10 things media students need to

know

Your teachers won’t know everything

• No-one can! Media Studies is a huge field, changing daily

• You can become the expert if you know where to look …..

• . .. And your teachers can help you find it - so take their guidance seriously

Collaborate!

• The best media work is collaborative

• Share ideas, research, work in progress, skills - even mistakes

• Production work depends on teamwork, not competition

Diversify

• Taste new genres of media

• Move out of your comfort zone

• Use the MediaMag archive to take you somewhere different

No right answers

• Doing well in Media means how to applying ideas from one medium to another - skills, process and concepts as much as content

• A series of debates

• Terminology can be helpful - but that does need to be right!

Take risks

• Be prepared to fail sometimes - and learn from it

• Learn by doing - dry runs, practice tasks, second attempts will all improve your production work.

• Think outside the box

Be selective

• Sort the wood from the trees

• Look at the big picture - history, context, arguments for and against

• But . . . know when to use micro and macro approaches

Make connections• Between and across media – and between

your critical work and your practical work

• With other subjects - ideas from history, politics, psychology, literature

• With the world - newspapers, journals, current affairs

• Via weblinks, references, etc - but know when to use academic texts

Get active• Go beyond the basic requirements of your

spec

• Participate in Facebook groups; join the college newspaper, radio station, Film Club; etc.

• Build your portfolio with extra-curricular media activity - you could even write for MediaMag!

Build your writing skills• Writing helps you find out what you really

think - do lots of it and share it with your class

• Use terminology and theory accurately but selectively

• Write concisely and unpretentiously

• Only use theory when its helpful – and test it out on your own production work

And finally . . .

• Try writing for MediaMag - contact jenny@englishandmedia.co.uk

• And have a great time on your course