Geo-Tagging and Mapping in the Cloud to Foster Research Readiness and Ethical Cognizance in Advertising Students:

AbstractGPS-enabled devices, such as tablets and smartphones, have created opportunities to send students into communities to capture and geo-tag visual data easily and accurately. Free, cloud-based tools facilitate collaboration to map and share data. These new technologies enabled students to build a visual representation of local outdoor advertising and analyze it in relation to census data. Integrating a technology-driven, community-based, experiential learning project in an introductory advertising course helped sensitize students to visual advertising images in their community, fostered research readiness skills and ethical cognizance and boosted student interaction with new technologies.Media-saturated environments and industry demand for applied technological skills have posed a unique set of challenges for advertising educators. Educators must constantly strive to balance academic objectives and technical skills (Kim, 2012). Fortunately, the same advances in technology that have spurred the demand for technical skills also have enabled the development of creative and cost-effective teaching activities to help educators integrate the academic and technical demands of evolving advertising curricula.For this teaching activity, students systematically captured and geo-tagged photos of outdoor advertising in communities within the county where their university is located. They used free, cloud-based applications to map and share data. In doing so, they built a visual representation of local outdoor advertising in the county and analyzed it in relation to census data. Using these resources, students formed interest-based research teams from which they developed unique research questions and analyzed the data within the context of their specific question. Each team presented their results in a class poster session. This teaching activity addressed both the theoretical knowledge and the technical skills demanded of today's undergraduate advertising students.This project was designed to address the following student learning outcomes: to re-sensitize students to the barrage of visual advertising images that surrounds them in their daily lives; foster skills in research readiness and ethical cognizance and boost student interaction with new technologies. In the literature review, I briefly present the basis for targeting these areas for inclusion in undergraduate advertising education and explain how the design elements of the project link to these curricular goals. In the explanation of the teaching activity, I describe the step-by-step process used to implement the project and specify the tools used. The outcomes section provides student feedback, including course evaluation data and instructor insights. The discussion section links the literature surrounding experiential education to the project outcomes. The considerations and limitations section is geared toward instructors who may be contemplating the design of a similar project.Literature ReviewRe-Sensitizing Students to AdvertisingIt is estimated that young people are exposed to 3,000 advertising images per day (Strasburger, 2006). However, they often believe they can tune out the advertising messages. Simons and Jones (2011) borrow the psychological term, the "not me" phenomenon, to describe the propensity to deny the personal influence of persuasive messages. When people are exposed to message overload, they tend to process information peripherally, increasing their susceptibility to persuasion. The tendency to process information peripherally is "impossible to avoid in today's fast-paced, message-dense society" (Simons & Jones, 2011, p. 229). As an advertising instructor, I recognized the "not me" phenomenon among my students. In this learning project, I included a hands-on data collection process to help re-sensitize students to advertising images in their physical environment and counter the "not me" phenomenon. …