Descriptions and times of courses I am teaching in the Autumn Term!

I just put the final touches on my courses for this year. I am pretty excited about what the year portends! On Tuesdays and Fridays at 2:30pm, I will be teaching CMST 1a03: Intro to Communication. I absolutely love teaching this giant course. It is the first course that I ever taught at Mac, on the …

QPMAP – Question Period Monitoring and Analysis Project Launched at CCA in Montréal!

Today, my colleague Philip Savage and I presented the first, very preliminary results from our QPMAP: Question Period Monitoring and Analysis Project in front of a great crowd of  24 engaged colleagues from across Canada at the  Canadian Communication Association’s (CCA) annual conference at Concordia University in Montréal. The CCA was part of the Congress …

Launched new publication: Journal of Professional Communication !

I thought that this warranted its own entry! Today, I launched the Journal of Professional Communication at the Public Relations Leadership Summit. The JPC will be a forum where academics, PR practitioners, marketers, political communicators, and multimedia artists and designers can exchange ideas, publish case studies and discuss the actual state of and future of …

COMM-Lab: Communication Metrics Laboratory is LAUNCHED!

Today, we launched the COMM-Lab: Communication Metrics Laboratory, of which I am the founder and co-director with my colleague, Dr. Philip Savage. COMM-Lab was created because of a dearth of empirical and evidence-based research on communication studies in Canada. Many scholars, practitioners and MPs have told Philip and me that more data is needed to …

Guest lecture from Andrew Laing of Cormex Research at McMaster

My 4th-year News Analysis class had a special treat today. We had a guest lecturer – Dr Andrew Laing, president of Cormex Research. Cormex Research is Canada’s leading media content measurement and analysis firm. Here’s an example of the sort of work Cormex does. Andrew is a unique and admirable person. He took time out …

Variables, Sampling and Content Analysis

I had a seminar class today with my Communication Studies 4N03: News Analysis class. It was great. We focused on units of sampling, variable selection and defining the population. I really enjoy teaching this class, because it is problem- and project-based. The class is divided into 7 groups, each of whom is taking on a …