Usually a teacher's first step to prepare for class is to write a syllabus, and Professor M had copies ready on day one of "Teaching Mass Communications in College." Instead of distributing them, however, he offered class members an option. They could follow a traditional route and use his detailed outline, or they could immediately put constructivist learning theory into practice by choosing to build their own syllabus and chart their own course. With this gauntlet dropped, he left them alone to decide.The class members opted to be constructivists, and this article reports the participants' observations during, Learning to Teach Collaborativelyin College" be to approach the class as active learners? Constructivists see knowledge as actively constructed by learners, not passively acquired from instructors. For this reason, students learn more effectively when they "own" the process and work collaboratively on tasks that seem real and authentic. Journalism educators often apply some of these constructivist notions in their classes but rarely to the degree used in this graduate-level pedagogy class.This article presents a case study of a constructivist pedagogy class and argues for the use of constructivist theory in mass communication higher education.

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Purpose – Social media connect individuals in different geographical location and allow people of different political and cultural backgrounds to discuss and participate in events that occur in distant corners of the globe. But, this does not suggest that social media promote homogeneous globalization. Rather, the local and its interactions with the global or regional views remain a powerful force in the realm of social media. The purpose of this paper is to take on the local/global factors in the social media service Twitter and analyzed the keyword-captured Chinese language tweets relating to the 2012 presidential election in Taiwan. Design/methodology/approach – Language code usage was used to sort out the community origins of Chinese language tweets relating to the election, given that distinct types and codes of Chinese characters are used within each political border. Community-specific patterns of communication were identified by cross-correlating language styles, tweeting frequency and participating users. Social network analysis was used to further characterize the local factors in the global social media. Findings – The authors found that the language styles and character types can be used to identify the regions to which the users belong. The authors were able to identify community-specific patterns of communication and reconstruct a social network that exhibits local characteristics. Originality/value – The results demonstrate that language code can be used to identify the community origin of Chinese tweets. This will enable fine-grain content-based analysis of the Chinese language social media.