trivial problem in a whole organized sequence of trivial problems.
Anyway, I think that those who have the guts to support our research, should somehow encourage us to spend lots more time exploring problems.
Discovery and Invention
Another phase which I think can help us learn a lot, but which again seems shamefully ignored, is one I like to call discovery and invention.
We come out of the exploratory stage with lots of ideas we want to try out. Here we can invent dimensions of response, situations to represent those we consider important in real life, items by which people vital to our problem can relate themselves to it meaningfully and systematically.
Here we can discover basic patterns empirically. I think it's strange that those of us in communication research have not yet isolated fundamental patterns of human communication. Most people, I think, have fairly stable patterns of communication input and output. In fact, certain personality theories, such as that of Carl Jung, deal primarily with communication. The closest thing I have seen to this in our field are the time-use studies, some of the best of which have been conducted by communication research people right here at Wisconsin. Studies of pattern and change in pattern can most appropriately be studied through Stephenson's Q methodology or a combination of Nunally's index of profile similarity and McQuitty's recent hierarchical syndrome analysis.
Computer simulation is another method I would put in the discovery and invention phase. The simulator can stage his problem, feed in actual or estimated data, then play around-preferably in a systematic fashion-with the major manipulable variables and see what comes out. For example, mass media competitive business games could be played; various editorial mix packages could be developed. Etc.
But, alas, discovery and invention suffer just about the same fate as exploration. This is true even though I am confident that professional communicators-publishers, television producers; etc.- could learn a great deal on highly practical kinds of questions by placing their research money mainly on these phases of research. Trouble is, they aren't confident. In fact, we have done a very good job of selling them on the idea that every study must have at least four humdred respondents. Talk to them about an exploratory study with ten or twelve families or a Q study of sixty persons chosen with purpose and you waste your breath. Simulation they might go forcomputer is another name for magic, these days.
Field Survey, Descriptive and Correctional
For many of us, training in research methods has meant training in survey research methods with a bit of statistics thrown in for good measure. Those with stronger psychological orientation have usually learned a bit about design of controlled experiments.
A well-designed survey can be a magnificently useful tool. Much too often, probably because it is a familiar tool, we have used it for exploration and discovery and invention purposes.
Instead, I am convinced we should save it until we are quite clear about what we need to know. We have our dimensions well defined. We have discovered certain communication patterns, say, and need to know how these are distributed in a particular population. We want to know how the communication patterns naturally related to content interest patterns. We have defined the data needed for a computer simulation problem. Etc.
Good surveys are costly. They are unnecessarily so when used mainly for questions dealt with better by other methods.
For example, I fail to see the value of a huge survey with many crossbreaks as what?- a rich man's substitute for some much cheaper pattern studies and some field experimentation.
Controlled Laboratory Experiments
Again, I think much of our laboratory experimentation is trivial-and will continue to be so in areas where we have as yet done little exploration, little discovery and invention. We experiment with ill-defined stimuli, response dimensions, situations, etc.
This sounds perhaps as though I expect each experiment to be a smashing breakthrough, making possible some grand generalization about the process of human communication. No, not really. But I do hope to see some glimmer of a systematic buildup to some useful generalizations. As it is now, we seem to act as though there were some magic about an analysis of variance, which can take the place of exploration, thinking, and theory.
It seems to me that, if we want to generalize the findings of our experiments back to some kind of natural environment, we need to do a fine job of abstracting and sampling from that environment. This requires a kind of knowledge which I think we can get only from thorough research at the earlier stages.
I think, too, that earlier levels of research could help a great deal in focusing on variables whose differences are likely to make a difference.
Field Experiments
What I have said for lab experiments goes double for field experiments. They can be very costly. I heard of one done recently which cost its sponsor around one and a half million dollars.
For years, Don Murphy conducted field experiments with practically every reader survey of Wallace's Farmer, using a split-run technique.
The field experiment seems to be the final payoff. It will tell you how things go in the real world. That is it will if you have sampled enough time-place situations-naturally complex combinations of stimuli, varieties of people or families or whatever is appropriate.
My picture of communication research may seem a bit gloomy. It is not, if we consider ourselves at the frontier as explorers and pioneers.
Mainly I have tried to emphasize the importance to communication research of problem definition, exploration and discovery and invention. This does not imply that other stages of research are not crucial, when we are ready for them.
Most of us ride our research hobbyhorses. What we have learned to do is good because we have learned to do it. We need to increase our range of research skills. And we need to collaborate more so that our research can add up to something.
I am happy to note that the document researchers-the historians and legal researchers-have been coming back into strength in our field. We have been the fair-haired boys for too long. We need some competition.
A View of Perception and
Communication
by
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
George H. Gallup Professor of Communication Research
University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1966
Nearly all of us go through our lives firmly convinced that we see, hear, and touch what is truly there to be seen, heard, or felt. We think of ourselves as inside observers of outside reality.
When somebody shows us a trapezoidal window turning on a pivot, and we see it not as a trapezoid and not as turning on a pivot but rather as an ordinary window oscillating back and forth, we are inclined to dismiss the whole thing as a trick or, at most, a clever illusion. When we learn that men who have gone without food for a couple of days report seeing ambiguous blobs as hamburger sandwiches, we are likely to consider it some kind of abnormality which would never occur to any of us under ordinary circumstances.
Ordinarily, we think we see what is really there. There is a table, we say; there are four chairs; here we are standing on this solid floor. We are talking about real things. Anyone who doubts it must be a fool. We become incensed if somebody suggests that our "there is" statements reflect beliefs rather than certainties. After all, we can go and sit in the chairs and thus prove that they are indeed chairs.
In the same way, after we see the trapezoidal window from the top, we are likely to relax in the certainty that the window is really turning around. The notion that this, too, might be an illusion does not usually occur to us. Of course, we could check further by going up to the window to touch it as it turns. Then we would be sure. Or would we?
Understanding processes of perception is one of the keys to understanding communication. We will see, too, how such understanding may help us to communicate more effectively.
A basic problem is this: We can know ourselves and the "there" in our world only through our senses, working with constructs we have developed through past experiences. We cannot somehow get outside of ourselves to check on the accuracy of our perceptions, to see that we are really seeing what is really there. In fact, we are eventually limited in knowing their accuracy to our evaluations of how well our expectations and predictions serve us.
We cannot properly separate the things in our environment from ourselves as observers, since we see them: in terms of our past experiences, our memories of past perceptions. A little thing you and I might see as a radio transistor might be seen as a plaything by a young child and not seen as a thing at all by an aborigine. An electronics engineer would actually see a different thing than we, though he might give it the same label. Our telling the young child that the thing is a transistor would not make him see the same thing as we do. And, of course, you and I don't see exactly the same thing, since our experience, too, has been somewhat different.
A thing observed can never be exactly the same thing observed for two different people for the "same" person at two different times (since he cannot be exactly the same person).
Various factors contribute to how we perceive our worlds. Around us we have an infinity of stimuli in different forms, patterns, intensities, rates, wave lengths, etc. These different kinds of energy impinge on our various senses-;eyes, ears, etc.-as we direct our attention to them. Or the stimuli, because of their intensity, force their way into our field of perception. Our perception depends in part on the quality and condition of our senses and, to some degree, the strength of the stimuli.
Many people think that that's about all there is to perception. They consider us humans as combined cameras, tape recorders, pressure gauges, etc., along with some kind of information processing and decision-making center. They ignore all that is contributed to perception actively by the observer. We are not mere passive receivers and reactors to the stimuli around us.
Our beliefs about the world and our purposes help mightily to determine what we perceive. Out of the infinity, we selectively perceive in terms of our purposes and experiences. Which aspects and things we perceive in a myriad of aspects and things-what we see and what we see them as-depend not just on what is there (for all aspects of all that is there are impossible to determine), but also on what we know and what we think we must do with things to achieve our goals. We give form and meaning to stimuli on the basis of all our relevant past experience.
This does not mean, as some have inferred, that we see simply what we want to see. Not at all. We might soon die if we continued to act toward blobs of paint on paper as though they were hamburgers or other kinds of food. Instead, perception must be functional. Each of us, like the scientist, is trying continually to improve his prediction of the way the world works.
Each experience, each new percept, helps to provide us with expectations about reality. We expect the world to behave in accord with our beliefs about it. We are usually surer of what to expect in relatively simple physical matters than in more complex social relationships. We know as "true facts" those things with which we have had a great deal of highly consistent experience.
The ground is solid, until we step in quicksand. Water is liquid wet, at certain temperatures and pressures. Joe acts toward us in friendly ways, until he construes something we do as an insult.
If perception works more or less as described here, what does this mean for communication?
Most failures in communication are probably due to mistaken assumptions, by both source and receiver, about correspondence of meanings.
Two people who had had no similar experiences could not communicate at all with each other. But that is impossible; the very fact of being human tends to provide us with many (more or less) similar experiences. Our mothers tended us; we ate and slept in some kind of dwelling; we courted and made love; we talked; etc.-not exactly the same experiences even for identical twins, but similar.
For most of our day-to-day communicating, this common human background and common cultural background allow us to do well enough. This fact seems to lull us into assuming that we are doing well enough in more crucial situations-that we as communicators are being well understood, that we as receivers are understanding all that we need to.
In such crucial situations, it is useful for communicators and receivers to spend some time exploring each other's beliefs, assumptions and purposes concerning the matters at hand. In informal situations, this can often be handled by raising questions and listening and observing carefully, and by trying to put oneself in the shoes of the other, to see things from his points of view. Formal situations where there are many receivers may require more formal techniques such as interviewing, perhaps even large-scale surveys.
As sources and receivers in vital communication, we can clarify matters by helping each other to see things from many angles rather than just one or two. Some people who know their subjects very well fail to communicate what they intend because they forget that their receivers have had little experience by which to give meaning and form to what the source says. Where the source does know the kinds of experiences his receivers have been through and what kinds of things they believe about the world, he can draw on these for examples, illustrations, analogies, similes, etc. to help bring their perceptions of his subject closer to his own.
As communicators, we can help our receivers to perceive things more as we do by increasing certain stimulus energies and decreasing others. Thus, we can emphasize, highlight, silhouette those aspects or those things we consider important. Again, we can do this more effectively where we know the ways our receivers see things and what their purposes are.
Politicians are known for their use of ambiguity, of presenting things in such a way that many interpretations are possible. Where the source is well liked by his receivers, they are likely to give favorable interpretations to his ambiguities. But this technique can be dangerous. The new, the unfamiliar, the ambiguous require more perceptual work, more thinking, more searching through past experiences; the receiver may resent being presented with things which have not been neatly ordered and structured for him. For example, you may know people who become quite disturbed when asked to understand an abstract painting or a piece of modern music. Even more, we are likely to become angry when important instructions are not clear to us.
Since past perceptions help to determine present perceptions, the sequence in which the communicator presents things may become quite important. An introduction which directs attention to certain matters or which develops a certain way of seeing things may constrict perceptions of later materials or channel them in particular ways. Where one side of a controversial argument is rather thoroughly presented before the other side, seeing of the other side may suffer.
Since we learn to depend on others to confirm or disconfirm our perceptions, social reinforcement becomes important. We tend to believe more surely those things we believe others around us believe. The major purpose of some meetings is to develop consensus so that individual members reinforce each other. The mass meetings staged by Hitler and Goebbels were extraordinary examples of the use of social reinforcement to influence perception.
The literature on perception is rich. An imaginative communicator can find in it many more implications for communication than those briefly suggested here.
Notes
Prepared for the Seminars on Communication conducted by Michigan State University for the Agency for International Development
Communication Theory, Research, and the Practical Affairs of Man
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
A paper delivered to a National Society for the Study of Communication session at the 1966 convention of the Speech Association of America in Chicago, Illinois, and published here for the first time.
As I sat daydreaming one day in my Gallup chair, I imagined three rather interesting characters. I would like to describe them to you now. Of course, any resemblance of these stereotyped characters to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
My characters are Academic Bum, Scientistic Virgin, and Bootstrap Sam, a hard-nosed practitioner.
Academic Bum and Bootstrap Sam are closely related. Each tries to outdo the other in contempt for Scientistic Virgin. In fact, when you unmask Academic Bum-let's call him A.B. for short-you often find a Bootstrap Sam who has retired into the tenured comfort of the academic world. The hardheaded, practical man has become softheaded and quite impractical, though he is completely unaware that this is so. (I will return to this interesting transformation later.)
Sometimes, A.B. finds the academic world not nearly so comfortable as he expected. For one thing, there are pressures to get a Ph.D. Though, in his inner heart, he knows it's ridiculous for an experienced man like himself to have to do it, A.B. may go through the Ph.D. torture to get the academic union card. But he hates it all the way.
The parts he hates most are statistics, research methods, and social sciences generally. He'll be damned if such matters really have anything to do with the real world. But he takes his medicine and struggles along.
Finally, he gets the doctorate out of the way! Having learned to despise research and scholarly endeavor generally, A.B. swears never to do any more serious studies than he can help. Any sensible person can see that all that research junk in the academic journals is nothing but a fancy boondoggle anyway.
Unfortunately, from A.B.'s point of view, most universities have quite a few people, some of them administrators, who do not see things his way. The system of academic Brownie points is against him. Deans and such actually put a lot of stock in research articles and monographs. Even the facts that he's a great teacher, the students love him, and he has a lot of friends among the pros. on the outside don't seem to impress the dean. Raises are slim, promotions rare.
Academic Bum may begin to suspect that the department chairman has it in for him. After all, the chairman knows all the good work he does and would be able to convince the dean, if the chairman only had guts. The trouble is that the chairman seems to believe in that research crap, too.
A.B. really boils when he sees young Scientistic Virgin promoted over him and given a large raise in pay. He then gets together with other academic bums for drinks and a good therapeutic bitching session, with many laughs over the titles of research papers and articles produced by scientistic virgins. When they really get swinging, the A.B.'s try to top each other in dirty digs at the chairman, the dean, and the whole goddamn system. Occasionally, A.B. screws up a lot of courage, then attacks the system and the virgins in print or speech.
In one or another university, through some oversight, A.B. may become chairman of the department. As positions in the department open up, he searches for bootstrap sams, hires them, and makes bums out of them. This solidly bum department makes for more comfortable conditions, and it's cheaper for the university, since scientistic virgins come high.
A major reason that scientistic virgins come high is that they have proven their ability to win academic Brownie points. Furthermore, they come at a time when nearly every administrator in the communication area feels he has to have one-at least one, that is. These are the days of image, and the department chairman is bothered because the rest of the academic community, including central administration, seems to see his department as little more than a trade school. If he gets the department a good chi-square and analysis of variance man and sees to it that academic colleagues are made aware of his virgin, the internal image should improve. At the same time, the chairman will probably keep his virgin hidden discreetly from the pros in the real, external world. This makes Virgin happy, since Virgin wants above all to keep himself pure, untainted by the dirty paws of Bootstrap Sam and his ilk.
Scientistic Virgin emulates what he thinks Scientistic Psychologist is doing, while Scientistic Psychologist emulates what he thinks the physicist is doing. And all but the physicist are very pure, indeed.
The department chairman may love his virgin for being pure, since the purer he is the more virgi-and possibly the department-will be respected by the rest of the academic community. Not all the people in that department are whores, his colleagues will think (the chairman hopes).
Scientistic Virgin maintains his purity by conducting and reporting research as far removed from practical problems as he can make it. The really crucial thing, Virgin believes, is not what you do-just so long as it's pure-but how you do it. If the design and execution are letter perfect and if the hypothesis tests out at probability less than .01, what more can anyone ask?
Scientistic Virgin feels as superior to Academic Bum and Bootstrap Sam as they do to him.
"To hell with the newspaper publishers!" says Virgin. "To hell with the broadcasters! To hell with the P.R. men! To hell with the communication teachers! Ignorant bastards!"
Meanwhile, Bootstrap Sam is giving a commencement talk to high-school kids on his favorite topic: "The Real World-It's Tough, Tough, Tough." He recalls getting his first job, during the depression, at $15 a week: "what some of you get for allowance money-and I was darned lucky to get a job at all." He urges the students to get lots of good, practical experience. The school of hard knocks, B.S. says, will get a person a lot further in life than the wishy-washy mouthings of a bunch of panty-waist university professors who have never had to meet a payroll.
"A couple of weeks ago," says Sam, "we had one of those young research fellows down from the university to visit our shop. Supposed to be an expert on communication. Ha! My daughter's three year old can talk-communicate-better than he did. He kept talking about 'cognition' and 'decoders' and 'encoders,' fancy words for 'thought' and 'readers' and 'writers.' Can you imagine?"
Bootstrap Sam feels that universities should have courses, taught by people like himself, on matters such as "how to buy a linotype" and "the tricks of writing letters that sell" and "fifty ways to audience laughter." He has often told the communication teachers so, but only a few A.B.'s have taken him seriously.
This daydream of mine about Academic Bum, Bootstrap Sam, and Scientistic Virgin had many more facets. But I don't want to bore you. Fortunately, as you know, there aren't really any such characters. If there were, our work in communication and communication education might really be fouled up-or, at least, slowed down.
Even so, there seem to be some quite unnecessary gulfs between research and teaching and between both and practice. I think we must build some bridges. I would like to explore further with you some aspects of the problem and then suggest some principles on which the bridges might be built.
For one thing, I think it is unfortunate that Kurt Lewin's wonderful remark "There is nothing so practical as a good theory" has become a cliché, since we seldom delve further into the possible significance of clichés.
Let's look into this matter of theory. Some people seem to insist that, in order for something to be called a theory, it must already be a grand, comprehensive set of logically related laws which explain parsimoniously all important facts and processes within its domain, I find such a definition useless.
To me, theory is something that we-all of us-are working on and using all the time. It is understanding or explanation which helps us to predict what may lead to what. As Lewin's remark indicates, we have good theories and bad theories. We have useful theories and less useful theories. We have big theories and little theories. We have explicit theories and implicit theories.
As practitioners of communication-and we all are practitioners; we can't help but be so-we operate on the basis of our theories, whether or not we realize we are doing so.
As teachers of communication-and all of us are teachers whether we know it or not-we have little else to teach but theory. Even when we merely get our students to imitate our "good" ways of doing things, we show our theories through our choices of things for them to emulate.
As researchers of communicatio-and I believe all of us are researchers-even in our most empirical moments, we cannot help but work from theories.
This kind of talk may be disturbing to the person who has always made a sharp distinction between fact and theory. Such people seem to think of fact as real and theory as fancied or imagined; they find it hard to face a world in which there can be no fact untainted by imagination, by theory.
It quickly becomes clear that, if scientific research had been the only source of theory, man would never have gotten off the ground. On the other hand, without it, he would not have gotten off nearly so fast nor so far. In any case, I want to make three important points:
1. There could be no practical world without theory.
2. The best, most useful, and practical theories may come from many sources of experience, including scientific research.
3. As we develop good theories, and skills in applying them, we gain power to deal with the world around us.
That last point is worth expanding. You may have one of the best theories in the world, but nobody, including you, will ever know it, unless you have the skills to apply it yourself or can communicate it well to those who do have such skills. And I mean to include here communicating theory to scientists with skill to apply it in their research.
I said earlier that the communicator on the firing line makes choices and decisions based on theories, whether he knows it or not. He may have lousy theories; he may have good ones; but theories he has.
One of his major problems, though again he may not recognize it as such, is that he is usually terribly wrapped up in day-to-day decisions, the ongoing process. This may prevent him from drawing back for a while to compare what he is doing with what others do, to stretch his thinking, to develop his theories, to develop a basis for more creative invention. He finds little time to read the history of others who have tried in their time to deal with problems like his. Neither can he afford to roam the world observing his counterparts in other cultures.
If he does not see himself as a user of theory, he is not apt to spend much time searching through academic journals. Even if he does, he may soon become discouraged, since he will probably find little he can relate directly to his work. He has not learned the language of the article writers, nor have they learned to translate their findings into useful and usable theory.
The problem seems to be more than one of language. Few of the researchers-and I don't mean just scientific researchers-concern themselves with those parts of communication theory which deal with communicating. This is not a new idea. Warren Bennis has pointed out that theories of social change may, but often do not, encompass theories of social changing. And Jerome Bruner has indicated that, while theories of instruction may be derived partly from theories of learning and development, few of the latter theories say anything directly about principles of instruction.
A theory of communicating deals primarily with variables which the people involved in the process can manipulate. These might include many situational and message variables. The fact that a researchers gets a multiple correlation of .88 for a bunch of demographic or organismic variables with information level, for example, may prove of very little value to the man whose job demands that he communicate at the same time to all kinds of people. Reminds me of a piece of research some of us did a while back in which we came up with the finding that intelligent men read more public affairs news than do unintelligent women.
It reminds me, too, of my visit to the University of Kentucky about a year and a half ago. An anthropologist there, to whom I had just been introduced, asked me this interesting questions: "Do you people in communication teach your students more effectively than the rest of us?" I thought that over for a moment and then gave what seems to me now an overly cocky answer: "Some of us try," I said, "and I think a few of us occasionally succeed."
Since then, I have thought about the matter some more. And I have observed more carefully the teaching, speaking, and writing of us communication people. Frankly, I don't think we do anywhere near an adequate job. Maybe you are an exception, but I mean most of us.
I wonder why. I suppose it's like the child psychologist who turns out to have the brattiest kids in town. We are the communication specialists who turn out to communicate just about as poorly as our colleagues who make no claim in this area.
Like the child psychologist, we may have good theory, but little skill in putting it into action. Or-and I suspect this may be more important-we tend to think of theory as being some abstract body we are building and testing. If it's to be used by somebody, it will be used by somebody else, later, not by us, now.
Possibly our theories are not very good in terms of useful applications to the practical affairs of man. I don't think we try them nearly enough in such contexts to know whether they will work.
Quite seriously, I believe that, as practitioners and teachers, we have not yet recognized our own need for continually improved theory. We continue to carry unfortunate misconceptions of the nature of the beast. As I suggested before, some of us seem to believe that theory is opposite to fact and that it certainly has nothing to do with our work. As researchers trying to build theory, we often forget that we are guided by theories about the conduct of research.
Many of us would-be Isaac Newtons are so wrapped up in our semantic differential dissonance laboratories we have little time for lying under trees where apples fall. And if we do lie and if an apple falls, I fear that at least some of us dismiss the event as disgusting and vulgar, or perhaps just trivial.
What I have tried to say here is that we all need lots of good theories. I see as barriers to development of good theories our tendencies to reify theory in our scholarly and scientific research and to ignore it in our teaching and other practical affairs. Conducting research and developing theory unrelated to the practical affairs of man is no more than a silly game. Trying to teach and conduct practical affairs in ignorance of relevant theory is foolhardy. Fortunately, only Academic Bum, Bootstrap Sam, and Scientistic Virgin would be so stupid.
Finally, I would like to credit some of my inspiring sources, with whom I have not checked my interpretations. These include Abraham Kaplan, my favorite philosopher of science, who has much nicer ways than I of saying nasty things about scientism; Jerome Bruner, whose work in bridging the gap between learning theory and instruction sets a lovely example for us; and my father, who long ago delivered a set of lectures at Harvard under the title "Scholars, Workers, and Gentlemen." To my colleagues I owe a great debt as they continue to stimulate and provide raw material for my imagination.
Suggestions for Revision in Our Training People in the Field of Journalism
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism
University of Iowa
December 14, 1966
A Paper for the Educational Policies Committee
I wish to have this paper considered merely a starting point for discussion and development.
Ipropose that we drop everything now offered by the School of Journalism. Before I am shot as a traitor, let me immediately say that I consider many segments of the content we now offer to be quite valuable. You will see that I am arguing chiefly against our present static form, sequencing and emphasis.
I suggest that, with the help of other interested persons in the university and under an administrative tent which can offer participating teachers sufficient rewards, we set up a program we might give some title like "Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory."
Nature of the Laboratory
The Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory would help students to develop their understanding of communication theory and inquiry and their skills in communication inquiry and practice. A major criterion for the success of the laboratory would be how much students gained in intellectual excitement and ability to learn on their own.
The laboratory would aid students in selection, integration, and synthesis of their free elective studies and a required foreign language. For example, in small group discussion, written and graphic communications, etc., students would be encouraged to communicate how they apply what they are learning in their elective work to cases and problems developed in the laboratory.
Much of the work of the laboratory would be devoted to helping students to learn how to bridge the gap between their work in fundamental aspects of humanities and the social and physical sciences and the application of principles so derived to understanding and communicating about current problems.
The laboratory would help the student to enjoy, appreciate, and analyze prime examples of communication in many different forms and styles. He would also have an opportunity to experiment in applying to his own communication what he learns in his analysis of these prime examples. He would have at hand many of the materials and instruments-typewriters, tape records, still and motion picture cameras, graphics material, etc. -useful constructing communication "packages." And there would be available help in techniques and tactics of using these instruments and materials effectively-help in the form of instructors, self-instructional devices, students at more advanced levels, etc.
Much emphasis would be placed on helping the student to relate basic questions raised in philosophy of science, aesthetics, values, and the like to his own life and work, particularly to heis key communication roles.
Stress would be placed not on historical study alone but on our uses of history in understanding ourselves today and projecting into the future.
Students would be assisted in learning and applying methods of analysis of systems at different levels-of self and role, of groups, organizations, institutions, and cultures. They would practice applying in their communication principles derived from the areas of attitude formation, cognition, perception, learning, linguistics, semantics, cybernetics, etc. Such principles would be related to the design of messages and the design of message production and distribution systems. Design would include formulation of strategies through analysis of receivers, markets, historical trends, etc., in accord with theories of communicating.
The Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory would be planned, organized, and operated by teams of teachers from the various relevant disciplines. It and its objectives would be evaluated on a continuing basis. Since this laboratory might contribute to and be a foundation for areas other than journalism which also involve a strong professional communication emphasis-television, radio, film, and education, for example-collaboration of members from those areas would be sought early in its devilment.
The laboratory would encourage self-instruction, peer teaching and evaluation, computer-assisted instruction and the like, where these seem appropriate. A part of the work of the laboratory teams would be searching for and developing more effective and efficient ways of instruction. They world also try to determine those courses and other activities around the university which the students might find most challenging and useful.
Structure of the Laboratory and Its Relation to the Total Program
The laboratory would continue from the first session of the freshman year to the last session of the Ph.D., increasing in sophistication and changing in emphasis. For example, in the early years, much attention would be given to relatively rapid methods of data collection, analysis, and message construction. During the graduate years, much more stress would be given to rigorous and thorough historical and scientific methods.
The whole of the junior year, the student would work in a foreign area communication study center. Eventually, several such centers might be established in places such as Peru, Equador, India, Nepal, Formosa, Nigeria, or Sierra Leone. Each center would have resident instructors and graduate students from the university of Iowa, aided by experts in the culture and language of the country. Major thrust of this part of the program would be as thorough immersion as possible in a different culture, with particularly close study of its systems of communication. The juniors would work with the graduate students in their research on communication.
Laboratory work at the graduate level would include a continuing involvement of every student in a variety of research, particularly in those kinds of research which hold some promise of contributing to our work with undergraduates as well as to that lovely abstraction called the "field."
There would be no vocational specialization until the last half of the senior year. Then, the student could choose one or more of the specialization laboratories, where he would learn the peculiar style, prescriptions, norms, laws, etc., associated with the particular field or fields he thinks he is interested in.
These specialization laboratories would be followed by and integrated with three-month internships, required for graduation. These labs and internships would be directly under the supervision of the School of Journalism for people planning to go into our presently defined fields. Other parts of the university collaborating in this enterprise might offer specialization laboratories and internships of their own.
More advanced specialization laboratories or seminars would be offered at the master's level.
A diagram follows
Diagram of Possible Organization of the Program
Internship,. practice
teaching, etc.
Fr. So. Jr. Sr. M.S. Ph.D
Wide range of electives
in humanities and sciences
required core,
foreign language,
relevant to
Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory (ICL)
|
Foreign area com study center |
Possible locations: |
|
Peru, Ecuador, India, Nepal, Formosa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone |
The
University, the School of Journalism, and
Education for Communication
A Paper for the Educational Policies Committee
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism
University of Iowa
January 19, 1967
How much of what we "know" we know only indirectly! All but the most recent history (while we have been alive) and all but those events close enough to us for direct sensing we have had to learn through others. And even the events close to us in time and space we see only in sharply limited ways.
The persons who help us to know about things not right within the range of our senses may, in turn, have learned much of what they teach us through others still. In fact, for most of what we learn, we seem to find ourselves links in long relay and processing chains. Our historical facts have usually gone through many more than just primary and secondary sources. And so have many of our news facts (our current history) and our scientific facts.
The institutions, agencies, and people responsible for helping us to know our world are thus vitally important to us. How well our journalists, our teachers, our scientists, etc. perform can make a world of difference to our well-being. Nor is this kind of key role limited to those who supply us with factual, documentary materials. Our images of people and things not near to us in time or space may sometimes derive mainly from fiction, from entertainment, feature movies, television's dramatic programs, etc.
I feel strongly about issues in education for journalism and communication. I am convinced that most people, including many of our colleagues in journalism education, don't realize the great importance of journalists to the health and well-being of society. It is my impression that even the best journalism school is doing only a so-so job of educating young people for the crucial roles in this field.
For example, I think we spend much too much time in trying to teach our undergraduate mechanical matters such as spelling and style, which might be better handled by self-instructional approaches. We don't have them read or write, especially read, nearly enough. We tend to limit their writing to the amount we can correct, as though they could learn nothing from writing that is not corrected by a teacher. Though we pay lip service to the need for broad, liberalizing influences, we often seem to act as though the most important purpose of a student's journalism education is to please his boss on his first job. Our students learn today's formulas rather than the kind of communication theories which might bridge them into the future. And generally, we have more or less tacked on such things as international communication and cross-cultural comparative courses rather than making the seeing of things from different points of view, the sense of the commonalities and differences of ourselves with other people, an integral part of the learning of budding journalists. Some of us have acted as though the only student who need to learn about international communication are those who hope someday to be foreign correspondents. In the same way, we have tacked on science writing courses and sent some of our students out to take introductory science courses as though it were some kind of specialty really only appropriate for people who are going to become science writers. On ethics and responsibility, we have typically preached sermons or had our students read the sermons of others. We have sent our students to other departments-very much encouraged in doing so by our accreditation syste-to get smatterings of history, literature, psychology, economics, political science, etc.,etc., pretty much assuming that these brief immersions would prepare them well for interpreting the world around us. In this, we have been caught up in what I consider an education-wide problem: too much concern for fact storage, too little for learning processes of learning, too little for contemplating purposes, too little for basic philosophical matters, too little for exercising our precious intellects.
I propose that we drop all courses now offered by the School of Journalism. I consider many segments of the content we now offer to be quite valuable. You will see that I am arguing chiefly against our present static form, sequencing, and emphasis.
I suggest that, with the help of other interested persons in the university and under an administrative tent which can offer participating teachers sufficient rewards, we set up a program we might give some title like "Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory."
Nature of the Laboratory
The Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory would help students to develop their understanding of communication theory and inquiry and their skills in communication inquiry and practice. A major criterion for the success of the laboratory would be how much students gained in intellectual excitement and ability to learn on their own.
The laboratory would aid students in selection, integration, and synthesis of their free elective studies and a required foreign language. For example, in small group discussion, written and graphic communications, etc., students would be encouraged to communicate how they apply what they are learning in their elective work to cases and problems developed in the laboratory.
Much of the work of the laboratory would be devoted to helping students to learn how to bridge the gap between their work in fundamental aspects of humanities and the social and physical sciences and the application of principles so derived to understanding and communicating about current problems.
The laboratory would help the student to enjoy, appreciate, and analyze prime examples of communication in many different forms and styles. He would also have an opportunity to experiment in applying to his own communication what he learns in his analysis of these prime examples. He would have at hand many of the materials and instrument-typewriters, tape records, still and motion picture cameras, graphics material, etc.-useful constructing communication "packages." And there would be available help in techniques and tactics of using these instruments and materials effectively-help in the form of instructors, self-instructional devices, students at more advanced levels, etc.
Much emphasis would be placed on helping the student to relate basic questions raised in philosophy of science, aesthetics, values, and the like to his own life an dwork, particularly to his key communication roles.
Stress would be placed not on historical study alone but on our uses of history in understanding ourselves today and projecting into the future.
Students would be assisted in learning and applying methods of analysis of systems at different levels-of self and role, of groups, organizations, institutions and cultures. They would practice applying in their communication principles derived from the areas of attitude formation, cognition, perception, learning, linguistics, semantics, cybernetics, etc. Such principles would be related to the design of messages and the design of message production and distribution systems. Design would include formulation of strategies through analysis of receivers, markets, historical trends, etc., in accord with theories of communicating.
The Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory would be planned, organized, and operated by teams of teachers form the various relevant disciplines. It and its objectives would be evaluated on a continuing basis. Since this laboratory might contribute to and be a foundation for areas other than journalism which also involve a strong professional communication emphasis-television-radio-film and education, for example-collaboration of members from those areas would be sought early in its devilment.
The laboratory would encourage self-instruction, peer teaching and evaluation, computer-assisted instruction, and the like, where these seem appropriate. A part of the work of the laboratory teams would be searching for and developing more effective and efficient ways of instruction. They world also try to determine those courses and other activities around the university which the students might find most challenging and useful.
Structure of the Laboratory and Its Relation to the Total Program
The laboratory would continue from the first session of the freshman year to the last session of the Ph.D., increasing in sophistication and changing in emphasis. For example, in the early years, much attention would be given to relatively rapid methods of data collection, analysis, and message construction. During the graduate years, much more stress would be given to rigorous and thorough historical and scientific methods.
The whole of the junior year, the student would work in a foreign area communication study center. Eventually several such centers might be established in places such as Peru, Equador, India, Nepal, Formosa, Nigeria, or Sierra Leone. Each center would have resident instructors and graduate students from the University of Iowa, aided by experts in the culture and language of the country. Major thrust of this part of the program would be as thorough immersion as possible in a different culture, with particularly close study of its systems of communication. The juniors would work with the graduate students in their research on communication.
Laboratory work at the graduate level would include a continuing involvement of every student in a variety of research, particularly in those kinds of research which hold some promise of contributing to our work with undergraduates as well as to that lovely abstraction called the "field."
There would be no vocational specialization until the last half of the senior year. Then, the student could choose one of more of the specialization laboratories, where he would learn the peculiar style prescriptions, norms, laws, etc., associated with the particular field or fields he thinks he is interested in.
These specialization laboratories would be followed by and integrated with three-month internships, required for graduation. These labs and internships would be directly under the supervision of the School of Journalism for people planning to go into our presently defined fields. Other parts of the university collaborating in this enterprise might offer specialization laboratories and internships of their own. More advanced specialization laboratories or seminars would be offered at the master's level.
A diagram follows.
Diagram of Possible Organization of the Program
Internship,. practice
teaching, etc.
FR. SO. JR. SR. Masters PH.D.
Wide range of electives in
humanities and sciences
Required core,
foreign Language
relevant to
Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory (ICL)
|
Foreign area com study center |
Possible locations: |
|
Peru, Ecuador, India, Nepal, Formosa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone |
This program would be based on three principles: (1) develop students' knowledge and abilities through (2) personal experimentation and discovery in tasks which (3) provide a high degree of involvement. The center of the program would provide for continuous exploration and discovery on the part of the student.
This can be accomplished through flexible organization of small groups of students and faculty-what we might call teaching-learning groups. Each major group would contain fifteen to thirty members. Each student would be assigned to this seminar-type group upon entering the program and remain with that group until graduation. The group would serve as a home base of operation for as long as the student remained in the communication program. Students would sometimes be regrouped-by level of advancement, for example-where such regrouping seemed appropriate.
An advantage of the small seminar structure would be that the students would get to know each other and have increased contact with the faculty seminar-advisors. This might help to solve the growing student-alienation problem in large universities. The small group would also encourage discussion and make the educational process interactive rather than the traditional one-way process.
Such seminars would meet for a minimum of two hours and preferably three hours every weekday (at least the time would be earmarked daily for comm lab activities).
The seminar would provide continuous evaluation of the student's current program.The allied program of study (more formally structured courses in other areas of the university) would, I believe, be stimulated by his work on projects and problems in the Communication Laboratory. His understanding of the more formal work might be considerably enriched by exposure to other ideas offered by fellow students in the lab; ideas confronted and needs created in such experiences might provide the motivation for expanding academic work, rather than requirements.
Students would complete a wide variety of projects. Some of these would require breaking into smaller groups or working alone to pursue a specific area of study. They would require a great deal of attention to relevant books, magazine articles, films, lectures, TV programs, etc.
The seminars ought to have permanent quarters where facilities (the mechanical side of communication and learning) would be available at almost any time (e.g., 8 AM to 10 PM), where students would leave materials and return to them. This laboratory would serve as a center for discussion, presentations. etc.
Since the students are earlier levels would have close contact with more advanced students and faculty, curricular advising would be built in and probably more effective than our present system. Credits toward graduation would be based on
1. number, independence, and depth of projects completed in I.C. lab;
2. traditional credits for elective and required courses completed satisfactorily;
3. internship.
Thus, the eager and bright students could move more quickly through the program than the clods.
Generally, projects would require
1. planning in terms of given objectives;
2. data collection, information search from a great variety of sources through on-the-spot observation, reading, interviewing, etc.;
3. analysis and synthesis;
4. written, oral, and nonverbal communication to specified receivers;
5. evaluation of feedback.
As a matter of fact, the slower student might well benefit from exposure to the brighter students, and the brighter student may help himself by teaching the slower student. Such a program might eliminate the superficial competition among students (usually on the basis of grades) and instill a desire for individual and group achievements.
Acceptance of the program should not hinge on questions of its administrative convenience. The traditional pattern of assignment of hours for number of hours in the classroom will not fit the program being recommended. Neither will it be possible to talk about faculty work in terms of course load. The new program would require administrators, faculty, and students to be more flexible than does the current program.
The director of such a program would have to be much more closely involved in instructional decisions. I would like to see us hire a director who is bright, creative, and interested in developing real educational leadership in our field.
This kind of program would require fine specialists in the production and research methods areas plus communication generalists who are neither media based nor specialty bound. It is very hard to find individuals who have both these attributes, but we would need to take both into account in building our faculty. In selecting new faculty, I believe, we must put a very high premium on broad background, scholarship, imagination, intelligence and ability not simply to lecture but to communicate, to educate. Our present emphasis on number of years experience in the media would, in general, not bring us the kind of people who could handle either the special or the general aspects of the new program.
Some staff members may participate in only phases of the program and be retained for consulting roles or special lecturing as part of a lab team. Others with special talents for working in small groups will be used in the classroom role. Faculty will be organized around time and talent (with the student at the focal point) rather than the classic pattern of manning specific courses (whether or not the faculty member has the talent or the desire to teach such a course). The result would be a smoothly operating team.
If we plan to move in the direction suggested by this proposal, we must keep this in mind not only in the selection of a new director, but also in the selection of new faculty for the coming year. If we now select and hire new faculty pretty much on the same criteria we have used in the past, we will likely delay the achievement of a program like the one suggested here.
The new "program" is not yet a program at all. To become one, it will take a great deal of creative effort on the part of every one of us.
Mal MacLean
University of Iowa
Position paper for the
Ad Hoc Committee on Media Evaluation
Association for Education in Journalism, 1967
Sorry to have made my next few days" so many. But it does give me a chance to draw on the excellent papers you others have sent.
I agree that we ought to aim at the bull moose rather than the mosquito. This must apply to the problems as well as to the enterprises involved. I believe, too, that we need to figure out good ways to study performance. As I look way back at our attempts to do so in that abortive Ford Foundation proposal in 1956, I shudder a bit, though I think we have learned of few things since then.
Anyone who gets involved in this sort of thing needs to keep asking himself just what he's trying to accomplish and whether the payoff is worth the investment. It is a luscious problem which invites wheel spinning. It invites, too, the Sunday preacher in all of us. I see little danger in our being seduced by others, but a great deal in being seduced by ourselves.
I believe we need to pull our cameras way back for a nice overview and possibly move to a serious redefinition of the problem. What do we wish to mean by good and bad press performance? We speak blithely of roles and (purposeless, Dick?) functions of the press. I find in much of this talk little I can grab. It's mishmashy. (That's one of my favorite criticisms of press performance, too.)
It's hard, and often futile, to try to be somebody else's conscience. I believe that the press councils and commissions and the individual lay and professional critics have damn little impact on performance.
One of my friends recently rode to the airport with Otis Chandler of the L.A. Times. he asked the publisher what he thought of the idea of a press council. "I don't know what that is and I don't care to!" Chandler replied and remained silent the rest of the way to the airport.
I find it interesting to speculate about possible reasons for the change in the L.A. Times, say, from one of the worst metropolitan papers to one of the best. I suspect that a great deal of it had to do with the man Otis Chandler, with the rich advertising market in the Los Angeles basin, with the ripe talent available for good pay, and (not to make a pun) with the times. No organization of journalism professors or the like had much at all to do with it. This does not say such a group could not have, but I wonder.
I suspect Otis Chandler conceives of his role quite differently from the way his father did. And I wonder how he came to do so. For example, Chandler hired a young physics Ph.D. who could write and started him at around $18,000. I suspect that many of the new men he has hired and even some of the old ones he kept conceive their roles differently than do many metropolitan newsworkers.
And perhaps that is true, too, for people working on the business side.
And this gets me to the horse I like to ride. I believe that we journalism teachers might invest our efforts most profitably in our own business. With few exceptions, journalism practice is inadequate to the times. But so, too, is journalism education. Both are our business.
I believe that some journalism practice is bad because many of our graduates define their roles narrowly, traditionally. They aim to do little more than fit in. I believe that some journalism practice is bad because many of our graduates have learned damned little about how they might help to redesign and change the systems within which they operate. This, I think, creates one of the great frustrations of some of our idealistic students who go into the news business-and one reason many shift into public relations.
No doubt it helps to be in a position of power, as is Chandler, if you wish to change a system. But people at lower levels can institute and maintain changes, if they think they can and if they can imagine well what they might change to and if they are skilled in working with people and if top management is not too narrow.
I suggest we journalism teachers might reach our greatest impact by developing our journalism schools programs to make heretical, subversive infiltrators of our graduates.
What might be the nature of such a heretic? For one thing, he is at least as competent as our graduates of today in basic communicative skills-and I emphasized the plural. That means he can write well and appropriately. He can use a camera effectively, produce pictures which say something. He can film and knows how to handle video and audio tape and other tools of broadcasting. And he knows how to put these together in packages which make a real difference to his intended audiences.
Our heretic is deeply concerned and thoughtful about the human condition. He cares about the consequences of his work-not just the immediate results, but especially the long run. He has high purpose. He lives for much more than just to bide time and make a buck or two between birth and death. He becomes careful in observation, creative and rigorous in analysis, bright in interpretation and synthesis, thorough in follow-through. He feels keenly his responsibility to his fellow man.
Our heretic knows how to work well with people. He learns how to shape the role he plays and to test its limits. He grasps well the nature and processes of the system he works in and the functions of that enterprise within its community. He invents. He thinks creatively about what could be and moves toward those alternatives he believes should be. He watches for opportunities to encourage change in those directions. Given the chance, he hires or urges the hiring of other heretics and supports their efforts.
Our heretic has courage, patience, and, in battle, a tough skin. He knows that any basic change makes waves. Biologists tell us that irritability is a basic sign of life. A successful heretic will find lots of signs of life. He becomes a troublemaker. If nobody bitches about what he's doing, he probably isn't doing much.
If he is a good infiltrator, he won't need to overthrow the establishment. Rather he'll help to make it an establishment that works. In some communities, he may find that the only way to fill the communicative needs of a community is to create his own enterprise. Our heretic gains the initiative, drive and skills to do that.
In these times of protest, the mass media are not immune. Now, even Spiro Agnew has joined the protest ranks. Some of the protest from the "young Turks" within the news media arises from their desires for the new glamour beats or to write in bleeding-hearts style. Some, like that of the Chicago Journalism Review, deals with matters of inadequate or biased handling. Unfortunately, the Chicago Journalism Review reporter-editors, by their direct confrontation, have probably lost any chance for promotion on their own newspapers, perhaps on other newspapers, too.
I think we must train journalists who are not missionaries but who have a high sense of mission. And I think we must train journalism teachers who have a high sense of mission.
Most top journalists are, I think, as concerned as most of us about press performance. They have good intentions. I believe they will welcome help we might offer in understanding and in improving performance. But I believe, at the same time, they will reject as the braying of asses almost any criticism,. by whatever agency we might set up.
I don't believe the negative hand-slapping sort of thing works very well. Perhaps we could contribute much more by inventing feasible conditions under which journalists will be encouraged to follow their desires to act ethically and responsibly.
I won't offer the Iowa program as a unique approach to the education for subversives. There must be many good approaches.
And the clock goes tickety-tock, tickety-tock.
American Business Press Speech
May 1967
Dr. Malcolm S. Maclean, Jr.
School of Journalism
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
When I learned the fee your association pays to its invited lecturers, I concluded that you must enjoy listening to cheap talent. Then I learned who the other speakers were to be today. That led me to think that there must be some excellent talent willing to come here at your fee chiefly to get your ear for their messages.
That, in tun, led me to ask myself: Do I have anything I want to sell to the members of the American business Press, Inc.?
As a matter of fact, I do-several things. But my better judgment tells me to go easy on you today, to give you the soft sell on just one item. If this goes well, perhaps you'll ask me to speak to you again. And then I will have been well rewarded.
In any case, I am going to talk to you about something which concerns me and which I think there are good reasons for you to be concerned about, too. The something is research utilization.
I don't know you; perhaps you are different. But, if you are like most publishers and editors I know, you buy very little good research. And, when you happen to get some, you don't know very well how to use it. Now as I said, you may be different; this may not be true of you. If that is the case, then discount the rest of what I have to say.
Those of you who believe that theory is impractical, contrary or irrelevant to fact, will find my next statement ridiculous. I believe that those of you who most want to improve what you are doing, want really to hurdle the awesome barriers of communication, must devote much of your energy to developing good theories. I can promise you that, if you have any intellectual bent at all, you will enjoy it.
The fact that we want and use theory is one of our characteristically human traits. We want to know the hows and whys of things. When we make decisions, choose to do or not to do, select this or that alternative, we use theory-that is, we use our understanding of the way things work. Sometimes we do this consciously; most of the time we are quite unaware of our theories or the fact that we are using them.
Theory is neither practical nor impractical. But, as the famous psychologist Kurt Lewin said, "There's nothing so practical as a good theory."
I think you can readily see why. If we have a good theory-that is, we understand well how and why things work the way they do-then we can usually manage or cope with them well. I say usually because there are some things we apparently can do very little about, even when we do understand them well.
Medicine provides some excellent examples of good, practical theories. There, theories about the nature and processes of micro-organisms led to some very effective applications. We can now prevent or cure some of our most dreadful diseases.
In physics, understanding of the structure and characteristics of the atom led to some applications whose practicality no one doubts.
I wish I could point to similar dramatic cases of good theories and their applications in our field. I think one reason I can't is that you have not been nearly so concerned with understanding what you are doing as were the early medical doctors. Nor has our equivalent of the medical researchers tried very hard to learn your problems and your theories and communicate his findings to you in terms that you can understand.
If you care, if you want help in developing theories, I suggest you beard the research man in his den. Go to him in the university or the commercial agency and tell him what you want to know, let him in on the problems you are struggling with. Read his research reports and his articles in the professional journals. When you don't understand him, press him for clearer explanations in terms of your situation. If you do these things, it will help.
I have a theory of my own which goes something like this: One of the greatest barriers to communication for those of us who are supposed to communicate is our own self image. We think of ourselves as lecturers or writers or editors or news directors or publishers. But we seldom really think of ourselves as communicators. We think of ourselves as message manufacturers, but, unlike most manufacturers, we concern ourselves very little with marketing our goods in the competitive market place. We see our tasks as covering content, organizing materials, collecting information, promoting ideas and the like. We act like builders, following standard, traditional patterns. If sometimes we become creative, we act like expressive artists. We seldom think of ourselves as architects who study carefully the needs and functions and life patterns of our clients and then design things to suit them as well as our own artistic sensibilities. We seldom see ourselves as strategists; thus, we have no reason for making our objectives as clear and explicit as possible. We almost never think of ourselves as theorists trying to develop better and better explanations of how things work, particularly how communication among humans works.
Making theory is a creative task. You wonder: What if . . ? You speculate: If I do so and so, I'll bet such and such will happen. This is one of the wonderful things about human language and thought. They help us to create "might be" worlds. We can make thought models. We can imagine back and forth in time, out into space and down into the microworld. We can predict and then check out our predictions. This is what gives us our great power to learn.
So, when I say that probably few of you see yourselves as theorists, I guess I am also saying that you don't see yourselves as learners. Oh, perhaps you go to meetings occasionally and pick up a new idea here and there, but you don't see yourselves as part of a communication system. You don't set things up so that you can readily modify what you do in considered response to changes occuring in other parts of the system. You buy research which is supposed to help you improve what you are doing, help you to communicate more effectively. Usually it doesn't help very much. I suggest that it cannot help very much until you make your theories explicit and in a form where the research can test them.
How do you do that? First, you must isolate and define the decisions you make. Then, dig into your own thinking to find the beliefs and assumptions on which you base those decisions. Take a particularly close look at your standard operating procedures, for they often hide some of your most basic assumptions. Redefine your objectives and the objectives of your publication. Try as much as you can to put those objectives in terms you can observe, so that you can actually tell whether you are achieving them.
There's another thing I would like to suggest. Most people make much ado about research. It's something special, big and expensive. It's something you go to a university or a fancy commercial agency for. I suggest that any intelligent, imaginative person can-and usually does-a great deal of very useful research all by himself. He observes and thinks and tries things out. Then he observes some more, thinks some more, and tries out some new things. He is a theorist and an experimentalist. When some problem really bugs him or he needs a large or complicated study then he goes to his research friends in the university or commercial research agency, or both.
In our research program at the University of Iowa, we hope soon to develop computer simulation of various aspects of mass communication, including editorial decisions for example. One of my doctoral candidates is already working on simulation of daily newspaper production processes. This kind of research can move forward more rapidly under a close alliance between our researchers and those of you on the firing line.
We have a major program of research on the values of news gatekeepers and on how those values relate to their decisions and to the choices of their readers, viewers, or whatever,.
At the University of North Carolina, my friend Wayne Danielson has been doing some very interesting work with the computer. He finds that he can get it to perform some of the more routine news editing tasks rather well. You may already have heard of the Department of Commerce using a computer to write some of its standard news releases.
Nearly everyone is agog these days at the wonders of the electronic computer. Still, I think it safe to say that a computer combined with a clerk will not be able to do much better than a hack editor. But, if you are a hack, and are going pretty much by standard operating procedures, then watch out!
Now, I'd like to present some results of a study which was an undergraduate class project. Here we have two things I think will interest you. The study was done to help develop editing strategies for a proposed campus magazine. And it is a relatively new application of Stephenson's Q methodology, a kind of research quite different from the large scale surveys with which most of us are familiar.
The first step was to define the objectives and potential readership for the campus magazine. Then, the students developed a large pool of items of the kinds of things which would be accessible and likely to appeal to various kinds of readers. This is a stage where the truly creative editor can be most helpful. The sample of sixty items was taken from the pool in such a way as to ensure maximum variety.
A sample of 30 students was drawn in such a way, again, as to ensure variety. That is, the sample consisted of men and women from different disciplines in the university at different stages of education.
Each student was asked to imagine the best possible campus magazine for him, the magazine he would enjoy the most, that would give him the greatest satisfaction, would interest him the most. Then, he was to put the three items most likely to be in that publication in the top rank and the three items least likely to be in that magazine in the bottom rank. And so he sorted out all sixty pictures into eleven ranks.
Now, no two students sorted the items in exactly the same way. But some of them were quite similar to each other. By correlating and factor analyzing these individual patterns the researchers located and defined three major types of patterns of reader interest. These are referred to in the slides as A, B, and C. You will notice that these types agree on certain items but disagree on others. As we go through the slides, notice the general differences in tastes among the three types.
An in-depth study of this kind, followed by some good, creative thinking in the development of strategies, some laboratory and field experimentation, might really pay off in terms of greater reader satisfaction. Such a program can be helpful, too, in determining how to get your readers interested in things they are not now interested in. It also contributes to our fundamental knowledge of how communication works.
It has been a pleasure to speak to you today. Despite what I said at the beginning, I have found this much more valuable than money. You see, I don't have a standard operating speech. I'll be damned if I'll let those computers catch up with me. Writing a speech like this helps me to think through again some of my own theories and experiences.
My point is that, if you are to use research well and if it is to be useful research, you must have explicit theory as context from which to state your problems and within which to interpret your results.
On the Education of Responsible Newsmen
by
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
Professor and Director
School of Journalism, University of Iowa
Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Conference, American Association for Public Opinion Research, May 8-11, 1968,
Santa Barbara, California
At the end of March, I attended a conference on "Mass Media and Urban Turbulence." I had just finished reading the Kerner Commission report on civil disorders [1]. Both experiences strongly reinforced my belief that there is drastic need for fundamental revision in our university education of journalists.
Here, I want to share with you some of our discussion in that conference. Then, I want to analyze some ideas developed there and suggest some implications for change in the practice of journalism. Finally, I want to propose some approaches to journalism and communication education which might help to produce the kinds of newsmen and communicators our complex society needs.
In the main, I will not try to give you exact quotes from the conference; rather, I will try to synthesize. Since this will lose identification of the discussants, I ought to tell you what kinds of people were there.
We heard from specialists in urban problems, some of them heads of university urban studies centers, most from the fields of sociology, economics and political science. We had two engineering consultants concerned with urban transportation problems. We had media executives and newsmen and the broadcast executive of the Associated Press central office in New York. There were civil servants and community leaders concerned with race relations, poverty, and the like. Then, there were those of us concerned with university education in journalism, speech, communication, or radio and television. We even had a broad-minded captain from the Milwaukee police force. Robert Conot of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, contributed many comments on performance of the media. There were also students sitting in as observers from the University of Wisconsin (both Madison and Milwaukee) and the University of Chicago. Several of these were in the University of Wisconsin Russell Sage program for educating newsmen in interpretation of social science.
Since we often used such slippery concepts as truth, accuracy, reality, facts, and knowledge, it was too bad that we had no philosopher to question our assumptions. We watched and discussed a Frank McGee NBC news program on last summer's Detroit riot and a color film edited from many news shows of a television station in Detroit. We listened to an audio news tape and had various newspapers displayed for our inspection. Some very nasty things where said about these news media products, particularly the two television programs. Too bad that the people who called the conference were not able to get McGee and other relevant news people there to hear and react to the criticism.
James G. Miller, vice president of academic affairs for Cleveland State University, opened our conference by presenting some of the basic concepts of general systems theory [4, 5, 6]. As the discussion developed, we began to apply fruitfully systems notions of matter-energy transfer and informative communication. We found it useful to look at large, metropolitan communities as complex social systems. In a systems framework, it becomes clear that the life and health of a community system depend heavily on continuing effective, relevant communication among its various segments.
A systems view also suggests that good communication among segments of the community is not just the responsibility of the news communicators. We find many agencies-police, welfare, school, health, business, etc.- whose agents, if we are to have healthy communities, must expand and make more effective their communication functions, particularly those which might persistently keep realistic images of community ills before power figures.
Through systems analysis, we can draw on analogy to biological organisms where disease develops in some of the limbs, but is not given much attention until boils and sores break out on the skin.
The health of a metropolitan system relies particularly on good communication between its various segments and its planning, decision, and control elements.
What's wrong with present communication?
Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, a member of the President's Commission on Civil Disorders was interviewed on a TV program shortly after the report hit the bookstands.
"For some years," he said, "I have understood intellectually the problems of black people in large city ghettos. But not until my work with the Commission brought me directly into their homes to talk with many of them did I begin to understand the problems in human and sympathetic ways."
The Harris comment provides a theme for many criticisms presented by discussants.
Objectivity in reporting was developed in part to ensure fair play, but also to avoid offending clients. In the hands of poor reporters and editors, objectivity becomes a neutralizing agent. In the hands of good ones, it can often excite more response than opinionated editorial material.
The newsman's objectivity criterion may encourage superficial, quickie interviews of activist celebrities and so give a very misleading impression of what is going on. For example, constructive efforts of young ghetto groups may go unnoticed.
Objectivity often means the reporting of effects without the possible causes, the events without the forces leading to them.
How can a reporter come to understand and then get his readers or viewers to understand why some ghetto blacks are so mad and sad?
Most reporters, one critic said, don't understand ghetto problems and don't know how to report them meaningfully. So we get an accretion of false images [2, 3].
Coleman of the Associated Press agreed that even old hands have problems in understanding and reporting these things.
A sociologist suggested that news media may fail in four ways:
1. By saying things which alienate blacks.
2. By not saying things which might help bring black closer to white.
3. By not saying things which would help whites to understand ghetto problems.
4. By saying things which lead whites to misunderstand ghetto problems.
Even our best journalists don't seem to grasp the importance of statistics on unemployment and underemployment of ghetto blacks, said Phyllis Wallace, a black woman who oversees the collection and analysis of such data.
Many blacks are saying:
"I am an American, but you will not accept me as an American."
"I am a man, but you will not accept me as a man."
Journalism schools have trained few newsmen who can do much more than write clearly and neatly. Our journalists must be enabled to deal more effectively with who and why.
There are three major problems in news communication concerning ghetto life:
1. Many newsmen don't have the education and experience to understand or the competence to translate blacks to whites and whites to blacks.
2. Even when they do, their more serious interpretive pieces or programs are seen by relative few of us.
3. We need to learn more effective ways of communicating the gritty experience of being trapped in a black skin in a white racist society interlaced with ways, both blunt and subtle, of reminding you that black means bad.
The problem of educating journalists comes into sharper focus with this statement from a political scientist:
Cleveland with its new Negro mayor is a city where a miracle might bring it from chaos to mere disorder. Cleveland has a very confused power and economic structure. Nobody runs the city. It hasn't had an effective mayor since 1915. Whites and some major businesses have moved out to the suburbs. The central city today has less money than before to deal with much tougher problems.
And Miller, the systems theorist, said:
The politically defined boundaries are not significant in matter-energy flow. Metropolitan boundaries are, and ghetto boundaries are. One can see the rates of matter-energy flow change at the ghetto boundary.
Cleveland's two newspapers covered the ghetto inadequately, superficially, except for sensational matters. They report some of what Mayor Stokes is doing, but they have done little to show why the problems he faces are almost impossible to solve. For example, one discussant claimed, Stokes has 90 percent of the civil servants against him. And he is up against an interlocking business directorate of whites who live in the suburbs. The New York Times described Stokes' first 100 days for its readers. The Washington Post developed a fine feature on Cleveland's ghetto problems, but this was not reprinted in Cleveland itself.
So many of our objective news stories seem to assume that everybody knows the background of the reported event.
Newsmen often seem to assume that coverage means communication just as those of us who profess seem to assume that covering materials in a lecture means learning of those materials by students.
Then, we heard this warning:
If our news media tell us white people all the things black people would like us to hear, would we all be better off? Effective communication of black anger might scare the hell out of some of us and possibly lead to repressive measures.
It seems we must learn more about possible accretion effects of the mass media in our whole cultural river.
People develop images of others not just from news, features, and documentaries. Novels, both fiction and non-fiction, plays, TV drama, ads, and commercials may play a much greater part in developing understanding of the kind which might lead to therapeutic and preventive action.
TV probably increases dramatically a black person's sense of relative deprivation through its commercials and its news and its drama.
Consider the symbolic nature of rioting, of looting, of fire bombing: Look, whitey establishment! Listen, you bastards! You are sick and don't know it, and we are sick and do know it, and we'll all go down the drain if you guys with the money and power don't get off your dead asses and do something about it.
I see an implied demand that our communicators need to know deeply, empathetically, and at the same time to be able to analyze objectively and communicate what it means to be poor among the rich, to be hungry among the well-fed, to be black among the white, to be degraded among the smug, to be sick among the healthy, to be unheard, unheard, unheard-in a society noisy with messages.
Like other social institutions, news systems grew to meet human needs. In a very real sense, they act as our scouts, bringing to us a great deal of information on which, in part, we base many of our economic and political attitudes and decisions. With changing needs and new technology, these institutions have changed. They can now instantly reach out to bring us news from all over the world. They now bring us excellent pictures in color. Now, live and in color, we can see a Detroit newsman shove his mike under the chin of some bystander to ask: "Sir, what do you think of the looting?" Or we can watch film of a suburban white woman holding a loaded revolver in her hand as she drives into the city. But we still seem to know very little about the potential impact of such messages.
One participant described a CBS crew in the middle of Newark's black ghetto asking here they could find some real slums. After quite a search they found a room with cracked walls and a pot-bellied iron stove. We have some of the richest poor people in the world. Many have TV sets. A few actually hold on to their Cadillacs for a few months before repossession.
To what extent do local newsmen gloss over mistakes of police and city officials to keep on the right side of their favorite news sources? Or perhaps to keep a good image of the city? Failure of newsmen to report good things done by blacks and bad things done by police leads some Negroes to see the press as a cover-up.
The conflict orientation of many newsmen leads them to pay attention to people like Rap Brown and Stokeley Carmichael just as they earlier did to the late, noisy senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. This attention confers status which in turn demands further attention.
When Rap Brown tells a big audience "shoot don't loot," how should newsmen handle it? Ignore it? Play it down? Play it up? Pay more attention to the stable, less dramatic leaders of the community?
And some blacks say:
"I've heard plenty of promises. You even pass laws. But we're still in the same boat. You say things are getting better. Look around. Look real close."
Many of us have taken ethics and responsibility among newsmen to mean that they would keep clear of bribes, even subtle ones, that they would write headlines which accurately reflect the contents of the stories below them, that they would not succumb to pressures from publishers or blandishments form public relations men, that they would act on our behalf as watchdogs to keep our governmental leaders from going astray.
Some critics ask that media people clean up programs, stories, and ads containing sex and violence. Others suggest that the news media pay more attention to the predominantly positive aspects of our teenagers, our schools, our churches, and all sorts of institutions, groups, and agencies.
Many news media executives and some journalism teachers have ignored such criticism on the grounds that the critics don't know the mass communication business. Some compellingly argue that the first business of a newspaper, broadcasting station or network, newsmagazine, or what have you is to stay alive. This argument generally implies that the introduction of positive, usually bland, constructive material in place of sensational accidents, disasters, crime, violence, and sex would quickly kill off the news medium that tried it. Actually, we have very little evidence one way or the other on this question. It is true that P.M., a serious news publishing effort in this direction, died rather quickly after losing Marshall Field II a potful of money. But P.M. also carried no advertising, a contributor of about two-thirds the income of most newspapers.
Our newsmen are now making decisions most have not been well prepared to make. Few have adequate background in social science even when they have had college courses in social science. Such courses seldom seem to help them to understand well critical problems of today.
Analysis of community systems suggests to me that news media as well as other agencies must perform function s of intelligence agencies: tell one set of subsystems what another set is doing and why. For example, they would critically analyze what schools are doing. They should raise dirty questions about what schools and other agencies are doing. We need more enterprising newsmen. Our people need to know about the tremendous differences in quality between central city schools and those in the suburbs.
In the face of rumors which almost always spread rapidly in the early stages of a disorder, news media can, if they handle things well, provide reassurance through information counter to the rumors. For example, when police arrested a black youth, rumor spread that they had beaten him badly. TV and radio both quickly broadcast interviews of the boy himself saying and showing that he had not been beaten.
All of us, especially when we work under emergency conditions, tend to fall into the traps of stereotypes and old definitions which don't suit new situations. Even such terms as ghetto and leader, terms used a great deal in our discussion, tend to be quite misleading. Newsmen have such problems, too.
News media tend to give their receivers little slices at instants in time. Don't we need more attention to processes unfolding over time?
Few newsmen know enough economics to understand the interdependency of economic factors and their relationship to situations of ghetto blacks. Study of the industrial mix or pattern can tell you some important things about land use which is highly relevant to the growth of ghettos. High rates of industrial growth may bring advantages for the rich and disadvantages for the poor. Rapid population growth may bring political fragmentation. One important economic idea many newsmen and city officials don't seem to understand is that of trade offs: with limited resources, getting one kind of thing usually means you must sacrifice others.
News media might help more to support the collection of and provide interpretation for more systematic data of public opinion polls, social and economic surveys, and the like. These data could provide a reliable base for interpreting data from his individual and more intimate news sources.
Blacks who were active in the disorders wonder why TV fails to show incidents of police brutality or even foul language lashings.
So many of our white-oriented institutions have been discriminating against blacks, I suppose it should come as no surprise that our news media have been going right along with the rest of the establishment.
Many news organizations would now like to hire capable Negro reporters. But there are few around. And these few usually come from the middle class with little more understanding of ghetto problems than have their white brothers.
In schools and mass media we must recognize African history and culture and the significant part played by Negroes in development of the United States.
We know that many large city daily newspapers attract relatively few readers in the central-city ghettos. Some of this low readership may occur because of illiteracy or semi-literacy. There is some indication that a much stronger reason may be the irrelevance of much newspaper content to problems of the ghetto black. We have not yet recognized clearly the discrimination of our white newspapers (and broadcast news as well) against blacks in the community, especially in regard to everyday matters. In the main, a black man gets into the news if he is arrested, becomes a leader within the establishment, or advocates violence.
The practice of a Cleveland paper of printing separate editions for the black and white communities does not resolve the larger system communication problem. Most concerned blacks want to be heard by whites, need to be heard.
Can we redefine communicator roles, institutions, and functions so that professional communicators can see the vital roles they might play in facilitating communication among different segments of their community systems?
Some large newspapers are now supporting the education of black journalists. But while we are training Negro reporters, we need some better, enlightened white ones. What about on-the-job training in which reporters would have to listen to the stories of some ghetto blacks? Somehow, it seems, they must come to see the dismal picture as viewed from inside.
It appears that our newsmen, white or black, will have to establish much better contacts with ghetto blacks if we are to get any real sense of what is going on among blacks in our communities.
In Detroit, a committee of black leaders and white business and industrial leaders was made to look ineffectual when news media played up a rather trivial conflict between black militants and the whites on the committee.
When there are ten speakers, do you as a newsman only cover Rap Brown? Do you catch and play up the extreme remarks, the inflammatory ones?
Here's another tough problem.
In many large cities, public transportation has badly deteriorated and fares have increased as more people bought cars and expressways were built. Of course, this hurts most the people who can't afford cars. Ironically, in some cities, the poor, through the high fares they pay, are subsidizing the busing of the town's school children. In general, newsmen have paid little or no attention to this problem, especially before the riots.
At Atlanta, engineers planned and put through a freeway which neatly split the blacks from a park they had previously enjoyed. Should some of our press watchdogs have anticipated such a problem?
News media can help people understand that central city schools don't change their black students very much. Since black kids seldom see much future for themselves, motivation is low. For many, severe language problems arise, especially where teachers assume that the Afro-Southern U.S. idiom is bad English. The system is so rigid that even the best teachers in the best schools don't have much effect. There seems to be a need for much closer interaction between teachers and students. These central city schools seem to be mainly sifting mazes. Educational-methods courses have generally been irrelevant to these kinds of problems. In education generally we seem to go from method ritualism to subject matter magic. And our behavioral scientists have not yet helped us very much, though Jerome Bruner, in his developing theory of instruction , is one who has begun to do so.
Several discussants recommended that we develop an institute for urban communication which would spur research, make a continuing assessment of new media performance in regard to race relations and conditions of the poor and black segments of our cities, conduct seminars in which newsmen and social scientists confront each other. Such an institute could act as a storehouse of information on urban matters for newsmen who are developing background features. Its members could study and synthesize research on methods and processes of communication in terms of urban problems.
Our communication researchers should help us find out more about what the news of disorders means to people, what images they develop.
One of the more extreme critics was a journalism teacher who said he believes many newsmen feed on conflict, discord, and disorder. They get a kind of vicarious thrill as they watch the fires and looting. Then they pass this along to their customers as true-life entertainment.
There is no doubt that events and the reporting of these events have led some people to become jumpy. Some of our headline writers call even minor disturbances riots. If newsmen continue to use inflammatory terms, we may get the disturbances to suit the terms.
Not all comments were negative. Conot from the Kerner Commission commended the Los Angeles Times for the job it has done since the Watts riot. Others said they felt today's news media are doing more interpretive and background pieces than ever before.
The head of a university radio-televisionn department noted that
1. Riots are symptoms of on-going processes.
2. We very much need more high-quality, in-depth research on questions about the news media raised here.
3. We should not be trapped by the mystique of problem solving, but rather should seek somehow to encourage responsible newsmen.
4. We should develop ways for mass media to get more immediate feedback on people's reactions to what they are doing.
We need anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, cultural geographers, and the like who will see that their findings and recommendations are fully communicated to action people-that is, decision-control centers. Extension of the old agricultural extension services into urban problems may help considerably here.
Our media might help, too, by giving much more exposure to such black people as school teachers, librarians, and civil servants in their day-to-day activities at work and at home. This might keep white people who have had little contact with Negroes from developing bogeyman images and anxieties.
If a Negro family is first to move into a white community, how should newsmen treat the event? Neither newsmen nor social scientists seem to have adequate answers.
How can city, military, and ghetto leaders coordinate with newsmen to ensure full and appropriate news coverage, when disturbances do break out? The problem is similar to war coverage. In some cities, people are trying to work this out.
Responsible behavior requires knowledge of sensitivity to the consequences of your decisions, of your actions or your inactions. Where is the research which might help newsmen in this regard?
Is the commercial base of our news media such that we should not really expect to see them move from a predominantly conflict orientation? If this is true, won't we have to develop new agencies to carry out the vital functions suggested in this conference? Perhaps extend the public television idea? It may not be true. Possibly our local news media, for example, can revise their beat systems so that news will no longer be loaded with trivial (except to the participants) accidents and crime.
We think part of the solution may be to somehow bring our journalism students directly to the poor, the hungry, the black, the sick, the degraded, the unheard. For example, we may have them work with the Job Corps or shadow social workers in south Chicago or help anthropologists with field work among the Colorado Indians of Equador or study the Shiites in rural Lebanon.
Perhaps, through scholarships and special recruiting, we can convince more Negroes to major in journalism. At the same time, we must see to it that our white students become much more aware of problems of poverty and racial discrimination.
At the University of Iowa, we in journalism-faculty and students-are discussing fundamental changes in our journalism education. Like most journalism schools, we have been offering courses in the areas of newspaper and broadcast news, advertising, public relations, magazine editing, and production, etc. We have also had courses in mass communication law and history. Again, like other schools, we have required our undergraduates to take about 75 percent of their work in liberal arts courses outside the school.
Some of us are proposing a many-pronged approach to the education of responsible journalists. Here are some of the ideas we are working with:
1. We hope, through a combination of required internships and a seminar for the sharing of experiences and the relating of these to earlier academic work, to shift major responsibility for training in occupational prescriptions and norms to related industries. This would be more like medical internships and practice teaching.
2. We hope early to introduce our students at all levels to a broad social systems orientation, so that they can see professional communicator roles more broadly, so they can understand better the great dependency of our complex social systems on adequate communication among their elements.
We believe we can serve our students and the media better than now by preparing our students to be creative in developing communication subsystems which will better serve needs of tomorrow's even more complex society.
3. We hope to give those students who are ready to be creative and able to work on their own more freedom to do so. We are presently running a pilot on a course called "Interdisciplinary Communication Laboratory," where students can try out almost any idea they wish. We find, among other things, it seems to help them to integrate studies they are doing in other areas like religion and psychology with their interests and capabilities in communication.
4. We hope to ensure that our students get much more direct experience among the impoverished and the sick, among the people of other cultures and other subcultures here and abroad. We hope our students will no longer be graduates with little or no sense of what it is like to be terribly poor and a member of a minority group which is severely discriminated against.
5. We hope that along with this direct experience we can bring to them some of the more useful tools in theory and method which social scientists have developed for understanding, observing, and analyzing the workings of social systems.
6. We hope, too, that we can organize things so that they will be communicating a great deal, experimenting with media and style and with varieties of communication purposes. And we want to see them frequently testing their communications-for interest and comprehension, for example-on small samples of the people with whom they are trying to communicate.
7. We hope that, through scholarships and recruiting, we can encourage students of various colors, within and outside the United States, to come to Iowa to study journalism. Just working together we believe, would be healthy all around, particularly if we can keep our structures firmly flexible.
Notes
This conference was developed by a committee of people concerned with communication and currrent urban problems at the Universities of Wisconsin and Chicago. It was sponsored by the Johnson Foundation and conducted in that foundation's excellent conference facility between Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin.
Works Cited
1. Kerner Commission. "Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders." U.S. Riot Commission Report.
New York: Bantam, 1968.
2. Klapper, Joseph T. The Effects of Mass Communicaton. Glencoe, IL: Free, 1960.
3. "Mass Communication Research: An Old Road Resurveyed." Public Opinion Quarterly ?????
4. Miller, James G. "Living Systems, Basic Concepts." Behavioral Science 10.3 (1965): 193-237.
5. "Living Systems, Cross-Level Hypotheses." Behavioral Science 10.4 (1965): 380-411.
6. Living Systems, Structure and Process." Behavioral Science 10.4 (1965): 337-79.
An Approach to Comunication Theory through Simulation
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., and Albert D. Talbott
Mass Communication Research Bureau
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
Paper First Presented to SAA/ICA Annual Meeting
New York City, December1969
By theory, here, we wish to imply a way of seeing or understanding things, with some purpose. Our most common and general purpose is that of coping with our environment. Theory not only implies a way of seeing things; it also, for us, must imply many ways of not seeing things. That is, theory constrains as well as liberates. It may disadvantage us as well as advantage us.
We see theory as in the nature of myth, of invention, of conjecture-again, usually relevant in some way to our purposes in coping with our environment. The ultimate test of a theory is the extent to which it helps us do that consistently in the way that satisfies us over time.
By simulation, we wish to refer to a special form of theory. That is, we can state our theories in different ways. Simulation, better than other means for stating theories, allows us to represent and observe dynamic processes. We can describe movement and flow through time and space; we can essentially present a n operating model, if we wish.
While we won't here try to develop a treatise on epistomology, we believe it useful to state some of our basic philosophy. For example, the traditional concept of objectivity in science and journalism assumes a way of knowing which seems to us impossible. That is, objectivity assumes that you can somehow get outside your skin-or, perhaps more succinctly, out of your head. So do concepts like veridicality and validity and isomorphism or, more subtly, contrary terms like distortion and bias and error, as many of us seem to use them.
Some of us seem to believe that, if only our senses were less fallible, if only our knowledge of "reality": was less limited, if only our theories were more certain and less contradictory, if only our data were more revealing and less ambiguous, if only our instruments were more precise, then we might really be able to know reality, truth, etc., etc.
Balderdash! Even the term "simulation" carries some of this kind of freight. Simulation must be something artificial which is good simulation to the extent it represents or is isomorphic to reality. No? No. We invent both our realities and our simulations. We postulate reality. We construct our theories about that reality and how it works. As we said earlier, simulation is simply one form of theory. We cannot compare simulation with reality (as many simulators say they are doing), since "reality' (other than one's own) itself is not available to us. But we can compare simulation forms of theory with other forms of theory-for example, verbal, games, and mathematical.
What, then, about the matter of validity? Many students of communication seem to prefer a short-run answer to the validity problem. While fewer and fewer get caught in the trap of such clichés as "a test is valid to the extent it measures what it purports to measure," many still hang on to the vestiges of such notions.
Development of theory yields principles. Some of these point to ways of getting things done, of coping with the environment. In trying to achieve our purposes, we put such principles into operation. Some seem to work well; others don't. We tend to hold on to those that seem to work well consistently over the long haul. When we fail or get hung up, we tend to look for alternative principles. These may be derived from the same or different theories, or we may even try to develop some radically new theories.
Turn the validity thing around. Suppose we ask such questions as How can we learn efficiently? How can we learn those things which can most usefully serve our purposes? How do we know that we know what we need to know? Etc. Such questions need considerable thought.
Perhaps we can clarify these matters a bit by an example. As some of you know, in the University of Iowa School of Journalism, we are designing, developing, and conducting a learning system fundamentally different from those with which most teachers and students are familiar.
A central part of this system is a four-semester simulated society. This society consists mainly of media enterprises and the people who work on them, the students. All of the students are also consumers of the products of the media enterprises.
Students may start this program in either the sophomore or junior year. During the first two semesters, students freelance. That is, under contract to media enterprises, they write stories, prepare picture essays, develop taped interviews, design advertisements, and the like. Their contracts specify the points the media will pay them for these efforts. And the assignments cover a variety of topics-education, medicine, government, etc.
In the third and fourth semesters, students man the media enterprises as editors, publishers, managers and so on. They work out contracts for stories, pictures, etc. the first year students produce. They edit and integrate these materials into publications, programs, displays, etc. They manage production and distribution.
Every student in the society consumes and evaluates these media products. He ranks them from best to worst. Rankings across all evaluations are converted to points, which are then paid to each enterprise. The enterprise which makes the highest ranked product gets many more points than the one which makes the lowest ranked product. The enterprise manager pays points to the first-year freelancers, to government and other agencies to maintain needed community services; and, with what's left over, he pays his editors and finally himself. If an editor, say, feels he is not being paid what he is worth, he may seek a job with another enterprise. The manager, if he feels that the editor is doing a poor job, may fire him. Both such moves would be subject to the conditions of their contract.
These points, as they add up during the four semesters, are converted into academic grades. Thus, a student who produces highly valued materials as a freelancer and is a highly valued editor or manager of a successful enterprise will receive high grades.
As you can see, this is a relatively open system. As its designers and managers, we can manipulate vital variables within the system. For example, incentives can be manipulated by changing rules for the distribution of points. We can shift emphasis from cooperative arrangements to more competitive ones. We can determine to some extent which technologies and technical training will be made available. Etc..
We can observe some of the apparent outcomes of these manipulations. We can purposefully build into the system communication to ourselves on the states of its various parts. We have student process observers, large group bitching sessions and feedback questionnaires.
Most important problems that interest us occur in relatively open systems like the one we just described. Yet we base much of our research on closed-system models. How can we recognize differences between open and closed systems?
One difference we consider most crucial is this: In a neat, closed system, you can readily specify goals and the strategies and tactics necessary to achieve those goals. We might recognize this criterion better in research, if we change the terms "goal" to "dependent variable" and "strategies" or "tactics" to manipulatable independent variables.
An example of a closed system most of us recognize is the ordinary home heating system. There, after we supply the system with fuel and turn it on, we need only set the thermostat in order to obtain the room temperature we desire. As the temperature rises, an expansion thermometer contacts a relay switch which turns the furnace off. Then, as the temperature drops, the thermometer contracts to a point where it activates the relay witch to turn the furnace back on again.
Some research suggests just about that simple-minded a view of human intercommunication. This sort of problem is at the heart of the questions raised by some of the wisest humanists about the value of present behavioral science. Incidentally, while we normally think of the thermostat as controlling the furnace, it many also be fun to think of the furnace as controlling the thermostat.
Open systems are more dynamic and often more complex. They are full of contingencies, of "it depends." Since a system must have structure, by definition, there can be no completely open system.
Let's look at the simulated society we described earlier. We consider it a system much more open than the usual university course. In the simulated society, even if we accept a good grade as a student's goal, there is no set of strategies and tactics which inevitably permit him to reach that goal. There are many ways of producing a magazine, say, which will satisfy its readers. Then, we cannot be sure that a good grade is even a central goal for many of our students
Traditional courses in our field often appear to have started from closed systems, how-to-do-it procedures, then fill in with what should be open system stuff but is in closed, prescriptive form-the right way or ways to write a news story, for example.
Let's turn our attention to a simulation model of a more closed system variety. In this one, there are no live people participants. It is designed to be run on a computer. It was developed by Paul Deutschmann and concerns information in small rural agricultural communities like those he studied in several Latin American countries. The information diffused deals with technical innovation in agriculture.
Deutschmann broke the community into social subgroups (cliques, social classes, racial groups, social isolates, etc.). He also classified community members according to their communication orientation, their prevailing tendencies to receive information in particular ways. In the model, he used three: (1) orientation to local face-to-face sources of information (friends, relatives, neighbors, etc.); (2) orientation to external face-to-face sources (change or an agricultural extension agent, agricultural products salesman, etc.); and (3) orientation to mass or impersonal communication (radio, magazines, TV, extension bulletins, etc.). Also, within the community, there is a small number of persons (tellers, communicators, opinion leaders) who, after they have become informed about an agricultural practice are very likely to inform members of the community about it. What's more, they continue to do so at every time period until saturation. These persons are always members of some community subgroup. All other community members will not pass on such information. When a teller tells someone else, he is more likely to tell a member of his own social group than members of other groups. He is least likely to pass the information on to social isolates or persons not tied very closely to the community social subgroups. In other words, face-to-face local messages flow more frequently within groups than between groups. The initial sources of information about new agricultural practices reside outside the community. The information is imported to the community by external face-to-face extension agents and mass or impersonal communication sources. The tellers are particularly attuned to these sources for information about new agricultural practices. Whenever a teller is informed by an external source, he, in turn, informs other community members. These are the essential community characteristics which Deutschmann modeled.
Using his model, we construct a population of people with a set of values representing the variables above for some actual or imagined community.
|
|
|
|
1. Communication Orientation |
a. local face-to-face |
|
2. Community Social Group Membership |
a. isolate |
|
3. Is community member a teller? |
a. yes, a teller |
The central variable is the possession of information concerning a new agricultural practice. The system starts with no information possessed by any member. Information is conceived of dichotomously, that is, a person knows about or does not know about the innovation.
We then construct a set of operating rules which will permit information about agricultural practices to diffuse within the simulated community over time. Here they are:
1. During every time period, external messages are delivered to the community through external face-to-face or mass or impersonal channels.
2. During every time period, some fixed percentage of community members are exposed to some external messages.
3. External message reception is selective with respect to communication channel orientation. A person becomes informed only if his communication channel orientation matches the channel of the external message.
4. During every time period, some fixed percentage of community members are exposed to local face-to-face messages from each informed teller.
5. Local face-to-face message reception is selective with respect to the match between the social group of the community member and the teller. If the teller and community member are of the same social group, the member will become informed by the exposure. If the teller and the community member are not of the same social group, the member will become informed by the exposure, say, only 50 percent of the time. If the community member is an isolate, the member will become informed by the exposure, for example, only 10 percent of the time.
6. If a community member becomes informed after exposure to a message irrespective of the channel through which it was received, he will be informed in a manner consistent with the objectives of the external sources of information about the new agricultural practice. Also, once a community member becomes informed, he stays informed. Further, additional exposures to messages result neither in raising the level of information within that member or within the comunity..
Let's see how the model operates for a few of the initial time periods. Initially, no one in the community knows about the innovation. During the first time period, we randomly draw an audience for the first external messages to enter the community. We do this for some fixed percentage of the members. Say we have a community of one hundred and the percentage of six. We draw an audience of six persons. We randomly assign each person an external message according to a mix, say, half external face-to-face and half mass or impersonal. If the channel orientation of the person matches the channel of the message, then the person becomes informed. A person who has a local face-to-face orientation by definition cannot be informed by an external message.
After we determine how many persons are informed in the original audience, we check to see if any of them are tellers. If one informed person is a teller, we then randomly draw an audience for him, say, four persons from our mythical community of one hundred. Whether a member is informed depends on the match in social group membership between the teller and each audience member. We record who is informed during time period 1. When we finish drawing an audience for each informed teller and determine who is informed, we move on to the next time period.
This same general procedure is followed during each succeeding time period until everyone is informed or the simulated community reaches some acceptable level of information or saturation. First, you expose an audience to some external messages and then determine who is informed on the basis of channel orientation. Then you examine the people in the community who are informed, to see which, if any, are tellers. For each informed teller, you expose an audience to local face-to-face message and then determine who is informed by examining group memberships. Every time they are already informed or not. By the way information is conceived for this model, exposing an already informed community member to a message does not raise the community information level (proportion of persons informed).
You who are familiar with studies of diffusion of information and new practices will not be surprised to learn that this simulation usually yields a lovely ogive curve (~) when you plot number of knowers against time period.
Now, let us ask you how comfortable you feel with this model. Does it leave out aspects of diffusion you consider important? For example, what about the assumption that receiving a message inevitably results in a person's becoming suitably informed? Or, what about he idea that any particular person is either a teller or not a teller? Do you agree with the modeler's implicit conceptions about the nature of communication and learning?
You can see that the Deutschmann model is relatively closed, in contrast to the model for our new undergraduate simulation. The
range of possible outcomes in the former is much more restricted than that in the latter. Even so,, simulating a model like Deutschmann's, we can learn something about the process of simulation, and doing so makes us come to grips with that particular way of understanding diffusion. Most of the systems we want to understand simply do not lend themselves readily to such closed models.
It seems to be impossible to simulate open system characteristics on a computer. We can't get out more than we program in, but we can do so by using live people. You might ask, If what we are trying to understand are open aspects of natural human systems, why don't we simply observe and describe them? Why bother to simulate?
One reason is that we are usually in no position to manipulate natural systems. Try to imagine the barriers and problems you could run into if you tried to manipulate the three major television networks, or even the release of a fictitious news event.
Another good reason deals with time and space dimensions. In simulation we can collapse both to some extent. Some aspects of the natural system may simply be trivial or irrelevant for our purposes. We can shed them in our simulation. Such shedding may help us to see more readily some of the more basic dynamics of the system.
In our undergraduate simulation, for example, we find it not only too expensive but also quite unnecessary to represent all the current printing and broadcasting technologies. But we do want to provide those technologies which help our students understand basic communication technology problems.
In summary, after laying a philosophical, metatheoretical groundwork, we say that simulation and games can play important roles in theory development. If we have a dynamic theory of intercommunication, say, simulation permits us to work with and present it so that its dynamic qualities are highlighted.
In the examples we presented and are working with, it is hard for us to sort out research values from instructional values. We find that any simulation can advance theory and at the same time instruct the people involved. That is, it instructs us and the students at the same time.
In our use of simulation to study communication, we find that the dimension of openness is crucial. How open or closed do we want our conception of a system to be? How can we reasonably pose and answer questions of validity? Both these issues relate closely to matters of purpose and utility?
We believe we can now begin to understand why it may be foolish to expect a lot of little, linear, closed-system studies to ad dup to a grand theory. Instruction now calls for experimental design of impactful learning situations.
As those of you who are academics might expect, this makes it even tougher than usual to fill out those insidious, omnipresent forms on what portion of our time is devoted to research and what to instruction. We are tempted to answer, Who knows? or Yes.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to express their appreciation to the Hill Family Foundation. Without its continuing support of the University of Iowa Mass Communication Research Bureau, the development of papers such as this would not be possible.
Bibliography
Baldwin, John D. "Influences Detrimental to Simulation Gaming." American Behavioral Scientist. 12 (July-August 1969): 14-20.
Berlo, David K. The Process of Communication. New York: Holt, 1960.
Boocock, Sarane, S. "An Experimental Study of the Learning Effects of Two Games with Simulated Environments." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (October 1966): 8-17.
Boocock, Sarane S., and Erling O. Schild, eds. Simulation Games in Learning. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1968.
Borko, Harold, ed. Computer Applications in the Behavioral Sciences. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1962.
Brown, Lawrence. Diffusion Dynamics: A Review and Revision of the Quantitative Theory of the Spatial Diffusion of Innovation. Lund, Sweden: Royal U, 1968.
Brown, Lawrence. Diffusion Processes & Location. Philadelphia: Regional Science Research Institute, 1968.
Brown, Lee, and Hanno Hardt. Explorations in Basic Journalism Education at Iowa, A Case Study. General Session on Teaching Standards. 52nd Annual Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism. Berkeley, Aug. 1969.
Bruner, J. S. On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966.
-. The Process of Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1961.
-. Toward a Theory of Instruction. New York: Norton, 1966.
Budd, Richard W., and Malcolm MacLean, Jr. "Applying Communication Principles to Communication Education." Communication Spectrum '7. Ed. Lee Thayer. Denver, NSSC, 1966.
Campbell, James H., and Hal W. Hepler, eds. Dimensions in Communication-Readings. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1966.
Carroll, Tom W. Two Models of Innovation Diffusion. 2nd Conference on Applications of Simulation. New York, Dec. 1968.
Carroll, Tom W. Simulation of Innovation Diffusion in a Rural Community of Brazil. Technical Report 8, Project on the Diffusion of Innovations in Rural Societies. Michigan State U, East Lansing, May 1969.
Carroll, Tom W,. and Vincent R. Farace. Systems Analysis, Computer Simulation and Survey Research; Applications to Social Research in Developing Countries. Computer Institute for Social Science Research. East Lansing: Michigan State U, 1968.
Cherryholmes, Cleo H. "Some Current Research on Effectiveness of Educational Simulations: Implications for Alternative Strategies." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (October 1966): 4-7.
Cohen, Kalman J., and Richard M. Cyert. "Simulation of Organizational Behavior." Handbook of Organizations. Ed. James G. March. Chicago: Rand, 1965.
Coleman, James, S. "Games as Vehicles for Social Theory," American Behavioral Scientist 12 (July-Aug.1969): 2-6.
-. "Mathematical Models and Computer Simulation." Handbook of Modern Sociology. Ed. R. E. L. Faris. Chicago: Rand, 1964.
Coplin, William D., ed. Simulation in the Study of Politics. Chicago: Markham, 1968.
Deutschmann, Paul J. A Machine Simulation of Information Diffusion in a Small Community. Research Report. Programa for Interamericano de Informacion Popular. San Jose, Costa Rica, Sept. 30, 1962.
Deutschmann, Paul J. A Model for Machine Simulation of Information and Attitude Flow. Research Report. Programa for Interamericano de Informacion Popular. San Jose, Costa Rica, Oct. 30, 1962.
Feigenbaum, Edward A., and Julian Feldman, eds. Computers and Thought. New York: McGraw, 1963.
Gamson, William A. Simulated Society: Instructor's Manual. New York: Free, 1969.
Gamson, William A. Simulated Society: Participant's Manual. New York: Free, 1969.
Guetzkow, Harold, ed. Simulation in Social Science: Readings. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice, 1962.
Guetzkow, Harold et al. Simulation in International Relations. Englewood Cliffs,: Prentice, 1963.
Hanneman, Carroll, Everett Rogers, J. David Stanfield, and Nan Lin. "Computer Simulation of Innovation Diffusion in a Peasant Village." American Behavioral Scientist 12 (July-Aug. 1969): 36-46.
In??, Michael. "The ???? Simulating a Community Disaster." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (Oct. 1966): 18-27.
Kaplan, Abraham. The Conduct of Inquiry. San Francisco: Chandler, 1964.
Kerlinger, Fred N. Foundations of Behavioral Research. New York: Holt, 1964.
Kinley, Holly J. "Development of Strategy in a Simulation of Internal Revolutionary Conflict." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (Nov.1966): 5-9.
Koenig, Herman, Yilmaz Tokad, Hiremaglur Kesavan, and Harry Hedges. Analysis of Discrete Physical Systems. New York: McGraw, 1967.
MacLean, Malcolm S., Jr. A Process Concept of Communication Education. A position statement for the Educational Policies Committee, School of Journalism, University of Iowa, 1966.
- On the Education of Responsible Newsman. 23rd Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Santa Barbara, May 1968.
-. "Some Multivariate Designs for Communication Research," Journalism Quarterly. 42 (1965): 614-22
-. Theory, Method and Games in Communication. Behavioral Science Section. International Association for Mass Communication Research. Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, Sept. 1968.
MacLean, Malcolm S., Jr., and Anne Li-an Kao. Editorial Prediction of Magazine Picture Appeals. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 1965.
-. "Picture Selection : An Editorial Game.' Journalism Quarterly 40 (1966): 230-33.
MacLean, Malcolm S., Jr., and Albert D. Talbott. Prediction of Individual Patterns of Television Viewing. American Sociological Association. Los Angeles, 1963.
McKenney, James, and William R. Dill. "Influences on Learning in Simulations Games." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (Oct. 1966): 28-32.
Nafziger, Ralph, and David White, eds. Introduction to Mass Communicaton Research. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1963.
Naylor, Thomas H., et al. Computer Simulation Techniques. New York. Wiley, 1968.
Nesbitt, William A. Simulation Games for the Social Studies Classroom . Rev. ed. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1968.
Noel, Robert C. "The POLIS Labortory." American Behavioral Scientist 12 (July-Aug. 1969): 30-35.
Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations. New York: Basic, 1965.
Postman, Neil, and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Delacorte, 1969.
Ragan, Tillman J. Simulation and Cybernetic Learning Theory . Mimeographed report, n.d.
Rapoport, Anatol, and Albert Chammah. "The Game of Chicken." American Behavioral Scientist 10: (Nov. 1966): 10-27.
Raser, John R. Simulation and Society: An Exploration of Scientific Gaming. Boston: Allyn, 1969.
Roeckeleiin, Jon E. Simulation of Organizations: An Annotated Bibliography. Technical Report 67-14. Human Resources Research Office, George Washington U, 1967.,
Rogers, Everett M., and A. Saxena. Change Agents, A Simulation Game for Traaining in Diffusion Strategies. Working paper. Deparment of Communication. Michigan State U, July 1968.,
Ruben, Brent D., and Albert D. Talbott. Communication, Information and Education Systems: Some Perspectives. 17th Annual Conference of the National Society for the Study of Communication. Cleveland, 1969.
-.The Communication System Simulation: An Overview. Working paper. School of Journalism. U of Iowa. Jan. 1970.
Rudner, Richard S. Philosophy of Social Science. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1966.
Schild, E. O. "The Shaping of Strategies." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (Nov. 1966): 1-4.
"Selective Bibliography on Simulation Games as Learning Devices." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (Nov. 1966): 34-36.
"Simulation." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1968.
Smith, Alfred G., ed. Communication and Culture. New York: Holt, 1966.
Smith, Robert B. "Simulation Models for Accounting Schemes." American Behavioral Scientist 12 (July-Aug. 1969): 21-29.
Smoker, Paul. "Social Research for Social Anticipation." American Behavioral Scientist 12 (July-Aug. 1969): 7-13.
Stanfield, J. David, Nan Lin, and Everett Rogers. Computer Simulation of Inovation Diffusion in a Peasant. American Sociological Association and Rural Sociological Society. Chicago, 1965.
-. Simulation of Diffusion. Working paper #7. AID Diffusion Project, Diffusion of Innovations in Rural Societies. Deparment of Communication. Michigan State U, 1965.
Starbuck, William, and Ernest Kobrow. "The Effects of Advisors on Business Game Teams." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (Nov. 1966): 28-30.
Stephenson, William. The Play Theory of Mass Communication. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967.
- The Study of Behavior. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956.
Stoll, Clarice. "Introduction to Simulation: An Annotated Bibliography." American Behavioral Scientist 12 (July-Aug. 1969).: 47
Talbott, Albert D., and Brent D. Ruben. Communication System Simulation: Particpant's Manual. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 1970.
-. Communication Training through Simulation: Early Formulations. 17th Annual Conference of the National Society for the Study of Communication. Cleveland, April 1969.
Talbott, Albert D. Malcolm S.MacLean, Jr., and Brent D. Ruben. Patterns of Orientation Toward Television: An Exploratory Study. 17th Annual Conference of the National Society for the Study of Communication. Cleveland, April 1969.
-. Producer and Viewer: The TV Program Interface. Working paper. Mass Communication Research Bureau. U of Iowa, 1969.
Thayer, Lee. Communicationn and Communication Systems. Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1968.
-. Communication Concepts and Perspectives. Washington: Spartan, 1967.
-. Communication and the Human Condition. VII Semande Estudios Sociales, "Mass Communicaaton and Human Understanding." Instituto de Ciencias Sociales. Barcelona, Nov. 1969.
-. "Communicaton: Sine Qua Non of the Behavioral Sciences." Vistas in Science. U of New Mexico P, 1968.
-. Communication Theory and Research. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1967.
-. Data, Information, Decision: Some Perspectives on Marketing as a Communication System. American Academy of Advertising Eighth Annual Meeting. Miami. 11 June 1966.
-. On Communication and Change: Some Provocations. 11th Annual Institute in Technical and Organizational Communication. Colorado State U. June 1968.
-. "On Theory-Building in Communicaton; I. Some Conceptual Problems." Journal of Communicatio.n, Dec. 1963.
-. On Theory-Building in Communication: II. Some Persistent Obstacles. Summer Conference of the National Society for the Study of Communication. Purdue University. 27 Aug. 1962.
-. On theory-Building in Communication: IV. Some Observations and Speculations. 16th Annual Conference of the National Society for the Study of Communication. New York. April 1968.
-. Studies in the Development of Administrators: I. An Experimental Training Program. Wichita, Kansas: Wichita State U, 1964.
Uhr, Leonard, ed. Pattern Recognition: Theory, Experiment, Computer Simulations and Dynamic Models of Form Perception and Discovery. New York: Wiley, 1966.
Watzlawick, Paul, James Beavin, and Don Jackson. The Pragmatics of Human Communication. New York: Norton, 1967.
Weinbaum, Marvin, and Louis Gold. Presidential Election: A Simulation With Readings. New York: Holt,, 1969.
Werner, Roland, and Joan T. Warner. Bibliography of Simulations: Socia Systems and Education. La Jolla, California: Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, 1969.
Wing, Richard L.. "Two Computer-Based Exonomics Games for Sixth Graders." American Behavioral Scientist 10 (Nov. 1966): 31-34.
Journalism Education at the University of Iowa
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
Professor and Director of the
School of Journalism
A paper presented to alumni of the University of Iowa School of Journalism in New York City, April, 1970
Reports of the death of good journalism training at the University of Iowa have been grossly exaggerated. At this moment, we have not changed as much as some of us had hoped, nor as much as others had feared.
That's why I'm grateful for this chance to talk with you about where things are, as I see them. Some of you have expressed a great deal of interest in what we are doing. I only wish I had had the time and energy to provide all the information you have asked for.
We have changed our doctoral and master's programs as well as the undergraduate program. Here, I plan to concentrate on our undergraduate program. First, I'll say something about philosophical issues underlying our sense of a need to change. Next, I'll try to show how our examination of these issues led us to some ideas for somewhat different designs for learning. Finally, I'll take you on a pictorial tour through some of the things our students do.
Suppose that I, as a journalism teacher, as myself: What am I for? If I close in on that question at one level, I might answer: I am for teaching young people to do the things that journalists do. In a sense, I make myself an agent for the journalistic industries and for the young people who want to become journalists.
If I approach that same question from another level, I might answer: I am for helping people to discover and fulfill the information needs of their communities. Thus, I make myself an agent for members of the larger society. And I do this in large part by helping others to see themselves primarily as communicative agents for members of the communities and enterprises within which they work.
Now, if current journalistic enterprises are discovering and fulfilling the information needs of their communities and, if they are designed to continue to do so, then what I do as a journalism teacher might well be the same for both levels of approach. That is, in order to fulfill the larger interest, I need only fulfill the smaller one. By preparing young people to do the things journalists do, I contribute my part to satisfying information needs at a broad level. Well, yes, if . . . .
Today, I believe, our journalists come nowhere near discovering or fulfilling the information needs of their communities. If I am right in this belief, then answers for the large system cannot be the same as those for the smaller one. I cannot fulfill my larger aim simply by teaching young people to do what journalists do.
Now, if today's journalists are not doing enough of what needs to be done, what can we do about it? I suggest these lines of action:
1. Explore with people currently in the information business how the systems within which they work might be redesigned to achieve more fully the broader aim.
2. Help the more able among current practitioners to construe their role and functions more broadly. Challenge them to work though such questions as, What am I for?
3. Design learning systems within which students can come to see themselves as agents acting for the long-term interests of their customers and of themselves, concern for the consequences of what they do. What do my customers want and need to know and will their knowing that help the development of this community?
4. Help students to become skilled and creative craftsmen in their use of communicative tools.
5. Encourage students to acquire sensitivity and toughness, humor and wisdom, gentleness and strength. They will need these and more to change sensibly today's information enterprises or to create new ones which may better meet our needs.
How can we do such things? This question becomes especially intriguing when you understand that we have defined ourselves into the information business. In other words, the same sorts of inadequacies I noted among practicing journalists and journalistic enterprises can readily be found among teachers and educational enterprises. So, up by the bootstraps.
Right at the center of the new program we put problem identification, analysis and solution-a simulated society. Every student in our general journalism sequence enters this society for two consecutive academic years. Students in advertising, photojournalism, and high-school journalism teaching go into it for one year.
The initial experience is something like being tossed into the middle of a lake before you've learned to swim. Most students find they can stay on top, but they become eager to learn some things that will help.
During the first year of simulation, a student writes stories, prepares picture essays, films material for documentaries, etc. He does these under contract to communication enterprises run by students in the second year of the society.
It's a relatively open system, intended to encourage creativity. We do have a few rules to promote breadth in use of tools and across subject matter. In other words, a student meets one problem after another, and we do not tell him how to think about the problem nor how to solve it. Instead, we expect him to consider it and work it through himself, using whatever resources he can find on his own initiative.
Each publication period, every member of the society evaluates the publications or products of other members. We convert these evaluations to points, which the enterprises then use as "money." At the end of a semester, we convert this "money" into grades. This leads to high competition among enterprises and strong cooperation among the members of each enterprise. We also use awards from faculty specialists as another form of reward.
Mechanical aspects of writing, still photography, film making, tape recording and editing we try to handle on a non-credit, on-demand basis in our technology institute. For example, we have tape cassettes and illustrated workbooks on how to operate a Yashica-D camera. Listen to Don Woolley . . .
Along with such programmed materials, we organize intensive workshops, field observation, etc., relevant to work the students are currently engaged in. With cooperation from publishers, TV news director and others, our students get a chance to try themselves in the so-called real world. So far, they seem to do at least as well as students from the old program.
Along with our simulated society and Technology institute, we have a core course and its adjunct, a colloquium series. In the core, we try to deal in a direct, informational way-reading and discussion of books, for example-with those matters we believe all journalists ought to know and think about. We concern our students with philosophical questions such as, How do we come to know what we know? and Can we be sure what we believe to be is true? At another level, we work with strategies and processes of observation, interviewing and data collection generally.
Our colloquium series we intend as a teaser, a curiosity arouser, a challenger. We invite to speak to our students some of the intriguing intellects working on problems of communication. This year we have had psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, a biologist-mathematician Anatol Rapaport, dramatist-poet-philosopher Kenneth Burke, and many more.
Are we having any problems? We certainly are. Some are repercussions from anxieties I have been unable to calm very well-anxieties of alumni and publishers who believed rumors that I would turn the school into a research school, whatever that is, and destroy the Daily Iowan. Long before we started our new program, people wrote-some privately, some for publication-that Dick Budd and I had ruined a fine old school of journalism. One wonderful old publisher in Iowa, an alumnus, fond of the school, died hating my guts.
Students in this first year of the new program have listened to a good deal of yapping from the sidelines, some of it from students in the old program. Yah, yah-you won't be able to get good jobs. Masturbation is simulation. About 25 out of 105 students who started dropped out of the new program. Some could not stand the freedom, the lack of direction on what to do and how to do it. Some objected to being evaluated by other students. Some could not tolerate the taunting by students in the old program. Some felt they simply could not afford the great chunks of time they found themselves investing in working out problems in the simulated society. Some became worried that this wasn't what real-life journalism was about. And, frankly, some were far from entranced by some of the first-run performances of our faculty. In any case, I applaud the courage and insight of the 80 or so who remained. And I applaud the dedicated members of our faculty who are creating a new program and, at the same time, putting an old one to bed.
Communication, Experimentation, and Growth
by
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
Professor and Director
School of Journalism
University of Iowa
Paper presented at Rutgers Communication Colloquium Series October 28-29, 1971, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Four of my faculty members are asking that I be dismissed from my position as director of the School of Journalism at the University of Iowa. They charge that I have discriminated against them, that I do not treat them fairly.
One of them is fighting my recommendation, accepted by the University administration, that his contract not be renewed. The case has been heard by the faculty senate's board of inquiry. That board decided he had no case. The same case is now before the faculty welfare committee of the faculty senate. If this unhappy man does not receive satisfaction from that committee, he threatens to take his case to the AAUP., then to the legislature and beyond. In fact, he has vowed that, for the rest of his life, wherever he and I are, he will do what he can to make my life miserable.
Usually, we have gotten good support from people who came to observe closely the undergraduate program we are developing. A few have called it a brilliant innovation.
On the other hand, some of Iowa's journalists-I hate to call them that-have blindly, ignorantly attacked me and the program we have created and are developing. In fact, they started attacking our "new program" a couple of years before we had a new program. They knew somehow-even without knowing me-that any program I helped to get going just had to be rotten.
A couple of years ago, the University of Washington was searching for a director for its School of Communication. Several of my friends there had urged the search committee to consider me for the position. A conservative member of the committee showed the others copies of our unfavorable press items. The committee decided to drop me from the list of candidates.
I am presenting these personal experiences here not to gain your sympathy. Rather, I present them as the credentials of a troublemaker. Sympathy, hell! Some of you must wonder how stupid a guy can get to put himself into the bind I seem to be in. Sometimes I wonder that myself.
The other day some of my associates and I had a grand discussion with one of my favorite school superintendents. He is just about to pull up stakes and head west to superintend a school district in California. He has been under fire in his present position. But he has been under fire most of his superintending life. Sex education, man as a course of study, open classrooms, experimental schools, self-discipline, and initiative-all sorts of evil things he has helped introduce and develop in the districts where he has worked.
Several of the superintendent's remarks are relevant to my topic. He said that you could usually identify the more innovative, creative school administrators by observing that they move every four or five years. He remarked on how disappointed he was with most principals with whom he had worked:
You ask them what they believe to be the long-term goals of the schools they run. All but a few answer that their schools are for providing space for teachers to give lessons to kids. And, if you ask the teachers, all but a few agree with their principals. I suppose that if you were to ask the kids. . . .
Compulsory education laws, teacher certification, school board requirements on textbook usage, and other such constraints tend to lock in the system. These constraints set a stage where most teachers and principals and superintendents can settle in comfortably. Maintaining order, class attendance, scheduling, and the like easily take priority over raising basic and disturbing questions like What are we for? Why schools? Given current developments in the larger society, what will our students need to learn in order to deal with problems in tomorrow's society?
Our superintendent criticized local reporters along the same lines.
They never seem to ask the important questions. Perhaps, if they were to ask me and my principals fundamental questions, public exposure of sallow thinking would help to create public pressure for deeper consideration of what we are about. Instead, reporters mostly ask shallow questions and seem contented by shallow replies.
And that may be a way for reporters to settle comfortably into their own systems.
Now, let's look at communication and change. The things we have described so far may fall into place in a larger context. So long as there is life, both communication and change are inevitable. And they are continuing. In this way of thinking, it simply does not make sense to say that some living person did not or does not communicate or that he does not change. If he or anyone is taking him into account, is inferring what "he" means, he is communicating. In this sense, thinking, daydreaming, cogitating, and so on are forms of within-person communication.
We can usually understand reasonably well how a person eats and processes food, breathes, and processes air. Nutrition provides energy and builds cells to replace ones which are transformed into waste-hair that drops out, skin that flakes off, dead cells eliminated through urine and feces, gases exhaled as we refreshen our blood cells with oxygen.
Somewhat parallel processes occur when we take in and make something of ourselves and the things around. us. Actively, through our senses and personal think tanks, we pay attention to and interpret things around us. After all, if we are to stay alive, if we are to make out reasonably well-and I use "make out" in the broad sense-we must continually survey and deal with our environs. Even when we are asleep, we are tuned in enough so that any extraordinary noises or changes in temperature will awaken us.
We continually process information-sometimes a great deal sometimes a little, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Our information, our values, and our anticipation all help to guide our actions. These include the direction of our scanning for further relevant information. We operate on the basis of our theories of how things work. "If I do so and so," one says, "such and such is likely to happen" or "If I say that to her, she might get mad or she might kiss me or something else."
I just don't understand people who pose theory against practice, the theoretical against the practical. Of course, we can and often do have impractical theories. Every practice has at least an implied theory. And for almost everything we do, we leave the theory implicit. That way we don't have to bother to think about it. It won't get in our way like it did for the centipede who began to wonder how it coordinated the movements of all those feet.
We seem to start as babes from the womb with some primitive theory built or programmed right into our systems. While most animals have a lot of their behavior and ways of seeing things built in from the beginning, we apparently have a lot more room for learning and therefore for diversity.
Within that room for learning, we have imagination. Then, I believe, there is a special kind of imagination which I'll call "play-think." In this garden, we toy with ideas. We have conversations with ourselves in which the major form is something like "I wonder what might happen if . . ." or "I wonder what the reverse of that would be like" or "If I were to put these seemingly unrelated things together, how might they relate?" Maybe I should say, "How might I make them relate?"
Some of our greatest creative scientists and artists say that many of their best ideas come to mind during relaxed periods. They work hard; they think hard; but relaxation-during an aimless walk in the park, say-seems to open up room for a sometimes almost unconscious play-thinking. Play-think seems to involve pulling together, in some new pattern, precepts and concepts one has stored.
I'd like to return and give broader perspective to some of the matters at the beginning of this paper.
I have been associated with journalism schools since 1946, after I graduated from World War II. I was an undergraduate and photo-lab assistant at Minnesota. Then I went into the M.A. program and taught a couple of extension courses and served as a public opinion analyst in Ralph Nafziger's research division. At Wisconsin, I taught news photography, news writing, theory and research methods while earning an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in mass communication.
At Michigan State, I worked with some very stimulating and creative colleagues in the journalism school, the Department of Communication, and the Communication Research Center.
I moved from Michigan State to the University of Iowa for three reasons: (1) It was an honor to occupy the George H. Gallup research chair in a fine university; (2) The chair had a very attractive salary with time and assistance for research; (3) I wanted to develop research relevant to the education of competent and responsible journalists.
After I reached Iowa, I was dismayed to find that the programs for journalism were about the same as those I had gone through nearly 20 years earlier at Minnesota. And, with a few exceptions, the faculty simply didn't have the intellectual power and curiosity of those I had worked with at Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan State. Change had been going on, of course, but at a snail's pace, for the most part. Each faculty member had his teaching assignments. Few seemed to care what the school as a whole was doing in its programs. When we talked, during coffee breaks or at each other's houses, we almost never talked about our work. At faculty meetings, we did occasionally hear a sequence head describe the courses in his sequences. Mostly our faculty meetings were filled with information and minor political matters.
In 1966, we created an educational policies committee to study our programs and make recommendations for changes to the faculty. In that context, I wrote the following position paper.
A Process Concept of Communication Education: A Position
Statement for the Educational Policies Committee
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
School of Journalism
University of Iowa
November 17, 1966
With an appreciative nod to Harold Benjamin who wrote a magnificent little book called The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum, I will start this paper with a story. You will recognize it immediately as a fable of sorts.
Around the turn of the century at Midwestern University, then not nearly so huge as it is today, there was a young engineering professor named J. Worthington Peabody. Quite unusual among the engineering professors of his day, Peabody had actually worked in the real world for several years before he decided to return to the university, acquire the Ph.D. and spend the rest of his life teaching the young how to be competent engineers. During that "working" period of his life, he had joined such eager young men as R. E. Olds and Henry Ford in tinkering with and developing our first automobiles.
Peabody was a serious scholar. (His book, Applied Mechanics, became a standard text in the field.) And the students liked him. One of the things students enjoyed most about Peabody was that he let them, even urged them to, join him in his favorite hobby, automobile building. Professor Peabody, these students felt, was concerned about real things, quite unlike some of their other professors.
Dr. R. P. Thunderbolt, Dean of Engineering, was not unaware of Peabody's popularity. In fact, he was rather fond of tinkering with the new machines himself. So, when, in the spring of 1907, Peabody suggested a new course in the design and building of automobiles, Thunderbolt agreed immediately, pleased by the initiative of young Peabody. But, he warned the young man, in order for the course to pass the university's curriculum committee, they would have to give it a title and catalogue description which would emphasize its academic characteristics. They decided to call it "Fundamental Principles of Automobilistic Engineering."
Two years later, at the convention of the Engineering Teachers Association, in a session on "New Developments in Engineering Education," Peabody proudly described the new course. Other teachers swarmed around him after the talk, wanting to know what textbook he was using and what kinds of laboratory exercises he considered most useful. Suffice it to say that, within three years, all but the most staid of the major schools had some kind of course in automobilistic engineering.
But Peabody and Midwestern did not stand still. One course could not possibly cover the rapidly expanding knowledge in the field. By 1912, Midwestern listed a full-fledged sequence in automobilistic engineering.
Reactions varied. Some of the other professors in engineering resented the popularity of the new sequence. They considered it too applied, too vocationally oriented. A few referred to it as "Peabody's Piddle."
On the other hand, a number of nearby auto manufacturers, most of them close friends of Peabody's, told Midwestern's President Hanley how pleased they were to have their budding industry recognized by the academic community. In fact, when Dean Thunderbolt retired and one of the senior professors stepped into his position, these manufacturers were influential in helping Peabody to set up a new School of Automobilism with Peabody as its director. One of them, Adelbert Dodge, donated money for a fine new building with more and better equipped laboratories than even Peabody had ever imagined in his wildest dreams. The new director hired more faculty to teach in the expanded automobilism curriculum. He hired most of them directly from the auto companies. While none of them had the Ph.D. and only one had the masters, they did know the auto business thoroughly. While some of the new teachers feared they would soon run out of things to teach, they quickly found that university students do not learn things very fast. So, a teacher has to string things out and repeat them to make sure the student remembers.
In fact, they found that they could not cover in a semester nearly all the important matters they wished to teach their students. Those with special interests developed new courses.
I hope I have not conveyed the impression that automobilism students took only vocational courses, for actually they took much of their work in liberal arts and general engineering. It was felt that the automobilist ought to be a broadly educated man. (Nearly all of them were men, since the industry managers generally refused to hire women in those days.)
One of these new courses, introduced in the fall of 1916 by a professor who had worked a summer in an airplane factory, dealt with principles of airplane design and manufacture. Students poured into this new course, hoping thus to prepare themselves for good jobs in this wildly growing industry. Professor Cartwright Boeing, the school's airplane man, urged Peabody to hire three more faculty members so they could field a full sequence in airplanism. Other faculty members fought acceptance of the new sequence until Boeing assured them that students electing it would be required to take the basics: Fundamentals of Auto Design I, Fundamentals of Auto Design II, Auto body Manufacture, Auto Distribution and Sales and Auto Management. Professor Larke Studebaker convincingly argued that auto design, at least the way he taught it, was basic to the design of any kind of transportation equipment. "We should not be misled," he said, "by the glamour of this new industry."
Several of the auto manufacturers, when they heard of the new sequence, expressed their displeasure directly to Peabody and Hanley. They felt the new sequence might dilute the work in and draw good students away from automobilism. Peabody assured them that automobilism would always be central.
At the same time, many students were happy to have the new curriculum, since some of their automobilism professors seemed to be teaching how to design 1907 autos.
Schools of automobilism had sprung up and developed particularly in the large state universities. And many of the smaller colleges had at least a one-man department. In 1922, you may remember, the directors of some of the bigger schools got together and formed ADSA, Association of Directors of Schools of Automobilism. Several years later, probably in August of 1925 (the records are not clear on this point), ADSA, along with several smaller groups, instituted the Association for Education in Automobilism (AEA). A year later, ADSA created CADSA, the Committee for Accreditation of Departments and Schools of Automobilism. This committee was intended to curb the dangerous tendency of some colleges with meager and poorly trained staffs to advertise full sequences in automobilism and even in airplanism. With proper accreditation, the good schools could assure students and employers alike that they were getting the genuine article.
Several of the automobile and airplane manufacturing companies had grown quite large. Since the labor market was favorable for them, they usually hired their engineering and middle-management people from the high-prestige eastern universities which, for some reason, had never developed schools of automobilism. Or these large firms took experienced men from the smaller ones. Since their top managers themselves had had general engineering and liberal arts when they were in college, they saw no need for the apprentice-like training that seemed to be going on in automobilism schools.
The smaller firms were grateful for the A schools, since they were saved the expense of on-the-job training. They particularly liked seeing the initiation of courses like Sport Cars I and II and Monoplane Design, though they saw no particular need for History of Automobilism (History of Transportation Manufacture in some schools) or Ethics and Responsibility in Auto Firm Management. In any case, when university appropriations time came, the legislative representatives of the Automobile Manufacturers Association were usually on the side of the gods.
Well, you are probably quite aware of the more recent developments in this story, so I'll only remind you of some of the more important ones. For example, you'll recall the impact of the general education movement in higher education during the thirties and forties. While it provided some much-needed broadening for many university students, in some places it merely stimulated the development of what I like to call "smatterings" courses. In almost every department of the university you still find these today under titles starting with "Survey of . . ." or "Introduction to . . ."
Of course, there was the development of graduate studies, first leading to the master's degree. Now, in about two dozen schools, there is the Ph.D. in Transportation Manufacturing Processes (in some places simply Manufacturing Processes). Remember the big flap several years ago when Jack Tube argued that the "damned manufacturologists in the big schools with Ph.D. programs ought to go back home to the physics departments." He was particularly worried about the growing tendency in A schools to hire Ph.D.'s in manufacturology with little or no practical experience, instead of the real pros from the automobile business.
My fable has no end. It can't be true; nothing like that could actually happen, not in higher education related to automobile manufacture. Perhaps it is only a caricature of the department of mobile homes and schools of hotel and restaurant management.
In any case, I have given the fable to illustrate some of the benefits and dangers of modeling university curricula in terms of real world industries. In our journalism school, we have a number of sequences: Advertising, Magazine Journalism, News-Editorial Journalism, Photojournalism, Public Relations, Radio-Television, and Community Journalism. Other schools of journalism have similar sequences or even departments. This structure probably helps to attract students who aspire to careers in newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations (on the news side, since a radio-television sequence for other types is offered in the Speech and Drama Department), advertising agencies, public relations, etc. This structure probably also helps to maintain good working relationships between the university and those industries or agencies, particularly the smaller firms. This may also contribute to the development of such things as useful intern programs.
But this structure and the relationship of journalism programs to other programs in the university have some serious drawbacks, I think. These may become clear as we look into objectives and relate these to some emerging principles of learning and education. (For these latter, I have drawn on Jerome Bruner's The Process of Education, a talk by Gordon Lee on the revolution in education, Sir Geoffrey Vickers' The Art of Judgment, Abraham Kaplans' The Conduct of Inquiry and others.)
First, a word about objectives. One cannot fail to be impressed by the crucial roles of those whose primary job is creating and facilitating communication to and among various persons and segments in our society. A major part of every teacher's job is communication. This is clearly true for the minister, the political leader, the lawyer, the diplomat, the reporter, etc. It is less obviously true for many other occupations. Without reasonably successful communication, internally and to other systems, any system dies.
The general nature of the content of communication for many occupations is more or less given by the nature of the occupation. In the main, the lawyer communicates about law, the politician communicates about political issues, the minister communicates about God and man, etc. But there are also many jobs where the communicator is also a facilitator of communication among various elements of the system. He must be able to handle many kinds of content. He may act on behalf of his receivers, searching out and bringing them information, thus contributing to their well-being and satisfaction. Or he may act on behalf of some source who pays him to help the source communicate to some set of receivers. Essentially, he aids transactions among elements of a social system.
This communication type includes not only reporters, editors, photographers, etc. in various media news organizations, the various people who create advertisements, etc., but also many people within business and government who are responsible for maintaining adequate communication among elements in their own systems and between their systems and others.
As I look around at our graduates in their jobs, as I observe today's newsmen, public relations people, advertising people, industrial editors, etc., I am impressed by several things. There are many kinds and qualities of things journalism alumni do at almost every level of responsibility and authority. On the dark side, there are hacks working in highly restricted jobs for unimaginative, dull employers. On the bright side, I find keen, insightful, sensitive people in positions offering wide opportunities working for responsible and dedicated employers. I wonder if we may not be training too many of the hacks. I know that we require our undergraduates to take roughly 75 percent of their work outside the School of journalism and, in this sense, are more liberal than most other professional programs and some academic programs. I know, too, that some of our journalism courses are liberal and humanizing.
Yet I think we may have set our sights too low and allowed our powder to get wet. I don't mean by this that we must try to train every student to become a James Reston or a Leo Rosten or a Chet Huntley. I'm sure we couldn't, even if we tried. But I do think that, much more than we seem to be doing now, we must stretch our students' intellects, hone their skills of intuitive judgment and synthesis, give them tools for rigorous analysis of public problems, stimulate their creative thinking, build their love of learning and communicating-do these things and much more-so they will never be content with a hack job or dull employer. I simply don't believe that our society, in its rapid, dynamic movement, can stand hacks in key communication roles.
Much of my criticism is directed not solely at our work in journalism and mass communication but also at some very severe drawbacks in much of what the university as a whole offers our students. And, since we in journalism are responsible for guiding our students, I think we must carry some responsibility for seeing to it that their outside work, as well as what we give them, is extremely worthwhile. We should not be satisfied with anything less than excellence inside or outside the school.
What are our objectives? What should they be? We are trying to train people who can and will keep the members of our society accurately and well informed about matters of concern to them, particularly in their decisions as citizens in a democratic society.
We are trying to educate people who will later create or facilitate those kinds of communication necessary to the maintenance and improvement of our governmental, educational, business, and other enterprises. We are trying to educate people who will in turn help to achieve the above objectives through teaching and through scholarly and scientific research in communication.
One of our major jobs seems to be processing and distributing students for some often not-well-defined areas of the labor market. We have an obligation to these students, to their future employers and colleagues, to society generally and to ourselves to ensure that our processing makes an important difference. We should affect these students in many ways. Here are some I consider most important.
- Increased ability in the use of written and spoken language and other common message codes.
- Solid grounding in those principles of communication which help to form a framework for continuing experimentation in strategies and tactics of communication.
- Increased awareness of the historical growth and development of our major institutions, including our institutions of communication and enculturation.
- Increased understanding of important similarities and differences among the people of the world generally in cultural matters as well as more specially in their styles and patterns of communication.
- Fuller sense of the ways of science and art, not particularly of the special techniques but rather an understanding of what scientists and artists are about.
- Greater familiarity with the laws, norms, and standard operating procedures of the occupation areas they hope to enter and some knowledge of how these arose and how they relate to the central communication tasks.
- Heightened creative imagination, inventiveness, and intuitive judgment, along with the skill and courage to experiment.
- Deeper concern with the process rather than merely the products of communication.
- Stronger philosophical base in ethics, value, epistemology, etc.-that is, ways of thinking about and judging ethics, values, learning, etc.
- More intense love of inquiry, learning and communicating learning to others.
- Greatly increased ability to analyze and synthesize.
There certainly are other goals implied in some of the things we do. Some of our activities, for example, seem aimed at developing and maintaining fruitful relationships with a variety of groups, such as the following:
- other schools of journalism
- weekly newspaper publishers
- circulation managers, editors and publishers of small daily newspapers and a few of the big daily newspapers
- radio and TV station managers and news directors
- public relations directors, industrial editors, government information officers
- advertising executives
- research agencies
- high-school principals, advisors and students
- the university administration
- related departments in the university
- government and foundation grantors of research funds
I expect that, if we do a good job of fulfilling our primary objectives and let people know that we are doing so, our relationships with such people will be quite good.
Now, I want to discuss some implications I see in the above objectives. One overriding implication: We must become much more experimental ourselves in our whole education venture. We need the kind of intellectual environment in which both we and our students are encouraged to creative invention, to try different ways of teaching, of learning, of communication. Along with this we need to develop some reasonable ways of continuously evaluating what we are doing.
We must find ways to help our students to go through such experiences that they will learn, learn to learn and learn to love learning, and learn to love communicating learning to others. Among other things, we might translate Dewey's "learn by doing" into "learn by teaching" into "learn by communicating."
Let me give an example of something of this nature we might try. Many students have a hard time understanding and integrating the work they get in the great diversity of courses we require them to take. Furthermore, these courses in themselves usually give the students relatively little experience in communicating. Suppose we set up a course on courses. In this course X, we would have each student write, say, two papers (roughly five pages each) in which he would do his best to communicate to other students in the class how the work he is taking in another course relates to or helps in understanding some contemporary problem. At the same time he would be asked to read and evaluate the papers of, say, four other students. The primary job of the instructor would be to help his students develop useful frameworks for handling these tasks. He would sample the work done, the papers, and their evaluation, mainly to see how well his students are learning. Something of this sort, I think, might help students to learn a lot more from their other courses, give them a good sense of the problems of communicating as well as valuable practice in doing so. Furthermore, it might feed some burning questions back to the instructors of the other courses, helping them to make their courses more relevant to the students' concerns.
The curriculum of a subject, Bruner says, should be determined by the most fundamental understanding that can be achieved of the underlying principles that give structure to that subject. Teaching specific topics or skills without making clear their context in the broader fundamental structure of a field of knowledge is uneconomical in several deep senses: (1) it makes it very hard for the student to generalize from things he meets now to those he meets later; (2) it provides little reward in terms of intellectual excitement, since the power to generalize helps make things worth knowing; (3) knowledge without cohesive structure is easily forgotten.
For maximum learning in an area, we seem to need a continuous moving back and forth from the more abstract and general principles to the specifics, including practice. In the long run, this means a kind of spiraling up from the simple to the more complex, where we keep returning to fundamental principles and their practical implications at what would earlier have been more difficult levels.
Bruner points out that drill need not be rote and that too much emphasis on "understanding" (theory) may lead a student to an empty verbal glibness. Practice seems to be a necessary step toward understanding fundamental ideas.
This suggests, for example, that we give our students practice in a wide range of writing styles, from the
Biting. Bold. Cold. Frosty. Wintry. Breezy. Shivering.
Shuddering. Shimmering. Stinging. Sparkling. Splashing.
Bouncy. Chilling. Nipping. Lively. Light. Bright. Bubbling.
Piercing. Almost shocking. Nearly freezing. . . and just plain
refreshing.
poesy of a Fresca commercial to Capote's In Cold Blood to Hersey's Hiroshima to some of the finer examples of hard news writing, etc. The point would be how to get them reading a great diversity of styles, first for the fun of it, then to analyze how these styles relate to each other or differ in important characteristics, then to sue them as models in writing. How do styles relate to and serve communication functions? How do editing practices exert controls on style? Emphasizing structure, principles of style with practice in many styles, and basic concern for communicating well seems more likely to produce excellent communicators in the various fields than does our present practice (or is it?) of prescribing and drilling our students in a few of the current newspaper newswriting styles.
I am convinced that we do not have our students read or write nearly enough. There is a lot of magnificent writing around. Can't we have our students read this with the purpose of relating it to their own tasks of communications? I'm sure it's no new idea that we can learn a lot about writing by reading, but I believe we have not taken this idea seriously enough.
Furthermore, we tend to limit our students' writing to the amount we can correct. This assumes that students can't learn much without correction and that our correction does a lot of good. I doubt this, particularly when the corrections deal primarily with wrong grammar, spelling, punctuation, and divergence from prescribed style. I wonder if we cannot find, or even develop ourselves, some self-instructional approaches to learning grammar, spelling, and punctuation. In some settings, at least, these have worked better than blue pencils And, as I suggested earlier, I wonder if we can't make good use of the students in a class as evaluators of each others' communication. They would get double benefits: (1) rather direct and quick feedback from peers on how well they communicate and (2) experience in an important kind of editing which in turn may suggest some new approaches in their own writing.
We need to develop some experimentation in general message design and, at a higher level, message system design, along lines suggested by Harrison of Michigan State and Gerbner of Pennsylvania, and probably incorporating later some of the ideas being developed now for the ANPA by a group at MIT. What might some of the new technology suggest in the redesign of message systems?
Looking into basic functions of editing-assignment, selection and processing of materials for communication packages-I find them more general than I think we have usually assumed them to be. Of course, there are specific norms for these operations in particular media and even more in particular organizations.
Anne Kao and I have suggested elsewhere the development of editorial prediction games which could be used to sensitize students to basic patterns of receiver values and interests. This kind of thing would be easy to experiment with even within the confines of our present curricular organization. It is the kind of learning approach which lends itself well to the blending of theory and practice.
The teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of techniques, Bruner says, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer. Supporting habits and skills make possible the active use of the materials one has come to understand.
the foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form. The basic ideas that lie at the heart of all science and mathematics or the basic themes that give form to life and literature are as simple as they are powerful.
Much too much, I think, we deal with conclusions from our field rather than with experimentation and inquiry. Can we help to train intuition, a most important factor in communication decisions? Bruner calls intuition the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible formulations without going through the analytic steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions. Can we help our students get the kinds of experiences which will lead them more often than not to sound hunches, shrewd guesses, fertile hypotheses-even give them the courage for an occasional leap to a tentative conclusion?
Is it possible at the same time to have them develop the tools and attitudes for analytic rigor which, in proper time, can bring the intuited idea into observation and close question? Further, how might they learn to synthesize, give form, and make understandable a whole set of observations?
Again, I would like to suggest an idea which is not new except possibly in its emphasis: a form of the great issues kind of course. This would start with a detailed case problem in one of the areas vital to human welfare such as population control, human rights, automation, integration, etc. Then we might have relevant experts-say, an economist, a historian, a systems engineer, a biologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist, etc.-take the same problem and demonstrate how they would analyze it, what kinds of data they would observe, what sources they would draw upon, etc. The students, we hope, would not merely observe passively, taking notes to be crammed for the next exam. Rather, they would write, search out illustrative materials, go to the library for more background material, interview the experts on matters they did not understand well, finally constructing packages intended to give particular receivers the kinds of experiences which would help them to understand the given problems. After a whole round of experts, the students would be challenged to synthesize what they had learned in terms of what some particular receivers might want and need to know about the problem.
The prime goal of any act of learning, aside from the fun we may have in the process, is that it should serve us in the future, take us somewhere, let us move onward more easily.
Currently, we seem to be miserably caught in the traps of our traditional courses and curricular structures and our foggy dichotomies: skills versus broad background, humanities versus applied, quantitative versus qualitative, you name it. Again I think we will waste a great deal of time in sterile discussions unless we become explicit. And, we will move nowhere at all unless we are ready to experiment, even if now we experiment only in our imaginations by asking, "What if?" One of my points here is that we do not carry out our liberal backgrounding responsibility to our students by sending them off to a whole bunch of liberal-arts-outside-of-journalism courses, whether these are labeled social science, physical science, humanities, or something else. For one thing, there are too damn many courses floating around under such labels which have had no more thought put to them in the last ten years than some of our own courses. We need rather to ask, What kinds of educational experience, feasible in the university setting, can we discover or help to create which will be most worthwhile for our students?
When we raise and begin to answer such a question, I think we may find that some of these experiences are ones which may be most worthwhile for many students whose future careers may have little to do with what we call journalism. "Is this worth knowing?" ought to be a frequent criterion question for us or "Later will this be worth having learned?" This sense of worthiness contributes much to our love of learning. Nothing seems so deadly as buckets full of unrelated facts.
It may seem that I have been talking solely about our undergraduate program-not really. Our Ph.D. program should tie in much more with our masters program, and both should be more closely linked to our undergraduate program. We and our graduate students (many of whom will become teachers in other communication programs) should conduct research which will contribute strongly, and often rather directly, to the learning of our undergraduates. We must help formulate the theoretical structures-the fundamental principles-and develop effective ways of communicating them to our students.
In what I have said above, I have assumed that we have an emerging science of communication, taking science itself as a process of learning as well as a body of things learned. This assumption tends to generate a quite different approach to communication education than the kind current at Columbia University and the University of California and now being developed at the University of Michigan. It also leads us to an approach different from that practiced in some of the other major journalism schools today, including our own.
It would require a strong core of communication work. (I don't say "courses" because I think the present concept of course structure may be too confining.) The aim of this work would be to help students to integrate for themselves communication theory and practice. Development of skills in communication would need to be in a broad context of principles of structure and process rather than narrow prescriptions and recipes. Experimentation would be emphasized.
Along with this core and directly related to it would be work in a variety of potentially fruitful ways to analyze and understand vital problems of man and his institutions. Perhaps this could be done in ways similar to the great issues approach mentioned earlier.
A continuing effort would be made to increase greatly students' knowledge of and sensitivity to similarities and differences among men though time (historically) and through space (culturally). We need to experiment with ways of doing this other than reading books and listening to lectures. I don't suggest that we dispense with the latter, but rather that we try some things like role playing, a year or two of work in a quite different culture, etc. (I think that well-directed study in a different culture would do a lot more for a future editor, public relations man, teacher of journalism, or what have you than almost any other experience we could help him get. Furthermore, I think we could find foundations and other granting agencies who would agree.) History and international and comparative studies have generally been tacked on to our journalism curricula and too often are taught as descriptive lists of facts, rather unrelated to the work and life the student has ahead of him.
At the graduate level, our students would have a continuing engagement with research and so with development of theory relevant to the whole enterprise. If we continue to turn out antihistorical (or even ahistorical) scientific researchers and antiscience historical researchers, and particularly the occasional ascientific, ahistorical nothings, we are in for a lot more trouble. We must put a great deal more meaning into the philosophy part of the Ph.D.
It seems to me that our students will benefit more if they choose the special fields they wish to go into late in their university work rather than early as they must do now. This can be accomplished, I think if we study rather thoroughly the possible common needs of the great many occupations which centrally involve communication and form our core around these needs. Of course, in studying styles, design, and so forth in the core, students will be working with and comparing the many and varied kinds of communication in the different fields and learning something of why these are considered appropriate for those specialties. They will also be working with different tools and technologies of communication used in different specialties. Thus, specialization would require simply a greater but relatively brief concentration on the problems, norms, and special prescriptions they may expect to find when they actually go to work in some field. Remember, our former graduates have tended to move about considerably among fields. The approach I'm suggesting might better prepare them for such mobility and, within a field, for adaptation to demands of a changing environment.
This paper has certainly rambled. Many of the ideas are underdeveloped. Even so, they do help me to express my central theme, which is: Let us be much less rigidly structured and much more experimental in our approaches; let us come alive (even more than the Pepsi generation); let us explore; let us imagine.
I simply do not know how these kinds of things can be worked administratively. I know they cross and might foul the present administrative lines not only of journalism but of a number of other departments. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that many of the things I would like to see happen are quite unlikely to happen under our present structure (whoever is director or head of what). Nor have these things all been accomplished very well under other university structures with which I am familiar: Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, for example.
We probably need some kind of special forces arrangement if we want to move rapidly. A slower development might mean a new department devoted to continued experimentation and evaluation in this area, handling the basic work suggested from the freshman year through the Ph.D., possibly with some of its members jointly appointed with the most closely relevant departments, including the School of Journalism.
In any case, this is some of my present thinking on the matters at hand.
It's a real pleasure to present this under the sponsorship of my friends, Dick Budd and Brent Ruben. Each has contributed significantly and uniquely to my thinking on these matters.
Journalism Education: Whence and Where To
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr.
Professor and Director
School of Journalism
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52240
Since I'm director of a school where our program has just failed to get accreditation, I have special credentials for talking to this topic. There are others here who can say more about the "whence" part. I want to say more about where I think we should go.
I'm not quite sure, after having read the accreditation report, just exactly what it was that bothered the accrediting group and made them decide not to accredit us. If you were to read the report, I think you would wonder about that too.
I think there has been a fair amount of nonsense in our field having to do with arguments about green eye shades versus chi-squares. As I interpret these arguments, both green eye shades and chi-squares (if any such really exist) must be people who emphasize tools. In one case, they are journalistic tools. In the other, they are statistical and research design tools.
I think that most of the people in journalism education who have made something more of it than mere vocational instruction have been those who are problem oriented. Problem-orientation leads one toward theory development and theory application. You often find people posing theory against practice. Some people seem to feel that theory is impractical and practice is practical. Or they pose academic against practical in much the same way. Consider the term "merely academic." How worthless can you get?
I see theory as essentially a statement of somebody's understanding of how things work in some particular area. And so I think theory can be very important. The real question for me is whether the theory is useful. And one of our great problems is to decide whether and where it is.
It seems to me that practitioners all are theorists, including those who eschew theory. Generally speaking, they leave their theory implicit rather than explicit. They don't lay it out on the table and say, "Well, I made the decision this way because I looked at these alternatives and this alternative seemed like the best one. It had these values, and those outweigh the values for the other alternatives." I don't think you get much thinking like that among those on the firing line. Rather, much is done intuitively. Still, except where the choices are random, there must be at least implicit theory.
I think this is one place where the university can make its special contribution. If we are to go beyond what community college teachers, high-school teachers, and various others do in the field of education, we must devote a great deal of our work toward developing understanding about how things work in the field of communication and especially in journalism. I believe that we and our students must become the best-informed analysts and critics of practice in this field.
We sometimes get fouled up with the desire for what I call " instant knowledge pills. I think that it's peculiar to journalism and education that our consumers often want to come to some really in-depth understanding of complex events and issues without any keen attention or strain on the intellect or even openness to feeling. Isn't it a shame that we journalists and teachers don't find more appreciative, concerned, and talented consumers than we do? Some of our colleagues believe in word magic. Somehow, through the use of the proper words and phrases-by good writing-you bring even dummies to clear, instant understanding of highly complex events.
Such pretension!
There's a lot of emphasis in journalism on the need to teach good writing.
In recent years, given that I have been questioning a lot, one of the things I have done when I met somebody I thought to be a good writer, I'd explore with him how he thought he had become a good writer. John McCormally, editor-publisher of the Burlington Hawk-Eye, is one of the great mavericks in journalism. He's a fascinating guy and one of the punchiest, liveliest writers I know. He's never been a journalism school student. I asked him how he came to write so well. He started describing his whole life. And then he said that one thing that was awfully important was that he married an excellent editor.
What is good writing? Is it that mundane stuff in 90 percent of the news stories I read?
The whole area of how we know what we know, what philosophers refer to as epistemology, I think must be a central concern of ours. Walter Cronkite, at the end of his evening news show, looks us in the eye and says, "And that's the way it is," then whatever the date is, and then the whole thing closes off, and you see the titles go by, and Walter turns to something else. I think he should instead say: "That's what our editors put together out of the way our correspondents saw it and our crews decided to take pictures of it."
I think that all through journalism there is a misleading division between fact and fiction or fact and opinion. There are various cues, often subtle, which suggest that somehow pure objectivity is possible, that a newsman observer can jump outside of his skin, outside of his senses, and tell it like it is. I think you can see this in the division between the news and editorial pages. The implication seems to be that the news is not based on individual viewpoint, that it comes from an opinionless, disembodied writer.
A similar division in magazines, say, comes where they identify something on one page as an advertisement, then right on an opposite page present new product news.
An ad is an ad. And the news is the news. Or is it?
What I get to in my understanding about journalism is that our thinking and our use of language hinges on metaphorical processes. That is, we move from not knowing something to knowing it, or knowing it in one way to knowing it in another way by metaphorical processes. The unfamiliar becomes familiar through our ability to use and understand appropriate metaphors.
Learning implies change. We can understand and deal with the new only through metaphorical stretching. I think that in teaching journalism we need to work more with metaphorical processes. The metaphorical ranges or capabilities of readers must overlap those of the writers in order for much learning to occur. Yet, if the overlap is great, if we have more simile than metaphor, readers may change very little in their thinking.
You may have seen the Disney picture where they were trying to explain nuclear fission and at one point used Ping-Pong balls hitting up against each other to illustrate chain reaction. This is metaphor. Somebody who sees this Ping-Pong ball sequence and has at least a smattering of what physical science is about may not understand chain reaction in any real depth, but at least he may get a little closer to it. Perhaps he gets more of a feel for it or a sense of it than he had before, perhaps not.
I think the so-called new journalism capitalizes on this. By looking at an issue or even through dialogue and keen description of various participants, new journalists may vastly extend the metaphorical range.
I feel it's very important, not because there haven't been occasionally "old" journalists who have been awfully good writers and have used a lot of devices to help their readers understand what was going on. But there is an awful lot of mundane, routine, hack writing, picture taking and presentation, film production and editing, and the like. As Alex Edelstein suggested in one of his papers, it isn't enough to provide the mundane relatively sterile kind of news we get where "spokesmen" talk and talk and talk and there's no real feel for what's happening. We get no sense of impact on the people who are involved in events. We learn little about how and why the events occurred. (How and why, of course, are only theoretical.)
We are in trouble.
Now I'd like to go into the program we're working with at Iowa. The accreditation team's report is balanced in the sense that, in one paragraph they say such things as "we feel that the program is philosophically sound, that it is creative, imaginative, innovative, and whatnot, and that it ought to be continued," and then in the next paragraph they say, "But the implementation of it is poor." And then they recommend in a further paragraph that we ought to hire a lot more people with more solid, current professional experience.
If I understand at all some of their suggested remedies, then they did not understand the philosophy they praised. For example, some of the best things in our program have been developed by people like Lee Thayer. As a youth, he worked in the oil fields. Later, he worked for several years as assistant to the president of an electronics and aerospace consulting firm. Then he became a vice president at Pratt-Whitney Co., Inc.
He has consulted on communication problems with many firms, including IBM., Hallmark Cards, AT&T, Bendix, Cessna, Sealtest, Cahners Publishing, World Homes, and Curtiss-Wright. He has also worked with NASA., the Air Force, the Army, and the Post Office Department. He has written and edited some of the finest books in the field of communication. He has written and presented in a wide variety of journals and conferences an impressive stack of stimulating and illuminating articles and papers. He is editor of a journal soon to appear, a journal to present some of the more advanced thinking in our basic field.
He got his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Oklahoma under Muzafer Sherif. He has taught at the University of Wichita and the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in business administration and psychology. He has been our Gallup Professor of Communication since 1968. Our simulation laboratory was basically his idea. He had earlier developed and run a highly successful business community simulation at Wichita.
But-and this is a great "but"-he has never worked even an hour as a newspaper reporter or editor. You can read the accreditation report until you are blue in the face, or just plain blue, and never get a hint that we have any faculty of the quality and challenging intellect of a Lee Thayer. In fact, you might even get the impression that our faculty members, in regard to scholarly work, are a bit on the weak side.
I wish I had time to spell out in detail the rich backgrounds of the rest of our regular faculty: Harry Duncan, designer and printer of magnificent limited edition books; Hanno Hardt, a German with excellent background in law and work as reporter and editor on newspapers in Germany and the U.S.; Bill Fox, author of several books, film scripts, lots of magazine articles; Al Talbott; Bill Zima; and the others.
I am convinced that our school has one of the best faculties in the country. And you would become convinced so, too, I think, if you had a chance to work with them.
The rich experience that Thayer and others of us have had in work and consulting with industry and government was almost certainly discounted by the accreditation team as not relevant to the teaching of journalism.
Our philosophy and policy is to build a faculty with a wide range of experience. We consider the Thayer kind of experience highly relevant to what we mean by journalism. Some journalism school directors believe that every faculty member should have had at least six years' experience as a reporter or editor or both, preferably on a newspaper. The accrediting group seems to push in that direction. Further, it implies that most, if not all, faculty members should work as interns on newspapers during the summers. We see such a position as too confining, too narrow. We desire diversity in background. We like to have some of our teachers who are well versed in current practice of journalistic crafts. We like to have all our teachers concerned about basic functions served by public communicators. We like teachers who challenge intelligently current practice. We like teachers who speculate thoughtfully about what journalism might become.
For students who understand and can deal with basic communicative problems, the special practices in newspapering or broadcasting, say, come easily. So, we have faculty members who have had lots of news media experience. We have those who have had none. But all perform basic reporting and editing functions, every day.
Now to the nature of our program. Some of the mechanics of it are like this. We have a two-year program. Students can start it in their sophomore year or their junior year. Two parallel courses continue over these two academic years. And one of the courses is a relatively open kind of experimental laboratory. It's a simulation of what we call a media enterprise society.
In the second year of the program, second-year students run media enterprises which change complexion as we move from one problem to another. They change as the nature of the problem changes and as the nature of the media they use changes. The enterprises are student teams. Within a team the kids work cooperatively with each other to try to produce the best stuff they can. I'll say more about that later.
And it's competitive in its economy. All students within this program are also consumers. That is, they have money in the form of points. With these points they can buy the products: the newspapers, magazines, videotape programs, super 8 films, photo exhibits, and so forth. The enterprises produce them. The enterprises set their prices at each distribution period. Members of the faculty, students in our large, elective undergraduate courses, and the students in my senior seminar, and all of our teaching assistants, all also act as consumers. They look at the magazines, they look at the films, they listen to the audiotapes, watch slide productions, sometimes multimedia stuff.
Each consumer decides whether he feels a production is worth buying. He doesn't have to buy anything. he can just write don zero on his evaluation form. Or he might buy just one of the publications. He might buy several. He has, say, just twenty-one points to spend. Each enterprise sets its price. It could set a price of twenty-one points and try to attract a special audience. Usually, an enterprise sets its price at ten or eleven points. This allows a consumer to buy two productions.
Within minutes after the deadline for evaluation forms, the data are fed into the computer. Within two hours we have results on computer printouts taped to the walls where our students can see them. So each enterprise learns quickly how well it has done in the marketplace. Half the points an enterprise earns by this process the members divide among themselves. They must decide how many points each member's contribution is worth. At the end of the semester each student's accumulated points are converted into a grade.
The other half of the points earned, the team can use to hire first-year students. These act as free lancers. They contract out their work to the enterprisers. They write, make photographs, draw cartoons, etc.
So, we have a lively, dynamic community. For many students, it works well. They get deeply involved. They develop lots of initiative. They learn to search out resources, go to people, get suggestions on what things might work or might not.
We have another kind of evaluation involving teams of faculty and graduate assistants. Each enterprise through the year rotates through the different faculty teams. This way, students get a wide range of critical evaluation. In these critique sessions, students get a critical review of the production they have just done and then can ask for suggestions for things they are getting ready to do.
Alongside of this relatively open and experimental laboratory, we have a more traditional-looking core. In it we have short courses, independent-study units, task forces, speakers, etc. The independent-study units are like small correspondence courses. A unit usually includes an outline, a set of readings, and a test. For example, in the area of interviewing, we have a set of readings including the Dexter book on specialized and elite interviewing, a book on interviewing for news reporting, about seven or eight books in all. A student can read these and then take an exam. If he qualifies in the exam, he can get into a short course on interviewing. In the short course, he can practice interviews, then observe himself on videotape. Then he can get some critical analysis from me or others who have developed this particular course.
We went to short courses and such because we think there are a lot of things that you don't have to have a whole semester for. It's a modular thing. A student himself, with some advice from faculty, can determine whether he really needs some particular module in order to develop the talents he wants to develop and that his faculty advisor feels are worthwhile developing.
We're now headed toward a somewhat different version of the scheme I have described. We'll have two programs. For both, we'll have a first year that's quite similar to the one we have now. Then we will have for the B.A. a broad communication program. It will involve several courses with large enrollment. We'll be getting more into communication history and comparative communication. We'll further develop critical analysis of mass media institutions. We are presently working with the speech department to develop this program. For our B.S. program, we will select from the first-year students a few we feel are talented, have high initiative, consuming interest in the practice of journalism and considerable concern for human problems. They will run the community media enterprises. We will challenge them with some of the toughest problems in mass communication. We will work with them intensively on basic, relevant theory. We will help them develop high-level internships.
I have described where we are and where we may be going and I think this is probably enough for me to say. I'd like to answer questions if you have some.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Edelstein: "What is the students' response to your program right now?"
MacLean: "Well, some students drop out very early. I think mainly they are students frightened by the openness of the simulation program. They have been through elementary school, secondary schools, and university courses where teacher's have been laying it on them, telling them just what to do. They get into our program and they say, 'Why aren't you telling us what to do? Why don't you set it up one, two, three, real clear so that we know exactly what to do?' They become frightened by the freedom of the laboratory. Some overcome the fear; some do not. Then I think some are dropping out for the wrong reasons. And we're trying to do something about that.
"Students who stay in tend to get tremendously involved. Part of the involvement I think recently has come from the fact that we have been attacked rather severely from the outside. Our opponents have been attacking us through the newspapers and through television by whatever means possible. A lot of attacks have been directed at the program by people who have never been in to look at the program or even to ask anybody much about it. These attacks have helped develop a tremendous cohesion among our students, just like that in the classic experiments of Muzafer Sherif. Furthermore, faculty member involvement in the program is tremendous. One of the things the accrediting team said was quite true: the faculty engaged in this program are much overworked, way beyond the normal load. We just can't stay away from it. And there are a lot of things to be done. As the program develops, some things will smooth out a bit. We won't have that tremendous demand. In the meantime, it's a real delight, for me, to see the kind of involvement that Al Talbott, Bill Zima, Hanno Hardt, and others have with it. It's just great!"
Carter: "How do you handle a question like 'Since you're just turning them loose to simulate the way it is, why don't you just turn them loose and let them go to work instead of going to college?'"
MacLean: "Well, actually we just don't turn them loose and let them simulate the way it is. As a matter of fact, we hope they won't just simulate the way it is. We try to set things up so that they won't.
"We require them to work with a variety of media. And they have to get into a variety of topical areas. They have, at some period, to work with medicine and health, say. Our topical areas are very much like those you find in Time magazine. We do this purposely. In earlier runs of the simulation when we didn't specify topics, we found them converging on the popular topics of the day, drug problems, minority group problems, and the like. In our core and in our critical reviews, we keep raising with them the questions: "What are you for?' 'What are you here for?' 'What are you in the University for?' 'What are you living your lives for?'
"We try to get them thinking of journalism and communication in terms more of function. How can a journalist serve his community? What is a journalist for? What do you as a journalist want to be for?
"To give them a current practice, we have task forces. These are not new. A lot of schools have used these before. In our program I think they fit very nicely. They complement the experimental part of it. In a typical task force, fifteen students might work on a weekly paper. They turn out the whole paper in one week. They go out and sell ads and put them together. They report. They take pictures. They lay it out. They edit. Most get tremendously involved. They have to cut a few classes in order to do it, but they find it helpful. They build bridges between what they want to do creatively and idealistically and the workaday world.
"Some of the people in our nearby news media are eager to work with us. They enjoy as much as we do working with our fine young men and women. I believe the media themselves can and should take more responsibility for the apprentice training of young journalists. I think most of us in journalism education have taken over too much of that responsibility.
"Thank you."
Talk presented at a conference honoring Prof. Henry Ladd Smith on his retirement, University of Washington, Seattle, June, 1972
Questions of Evaluation of Instructional SImulations and Games*
Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., and Albert D. Talbot
Evaluation, especially in the form of "scientific" evaluative research, is one of those things that almost everybody is for, along with God, mother and country. It seems to make a lot of sense.
If you are introducing a new program, a game, a large-scale simulation, you ought to demonstrate in rigorous fashion that it works better than the thing it replaces [1, 2, 5, 7-11, 14, 22-25, 27, 30, 31]. Right?
If you are drawing a good salary as a university professor, you owe it to the taxpayer to show him that you are giving him his money's worth in educational value. Right?
If you are asking your boss for a built-in closed-circuit TV system for the building, you should prove to him that its instructional advantages outweigh costs and other disadvantages. Right?
If our brothers and sisters in industry can come up with nice, neat cost-benefit ratios, we should too. Right?
Well, maybe, but we want to toss a cautious feather into the balmy breeze. In our years of designing and operating instructional systems, we have become skeptical of much evaluative research, especially that cloaked in scientific garb.
Why have we become skeptics? Because we have begun to see that such research, while sometimes helpful, may often be wasteful and sometimes harmfully misleading. This seems to be particularly true where we try to evaluate simulations involving complex, relatively open systems.
No problem, usually, where we have nice, neat closed systems whose designers have clearly specified behavioral objectives of the early Mager stripe [6, 15-21]. We can readily assess how far learners move toward desired observable ways of acting. For some areas of instruction, the Mager model works very well, indeed. For example, if you want to evaluate teaching somebody how to load a film into a Nikon camera, you can easily tell when he has learned to do so by watching him try.
Along similar lines, if you aim to instruct some extension workers, through gaming, in the relative audience power of different media mixes, their changes in communication strategies should show the extent to which they have got the idea.
And other, rather simple learning tasks can be handled about the same way. Memorizing multiplication tables is one. Historical names and dates may be another. Changing tires could be still another. You can probably think of many more.
When we move beyond such relatively simple, direct instruction and assessment toward more open, more intricate systems, problems of evaluation go up exponentially. Why so? And what can we do about it?
Our most basic differences in thinking about such problems seem to rest in our epistemologies, our assumptions about learning and knowing.
There is a view of learning and knowing we like to tag as the Walter Cronkite school. You recall that Walter winds up the CBS evening hour with this kind of assertion: "And that's the way it is, Thursday, September 13, 1973."
The Cronkite school includes not only a lot of players in the journalism game but also a lot of players in the history game, the chemistry game, the medicine game, the sociology game, the economics game, etc., etc., all the way to the gaming game.
Those of the Cronkite persuasion seem to believe such as the following: -
- There is something called objectivity which makes it possible for observer-reporters to see and tell the truth.
- Reality and truth are out there to be discovered, uncovered, or revealed.
- Fact and belief are quite different. News is news and not opinion.
- Things can be proved to be true.
Anything which exists in some degree can be measured.
- "It's only my job to report objectively the story, the facts., the findings. Interpretation is up to my readers."
- If you are objective and a good writer, you needn't worry about being well trained in the areas you report on.
There is another view, closer to our own, which seems to suggest the following:
- Many problems cannot be settled or worked through simply "by getting the facts."
- There seems to be no way for us to know that what we know is true.
- A fact may be simply something we feel pretty sure to be true.
- A lie, in these terms, would be something different from what we believe to be true.
- What man believes to be his environment may be largely his own creation.
- This creation rests heavily on his previous experiences.
- Since no two persons have had the same experiences, they must view the world differently.
- Messages in various forms can be widely distributed. Meanings for these messages depend on who gets them and what they make of them in terms of their own purposes.
Remember that these are assumptions. In our view, as you can see, there is no way to prove that either of these epistemologies is correct. We like ours, and we find it more useful for our purposes than the Cronkite school.
One view implies that we can stand firmly and confidently on the findings of science or, for that matter, on those of a good reporter.
An administrator of the Cronkite persuasion would likely buy the most scientific evaluative study comparing our simulation with other approaches, a closed-circuit TV system with in-class, face-to-face, or whatever. Then, he would decide for or against various approaches on the basis of which were proved more or less effective.
You may already see a paradoxical bind such a course of action might get one into.
There are different possible designs for evaluative studies. There can be as many different measurement devices as man can create. At each step, for each item, would one ask: Which is more scientific? Which is better? For what purpose? one would have to ask.
And, since items and procedures and designs and experimenters all interact in a system, how can we answer those questions about isolated units?
If we can make the evaluative studies of instructional approaches, we must also be able to make evaluative studies of evaluative research approaches. How else are we going to decide which is most scientific, which is better?
Then, if we can do that, how will we choose a scientific evaluative model for evaluating those alternatives? And so on.
Maybe we have here a regress to a paradox which may lead us, in exasperation, to rest on our intuitive feelings for what is good or scientific or whatever other values we care about.
If what we said so far were true, does this suggest that it's not worth bothering with evaluative research? We hope not. We believe that it is worth money and effort. We also believe that its value may hinge on two important qualifications: (1) that users of the results not take them too seriously, and (2) that purposes of all important members of the system be taken into account, so research can be designed and conducted in ways appropriate to those purposes.
We have too often seen otherwise sensible people reify research findings surrounded by an aura of sciences. In the case of other than trivial choices, a practitioner would be stupid to base a choice solely on results of a study. Ideally, we think, he should combine those results with a heavy larding of his own intuitive feel for what works well or not. Even high-quality operations research, custom-tailored to take into account, in many dimensions, the goals, structure, and processes of a system, may be misleading.
Should we use evaluative research primarily to help us to decide which paths to take? Or should we use it mainly to help us to invent and create new paths?
Partisans of the Cronkite school would, we think, say yes to the aim of choosing paths. Those of us with a more tentative view would probably push more for creative purposes. It seems to us that evaluative studies can and should be planned to help in both ways.
This brings us to matters of design [3, 4, 8, 10-11, 27, 33-35]. In recent years, evaluative researchers seem to have favored before-after, experimental-control factorial designs. Such designs appear to be quite appropriate for many problems in the natural sciences. How better, for example to study the effects of various kinds of feed on the growth rate of hogs?
Ah, but how similar to that problem is studying the relative effectiveness of three modes of instruction. The two problems do appear to have a surface similarity. The experimenter measures his pigs or people, then does something different to different groups of them, then measures them again and observes and compares the changes.
Okay? We don't think so. For one thing, the different things done, the experimental manipulations, the independent variables are usually quite dissimilar from the pig problem to the people problem.
With the pigs, the feed is simple. It can easily be matched by new batches of feed again and again. Not so with modes of instruction. Teachers change, and many studies indicate that teacher differences make a great deal of difference. Schools and situations change. A mode of instruction is usually highly complex. Even with the "same" teacher in the "same" school, the mode will not be the same from one semester to another. The more creative the teacher, the more it is likely to change. Our long-term simulation at Iowa, for example, has changed markedly from semester to semester, from year to year.
Think of the studies of television violence, where an experimenter has used a violent program in comparison with a nonviolent program. Is the violence of Kung Fu the same as the violence of The Dirty Dozen? Is the violence of one episode of Kung Fu the same as that of another? What do we call violence, anyway?
We suggest that, in many studies where effects are shown, neither the experimenter nor we have the foggiest notion of what aspects of a program observed in what light by the experimental subjects had which effects on which subjects.
Then there is the little matter of meeting assumptions for probability sampling models. We can randomly assign pigs to experimental treatments. In much evaluative research with people, we cannot. Even where we can, we might, by doing so, violate something at least as important, appropriateness of instruction to students. For example, in our relatively open system simulation at Iowa, we have found that some students simply cannot the ambiguity that comes from openness [14, 26].
Another problem of a before-after design is that the before measurements may clue people into what you hope they will learn. The act of weighing hogs, on the other hand, probably has little effect on how much weight they gain after eating the various feeds.
An after-only design takes care of this last problem, but not of the others. And you miss the within-person change. Even the more sophisticated before-after plus after-only design still leaves much to be desired. Incidentally some studies using this design seem to show that we might increase the learning of some of our students by letting them know what we hope they will learn. That is, by tests or other devices we can help them to focus their learning.
Trend study designs may be more appropriate than the others I have mentioned so far, appropriate for evaluation. This might be especially true where your main purpose is invention. And where what you hope will be learned is not likely to be learned outside your instructional program.
Simple trend studies seem to intervene less in an ongoing program than any other systematic evaluative research. They are not used more because they lack control or comparative treatments. They don't look as rigorous or scientific as the controlled studies. In practice, trend studies usually violate our assumptions for the underlying model much less than do Brand X studies. Thus, they may prove to be more rigorous and less misleading than controlled studies which turn out to be not so controlled after all. And, if measurement is well handled, trend studies can prove very useful in continuing development of instructional programs
Measurement seems much simpler before than after one gets into it. Developing useful ways of assessing knowledge, attitudes, and other behaviors becomes a very tricky business.
In a sense, measurement, to be helpful, must operationally define objectives of the program being evaluated. Something we often forget is that, strictly speaking, programs do not have objectives-at least, not within our epistemology. Program designers have objectives for programs. Program administrators have objectives for programs. Program evaluators have objectives for programs. Sometimes even students have objectives.
Another complication, a characteristic of a more open system is that people working within it may, and often do, change their objectives [14, 26, 32, 36].
Furthermore, we find different sets of objectives at different system levels. And even those at the same level may conflict with each other.
Now, how can we deal with tat bag, in terms of measurement and design>? We believe that in order for us to deal adequately with all these changing objectives we may have to become multi-dimensional schizophrenics. This suggests to us that the most useful evaluation systems are those which we build in as integral parts of the whole instructional system.
It is good to remember, too, that those people who engage in evaluative research also have objectives.
Any measurement scheme involves some weighing of objectives, whether intended or not. Some are seen as more important than others. Conflicting objectives require some sort of compromise.
Adequate translation of objectives into measurements demands considerable skill. If program operators cannot translate measurement indications back into action, the evaluation may not be much help.
Anyone who has prepared tests or questionnaires or other such devices, intending to operationalize some set of objectives or some theoretical concept, knows how disappointing such translation can be. The process almost always seems to lose a good deal of richness as we move from our original concept to some set of items.
We believe that you can never say all that you know. Nor can you know all that you say.
Getting people to make their objectives explicit can be like pulling teeth. But doing so may provide puller and pulled with highly useful learning experiences. And, if well thought through, the objectives represent something more fundamental-a theory of function in the program area.
We have found an approach to developing systematic objectives which may be very helpful. It is a variation of Stephenson's Q methodology. We have reported on it in more detail elsewhere [12, 13, 25].
Briefly, we go after the present objectives of the relevant operators and participants by observation and interview. We convert these into statements for a Q item sample. We ask members of the design and teaching group to sort the statements in terms of how an ideal student might sort them after completing the program.
With seventy or so statements arranged from "most like ideal" to "least like ideal" it is possible for one to express a complex set of objectives in some hierarchy of importance. By correlating and factor analyzing such Q sorts done by designers and teachers, we can see how much and what kind of agreement we have.
We have each student sort the same items in terms of how well each item describes his or her view of purpose and learning. By correlating and factor analyzing the student's sorts, we can develop types of students in terms of pattern of response. We can compare these with the ideal mentioned above. We are presently developing further variations of this scheme which we hope will provide us an even more elaborate view of our simulation system development.
Evaluation is a fundamental part of a communication subsystem. We don't have a choice of whether to evaluate, but only of how to evaluate. We intuitively evaluate all the time.
Our major suggestions in this paper have been that we should take care in choosing and inventing designs and measurement devices and that we not be taken in by scientism.
We think most programs might be made healthier by the inclusion of designers and instructors of different epistemological persuasions, but with an open one in a dominant position [3, 4].
We hope that you, along with us, will watch carefully the moves toward so-called accountability in education. If we don't watch out, some of our richest developments in instruction, including many fine simulations and games, may be throttled by sterile and rigid evaluative research combined with stupid politicians and administrators who take "scientific" evaluative research too seriously.
Notes
This paper was originally prepared for a symposium entitled "Use of Simulation and Games for Mass Communication Education," presented to the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association at the Annual Convention held in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 17-20, 1974.
Works Cited
1. Abt, Clark C. Serious Games. New York: Viking, 1970.
2. Boocock, Sarane S., and Erling O. Schild, eds. Simulation Games in Learning. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1968.
3. Churchman, C. West. "Education in a Technological Age." Philosophy Colloquium. Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Santa Barbara. 2-5 April 1968.
4. -. "Research Memorandum # 19: Statistical Methodology of Information Systems." Contract Toward a Reconceptualization of Knowledge Utilization in Education. U.S. Office of HEW, Office of Ed., National Center for Ed. Comm., Div. of Practical Improvement. January 1973.
5. Coleman, James S., Sarane S. Boocock, and E. O. Schild, eds. "Simulation Games and Learning Behavior, Parts I & II." American Behavioral Scientist. 10 (Oct. & Nov.1966): 1-36.
6. Flanagan, John C., Robert F. Mager, and William Shanner. Behavioral Objectives. Palo Alto: Westinghouse, 1971.
7. Haskins, Jack B. How to Evaluate Mass Communications: The Controlled Field Experiment. New York: Advertising Research, 1968.
8. Herzog, Elizabeth. Some Guidelines for Evaluation Research. U.S. Department of HEW, SSA, Children's Bureau. Washington: GPO, 1959.
9. Inbar, Michael, and Clarice S. Stoll, eds. Simulation and Gaming in Social Science. New York: Free, 1972.
10. King, Stanley H. Perceptions of Illness and Medical Practice. New York: Russell Sage, 1962.
11. Knutson, Audie T. "Evaluating Program Progress." Public Health Reports. March 1955: 305-10.
12. MacLean, Malcolm S., Jr. "Communication Strategy, Editing Games and Q." Science, Psychology, and Communication. Ed. Steven R. Brown and Donald J. Brenner. New York: Teachers College, 1972.
13. -. "Some Multivariate Designs for Communications Research." Journalism Quarterly 42 (1965): 614-22.
14. MacLean, Malcolm S., Jr., and Albert D. Talbott. "Approaches to Communication Theory through Simulation and Games." Speech Association of America and the International Communication Association. New York. December 1969.
15. Mager, Robert F. Developing Attitude toward Learning. Palo Alto: Fearon, 1968.
16. -. Goal Analysis. Belmont: Fearon, 1973.
17. -. Measuring Instructional Intent. Belmont: Fearon, 1973.
18. -. Preparing Instructional Objectives. Palo Alto: Fearon, 1962.
19. Mager, Robert F. Preparing Objectives for Programmed Instruction. San Francisco: Fearon, 1961.
20. Mager, Robert F., and Kenneth M. Beach, Jr. Developing Vocational instruction. Palo Alto.: Fearon, 1967.
21. Mager, Robert F., and Peter Pipe. Analyzing Performance Problems. Belmont: Fearon, 1970.
22. Kidder, Steven J., and Alyce W. Nafziger, eds. Proceedings of the National Gaming Council's Eleventh Annual Symposium. Report No. 143. Center for Social Organization of Schools. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U, November1972.
23. Raser, John R. Simulation and Society: An Exploration of Scientific Gaming. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1969.
24. Rinne, Carl H., ed. Proceedings of the National Gaming Council's Tenth Annual Symposium. Environmental Simulation Laboratory, School of Natural Resources. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, Michigan, 1971.
25. Stoll, Clarice S., and Michael Inbar, eds. "Social Simulations." American Behavioral Scientist. 12 (July-Aug. 1969): 1-48.
26. Strauss, Harley, Thomas Deats, Albert Talbott, Michael Turney, Lee Thayer, and Malcolm MacLean. "An Extended Game Simulation for Teaching and Learning in Journalism-Communication." Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Symposium of the National Gaming Council: A Decade of Gaming-Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1971. 65-84.
27. Suchman, Edward. Evaluative Research. New York: Russell Sage, 1967.
28. Talbott, A.D. "Q Technique and Its Methodology: A Brief Introduction and Consideration." Symposium on "The Uses of Q-Methodology for Research in Educational Administration." Annual meeting of the American Education Research Association. New York, Feb. 1971.
29. Talbott, A. D., and M. S. MacLean, Jr. "Final Report: Pilot Study #7: Simulation and Knowledge Utilization in Education." Toward a Reconceptualization of Knowledge Utilization in Education, ed. Lee Thayer. U.S. Office of HEW, Office of Ed., National Center for Ed. Comm., Div. of Practical Improvement. January 1973.
30. Tansey, P. J., and Derick Unwin. Simulation and Gaming in Education. London: Methuen, 1969.
31. Taylor, John L. Instructional Planning Systems. London: Cambridge UP, 1971.
32. Thayer, Lee. "On Communication and Change: Some Provocations." Systematics 6 (Dec.1968): 190-200.
33. "On Theory Building in Communication: I. Some Conceptual Problems."Journal of Communication 13 (1963): 217-35.
34. "On Theory Building in Communication: II. Some Persistent Obstacles." Language Behavior: A Book of Readings in Communication. Ed. J. Aitkin et al. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. 34-42.
35."On Theory Building in Communication: IV. Some Observations and Speculations." Systematics 7 (1970): 307-14.
36."Systems, Games, and Learning." Experience Learning. Ed. R. S. Lee. New York: Basic,1970.
