Jenny Grahame's slides from Media Mag conference

1. 10 things media
students need to
know

2. 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

5. Collaborate!
• The best media work is collaborative
• Share ideas, research, work in progress,
skills - even mistakes
• Production work depends on teamwork, not
competition

7. Diversify
• Taste new genres of media
• Move out of your comfort zone
• Use the MediaMag archive to take you
somewhere different

9. 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!

11. 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

15. 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

18. 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

20. 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!

22. 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

23. And finally . . .
• Try writing for MediaMag - contact
jenny@englishandmedia.co.uk
• And have a great time on your course