Selling home: Corporate stadium names and the destruction of commemoration

A city's primary benefits from professional sports franchises are civic pride and identification with its teams. The stadium or arena, as the physical “memory place”; for teams, has historically been named to commemorate the relationship among the team, the city, and the fans. This paper chronicles the rise in corporate naming and argues that sacrificing the commemorative name of a sports venue for a paid corporate name alters the identity statements of memory places, abbreviates the narrative about a city and its teams, and threatens the idyllic illusions about sports that fans have long chosen to maintain. As corporate naming spreads beyond sports, the substitution of commercialization for commemoration presents a growing threat to public memory places of many kinds.     

Creating greeting cards to understand and to evaluate Knapp’s Staircase Model of relationships

Courses: Interpersonal Communication, Relational Communication

Objective: This article teaches students to explain and evaluate Knapp’s Relational Staircase Model through the creation of personalized greeting cards for each relational stage. The in-class activity encourages students to be creative and succinct in capturing the essence of an assigned relational stage in their respective greeting cards. The activity also provides students with an opportunity to apply the model to their lives and to test the validity and usefulness of the model in the hook-up culture prevalent among many college students today.     

Global learning partnerships in the Café: peer feedback as a formative assessment tool for animation students

This paper reports on a global learning partnership using the Café: the collaborative application for education as an e-learning environment within the Facebook framework, for first-year animation students at the University of South Australia (USA) in Australia and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “The Café” has been designed based on five principles of user interface design – visibility, usability, relevance, accessibility, and interactivity – and aims to provide institutions with an established, structured, and dedicated e-learning environment that meets the needs of modern-day tertiary students and teaching staff. From July to November in 2013, 71 students participated within the e-learning environment. Students submitted work-in-progress imagery related to major assignments, and provided feedback and critiques to their local and global peers. A post-semester survey provided students with the opportunity to critically reflect on the learning experience. The results are discussed in light of the use of peer feedback as a formative assessment tool.