Dr. Weiai Xu: CESL Fellowship and Podcast’s
By Grace Keller and Gabriella Grondalski
Dr. Weiai Xu is a creative and talented Communication faculty member who joined the UMass community in 2016 as an assistant professor. He teaches courses at the intersection of data science and social media studies and his research is on the health of public digital infrastructures addressing the issues of propaganda, disinformation, and distraction. This semester Xu is teaching two courses, one focusing on social science theories applied to human behavior and community organizing on digital platforms. In that course, the students look at the good and the bad of our digital age. The other course is hands-on and technical through which the students learn practical computer programming skills.
About 10 years ago, Xu had a passion to be an international correspondent but his career shifted towards academics, studying important issues that matter to the health of civil societies. “I do see a lot of our societal problems are rooted in the way we communicate and taint sources of information, so like what I tweeted the other day, I am #protruth and as an academic, I am doing my small and imperfect part to #DefundDeception.”
Something innovative that Xu does in his classes is using podcasts to explain certain topics to his students. He developed the podcasts for COMM122, a large introductory course with many topics to cover, so he thought that having some sort of ready-to-listen and digestible audio materials for students to review class topics would be really helpful. “I am a huge podcast fan and believe that audio media are more effective in capturing our fragmented attention because you can listen to an episode when driving, doing laundry, or before going to bed.” At first, Xu used AI-generated voices for the podcast but last semester a stellar Communication student helped with recording all episodes and the new version comes with much better voice quality. “This semester, Professor Martha Fuentes-Bautista and I have got an Open Education Fund to redevelop the podcast. So stay tuned!”
Xu was also recently awarded the Civic Engagement Service Leadership Fellowship. He applied to “develop a service-learning course that enables students to partner up with local nonprofits to understand the nonprofit sector’s need for free and open-source data analytics projects and to support nonprofits’ online community engagement and advocacy. Overall, the vision of community-grounded learning is an appealing idea and I would like to explore that.” He plans to convert the existing Comm497CB (survey of Digital Behavioral Data) into a service-learning course. “For the fellowship program, we have multiple sessions where we discuss and debate the pedagogy of service-based learning. We also came up with a concrete plan to address potential issues in service-learning courses.”
Xu is a vital part of the Communication Department due to his research on the health of public digital infrastructure, his innovative ideas in his courses such as his podcast project, and trying to enhance Communication students’ learning experiences through the CESL Fellowship. He is eager to expand on his projects and continue to use them as a tool to progress the Communication Department.