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EducationShift
Epistemic Games Are the Future of Learning, Letting Students Role-Play Professions
Imagine you're a senior manager at a leading videogame company. Your job is to devise the company's competitive strategy in a rapidly growing and dynamic industry. What prices will you set for the consoles? How many games will be available for your platform? This is the premise of Platform Wars, an epistemic game, or management simulator, developed by MIT's Sloan...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #36: Facebook IPO Fever; Dive into Media; $30 Million to Columbia/Stanford
Welcome to the 36th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. It's been a crazy week in media + tech, with Google privacy concerns, Amazon falling short in earnings, and much more. But the dominant news was Facebook filing for an...
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Education
American University to Offer Master's in News Entrepreneurship
As debris from the firewall that once separated journalism from the business of journalism continues to fly, a new educational landscape is developing, one that supports and trains those straddling the line.
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Public MediaShift
How Social Media, Collaboration Fueled Reports on Australia's Refugees
An innovative Australian public journalism project has partnered student reporters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with a refugee support agency and a social media startup. The aim of the project, #ReportingRefugees, was to tackle problematic media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees in a volatile political climate in parallel with educating students to connect with a "citizens' agenda." The result...
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EducationShift
Steering Girls to Science and Tech Careers
For Ebony Green, a career as a scientist might have seemed unlikely just last year. The stereotypical outcome for girls like Ebony, an eighth-grader at Frick Middle School in a rough part of East Oakland, isn't necessarily a high-paying job in science, math, engineering or technology. In fact, 40 percent of Oakland Unified School District students drop out.
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EducationShift
In the Digital Age, How Much Is Informal Education Worth?
You can learn anything you want on the Internet, so the adage goes. But even if that's true, even if it's now easier than ever to learn about almost any subject online, there are still very few opportunities to gain formal recognition -- "credit," if you will -- for informal
learning done online.
EducationShift
The Pedagogy of Play and the Role of Technology in Learning
The goal of the videogame "Civilization" is to build a civilization that stands the test of time. You start the game in 4000 B.C. as a settler and, with successful gameplay, can create a civilization that lasts until the Space Age. Throughout the game, you need to manage your civilization's military, science, technology, commerce and culture.
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EducationShift
Year in Review: 6 Trends in Journalism Education
As the year comes to a close, it's worth a look at the some of the most intriguing developments in journalism education in the last year - from approaches to using social media and curation to new initiatives on data journalism, from academe's role in the news industry to leveraging publishing platforms.
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EducationShift
Year in Review: Most Viral Student Media of 2011
Strippers. Shootings. The Oscars. Osama bin Laden. One-night stands. Natural disasters. Asians in the library. And skinny jeans. These are a few of the most prominent buzzwords at the center of the student news stories, columns, online creations, and video rants that went viral in a major way over the past year.
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EducationShift
Why We Teach Journalism to Specialists, Instead of the Other Way Around
After 25 years in and around journalism, my understanding of media changed with one table in the "2009 State of the News Media Report" by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. Time Magazine and Newsweek each saw ad pages drop 19 percent in 2008, it said, while Motortrend gained 24 percent and Car and Driver increased 4 percent.
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EducationShift
New Etiquette Needed for Technology In (and Out of) Classrooms
If you want to see a teacher fume, just bring up the topic of cell phones in class. Technology, especially social media and text messaging, competes for students' attention as never before. When half of social media users say they check messages from bed, and 11 percent of those 25 or younger are willing to interrupt sex for a Twitter or Facebook message, what chance do teachers have of keeping students' attention in class?
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EducationShift
Collaboration Profile: A Look at WNYC and NYT's SchoolBook
SchoolBook is an ambitious new web offering from WNYC and the New York Times that provides news, data and conversation about New York City's
schools. The site, which launched just before the start of the school year, has been lauded by members of the education establishment, parents and journalists, and provides an interesting model for other public media stations to consider.
EducationShift
Can 35,000 People Learn Anything from an Online Class?
This summer, Stanford University announced its plans to make three of its introductory computer science classes available for free to the general public. The classes -- Machine Learning, Introduction to Databases, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
-- were to be taught by Stanford faculty and held online in conjunction with the regular on-campus courses held during this October-December term.
EducationShift
What Is a Great Education App Really Worth?
Walk the aisles of any toy store and you'll see miles of shelves lined with $20-$30 board games and toys. We're accustomed to paying that amount because that's where the market set the price years ago. It's predicated on production costs, overhead for toy manufacturers, distribution, and the store's cut of the margin, among many other factors.
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EducationShift
Journalism Education Roundup, Nov. 22, 2011
Education content on MediaShift is brought to you by: Innovation. Reputation. Opportunity. Get all the advantages journalism and PR pros need to help put their future in focus. Learn more about USC Annenberg's Master's programs. The best stories across the web on journalism education1. Evaluating Plagiarism: Part I & Part 2 (Best Colleges Online)2. Four ways journalism educators are using Storify as a teaching tool (Poynter)3. Ricky...
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EducationShift
Digital Updates for a Good Old-Fashioned News Writing Class
When I designed the curriculum for our college's recently launched journalism minor, I included courses in nuts-and-bolts digital reporting, and in new media form and theory, but I kept my introductory news writing and editing class pretty old school, and even anachronistically scanned and posted photocopied handouts on news value, canned stories and lede assignments, and notes on story structure that dated from the 80s to Blackboard.
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Your Take
What Do You Think About Journalism School?
There is a long tradition of journalists winning awards but never attending journalism school -- or even college, in the case of the late Peter Jennings. Now, in the digital age, there are good arguments for and against going to journalism school. In the pro camp, journalism schools can provide great training, experience and tech know-how before you get out...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #28: Journalism Education Special with Sree Sreenivasan, Sarah Hill
Welcome to the 28th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, filling in for Rafat Ali. This week is a special edition of the podcast dedicated to teaching journalism in the digital age -- and part of our week-long special "Beyond J-School 2011." How can educators keep up with the changes happening in journalism and keep students ahead of the curve?
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Education
5 Key Takeaways from the ONA Educators Group on Facebook
Teaching digital journalism sometimes feels like living on the slope of a volcano -- you never know when some seismic rumble in the news industry will give your curriculum a tumble, or when a new technology will erupt and leave your tools up to their kit in hot lava.
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EducationShift
8 Lessons in the Art of Teaching Journalism Online
I'm not the only one saying this: Online journalism educators should be good at teaching journalism online. After all, we are comfortable communicating clearly, are early adapters of technology, and we like being first.
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Education
In Journalism Class, Think Visceral
Every semester I conduct a small experiment with the undergrads in my Journalism in the 21st Century course. On the day devoted to discussing media consumption, they walk into class and I ask for their cell phones. They blink, then laugh, then gape as I collect their phones and pile them in a corner behind me.
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EducationShift
How Journalism Professors Can Navigate Social Media
Teaching journalism today requires an aptitude for learning new technology and experimenting with social media and mobile tools. It's a rewarding challenge, a constant race to stay ahead of the curve. But while some might expect a challenge in staying ahead of students regarding social media, it can sometimes be the opposite.
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EducationShift
Special Series: Beyond J-School 2011
Teaching journalism has never been such a moving target. All week on MediaShift, we're exploring the challenges and opportunities of teaching tomorrow's journalists, offering tips, tools and insights.
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EducationShift
New technology is a lightning rod and polarizing force because, as Nicholas Carr articulated in his book, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains," it not only begins to influence what we see and how we see it, but, over time, who we are.
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EducationShift
Journalism Education Roundup, Nov. 8, 2011
Education content on MediaShift is brought to you by: Innovation. Reputation. Opportunity. Get all the advantages journalism and PR pros need to help put their future in focus. Learn more about USC Annenberg's Master's programs. The best stories across the web on journalism education 1. Leveraging a "teaching hospital model" in journalism education (New America Foundation) 2. Students "may be 'digital...
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Must Reads
Journalism Education Roundup, Nov. 1, 2011
Education content on MediaShift is brought to you by: Innovation. Reputation. Opportunity. Get all the advantages journalism and PR pros need to help put their future in focus. Learn more about USC Annenberg's Master's programs. The best stories across the web on journalism education 1. Should we teach journalism students to be more like Julian Assange? (Charlie Beckett) 2. Are you...
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EducationShift
A Case for Using Social Networking for Learning
We are witnessing the emergence of something profound: Humans, historically divided by geography, culture and creed, are beginning to connect and collaborate on a scale never seen before. The driving force behind this creative wave are digital tools and networks that allow new forms of collaboration and knowledge creation.Â
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Europe
In Spain, 'Little Black Book' of Journalism Shows Profession in Crisis
Pressure from the publishing industry has weakened the watchdog role of journalists, turning them into lapdogs at the service of corporations and politicians and unable to serve their readers. That's one of the conclusions of Bernardo Diaz Nosty, journalism professor at the University of Malaga. Diaz Nosty, also a journalist, is the author of "Libro Negro del Periodismo en...
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EducationShift
How a $35 Tablet Could Revolutionize Classroom Learning
When Amazon unveiled its new Android tablet, the Kindle Fire, last month, analysts said that its price could well make it a viable competitor to the wildly successful iPad. Indeed, while the iPad has ignited great interest in tablet computing, particularly in schools, that interest has really just been in iPads.
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EducationShift
Using Facebook, Hoot.me as a Study Tool
Protecting student safety has been the rationale behind the recent spate of "laws restricting teachers' and students' communication via social networking. The laws call into into question once again the educational value of these sorts of online social tools: Why do teachers need to talk to students on Facebook? Shouldn't students be studying? Isn't Facebook just a waste of time?
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EducationShift
Students Go Old School, Create Newspaper with Typewriters, Xactos, Film Cameras
As if taking their cues from an entertainment industry increasingly inclined to remake just about anything from the '80s, today's college students seem to be jumping into a collective Hot Tub Time Machine. We watch as our journalism students covet Atari, combat boots, Star Wars and other throwbacks as if they discovered them.
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EducationShift
In the Digital Age, Is Teaching Cursive Relevant?
Reading and writing are fundamental to learning. But as more kids read and write via some sort of computing device -- laptop, tablet, cell phone -- how we teach those skills is changing, and one significant change is the decision to teach cursive. When it comes to equipping students with "21st century skills," typing is in, cursive is out.
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EducationShift
Learning in a Digital Age: Teaching a Different Kind of Literacy
"Education," scholar and writer Ralph Ellison once said, "is a matter of building bridges." And perhaps, no bridge is more important than the bridge to the future. As educators, it's our responsibility to prepare students for the world of tomorrow. Yet tomorrow isn't what it used to be.
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EducationShift
Class, Turn on Your Cell Phones: It's Time to Text
Education content on MediaShift is brought to you by: var mpt = new Date(); var mpts = mpt.getTimezoneOffset() + mpt.getTime(); document.write(""); Innovation. Reputation. Opportunity. Get all the advantages journalism and PR pros need to help put their future in focus. Learn more about USC Annenberg's Master's programs. As we noted in August, cell phones are in the hands of the...
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Legal Drama
Colleges Run Afoul of First Amendment in Barring Sports Journalists
College athletics are, in some ways, the epitome of what sports are supposed to represent. In our collective minds, college sports are pure, a reminder that decades ago, we too were once young, agile, and full of potential. Every season, alumni forced to move away from "dear ol' State" descend upon land-grant campuses in a tribal, nearly reflexive migration. But...
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EducationShift
School Libraries Struggle with E-Book Loans
Just as many predicted, sales figures show that more people are opting to buy e-books rather than printed copies. Sales of e-books rose 167 percent in June, reports Publishers Weekly, with sales totaling $473.8 million for the first half of the year. But sales of print books -- both paperbacks and hardcovers -- continue to decline.
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EducationShift
Cell Phones in Classrooms? No! Students Need to Pay Attention
In the battle for the hearts and minds of students, the front line for educators has changed over the last couple of decades. Rather than the age-old struggle for access, the foremost concern today is one of attention.
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EducationShift
Has Technology Changed the Way Children Play?
Last spring, there was a minor outcry when the Auburn School District in Maine announced that it would be piloting a one-to-one iPad program with its kindergarteners. Part of the uproar involved the cost of the program -- some $200,000. But much of it involved the notion that somehow young children should not be exposed to technology, that somehow iPads and other gadgets inhibit their imagination and make them play less -- or, to slightly modify one of Apple's famous logos, to "play different."
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EducationShift
Teaching Magazine Journalism Beyond the Magazine
While magazine industry professionals struggle to come up with the best ways to use today's technology, magazine journalism educators are working hard to prepare their aspiring co-workers. Journalism schools with strong magazine programs have developed innovative courses and assignments to challenge students to think beyond the printed page. Three magazine journalism educators shared specific innovations and ways of thinking that...
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EducationShift
Why Schools Should Stop Banning Cell Phones, and Use Them for Learning
Last week, a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that cell phones have become "near ubiquitous": 83 percent of American adults own one. Over half of all adult mobile phone owners had used their phones at least once to get information they needed right away. And more than a quarter said that they had experienced...
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EducationShift
How e-Textbooks, Online Modules Could Keep Journalism Education Current
Journalism textbooks can be a challenge (or as one commenter on my recent post on the subject called them, an oxymoron) in today's fast-changing media world. The long wait between writing and publication usually means at least portions of a book about journalism will seem outdated when it finally reaches the hands of college students. Imagine trying to write about...
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EducationShift
Teaching Journalism in an Age When News Comes to You
Does it matter where a story comes from, as long as it makes the news? Apparently it doesn't matter at all, to many of the latest crop of journalism students who believe their smart phones hold the keys to truth. And so, a sinister thing is happening in the world of journalism, and I'm going to get right to the...
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NewspaperShift
Revolution in Georgia: Student Newspaper Goes Digital First
The Red & Black, one of the largest and most-feted college newspapers in the country, recently dropped a bombshell on its readers and the student journalism community. In a wraparound section of a special issue published on the first day of the new school year, the University of Georgia student newspaper revealed it will be switching from a daily to...
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EducationShift
Twitter Interview Requests: #Innovative or #Epicfail?
Over the past year, I have noticed an emerging student press trend sweeping the Twitterverse: the tweet greet. An increasing number of student journalists appear to be using Twitter as the prime spot to seek sources for their story or class assignments and to make first contact with these sources. The result: a dramatic rise in brief, public, and sometimes...
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Education
Journalism Textbooks Suffer Slow Path to Publication
Rachele Kanigel had two thoughts when she started reading about the journalistic potential of Google+, the new social-networking program that just might push onto Facebook's turf. The first: "This academic year, everyone is going to discover Google+ and student newsrooms are going to be doing a lot with it." The second: "Darn." Kanigel, a journalism professor at San Francisco State...
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EducationShift
The Literacy of Gaming: What Kids Learn From Playing
"When people learn to play videogames," according to James Paul Gee, "they are learning a new literacy." This is one of the reason kids love playing them: They are learning a new interactive language that grants them access to virtual worlds that are filled with intrigue, engagement and meaningful challenges. And one that feels more congruent with the nature...
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EducationShift
The Parent Show: Will Augmented Reality Be Our Kids' Reality?
This week on MediaShift, we're running a special series exploring the relationship between kids and media. In that vein, the following video from our partners at PBS Parents looks into augmented reality and what that means for kids. In this episode of The Parent Show, Angela Santomero (the creator of "Blue's Clues" and "Super Why?"), talks with PBS Kids' Jeremy...
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Media Usage
We've all been there before. Whining kids at a grocery store with their dad, they can't sit still until finally the dad hands over his iPhone, and peace is restored. Kids are growing up with media all around them, from computers to smartphones to tablets to flat-screen TVs. And even in households without as many screens, kids find ways to...
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EducationShift
Screen Time for Kids: Balancing Fun, Learning, Media Creation
This week, MediaShift will be running a special series on navigating the relationships between kids and media. Stay tuned all week as we explore topics like this one. When it comes to videogames and apps, what’s a parent to do? On one hand, we’re bombarded with messages about the perils of letting kids play with computer games and gadgets....
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EducationShift
Is Digital Education a Luxury for At-Risk Youth?
For schools in low-income communities, the idea of investing money, time, and energy into a digital media program or mobile-learning program might seem superfluous. Administrators and teachers already have so much to contend with — safety issues in high-crime communities, chronic student truancies, debilitating health issues due to poverty, families in constant state of flux, not to mention blocked access...
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Ethics
Rethinking Journalism Ethics, Objectivity in the Age of Social Media
In response to the rapidly changing media environment, many schools and academic programs are offering novel approaches to journalism education. This seismic change creates tensions within programs, especially when it comes to how to teach ethics for this increasingly mixed media. In an earlier column, I put forward some principles for teaching ethics amid this media revolution. But these principles...
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EducationShift
Why Missouri J-School Should Rescind Its Apple Laptop Requirement
This story originally appeared on J-School Buzz and was edited and adapted for MediaShift with permission. It was written by David Teeghman, a recent graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. To incoming students in the Missouri School of Journalism planning to buy an Apple MacBook just because it's a J-School requirement, don't do it. Apple computers offer almost nothing...
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EducationShift
Wikipedia Taps College 'Ambassadors' to Broaden Editor Base
From what I can tell, most of my fellow educators spend more time criticizing Wikipedia than engaging with it. The conversation tends to go round in a fairly tiresome circle: The first educator points to an article on the subject of his/her expertise and points to a glaring error to demonstrate that the whole enterprise is worthless. The interlocutor responds...
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EducationShift
College Students Miss the Journalistic Potential of Social Media
This piece was co-written by Alexa Capeloto. A couple of days after news broke of Osama bin Laden's killing in Pakistan, a group of students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where we teach journalism, sat in a classroom and talked about how they were first alerted to the story. Most said Facebook. Some said friends or family, primarily...
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EducationShift
How Important Are Writing Skills for Modern Journalists?
When I ask my university journalism students why exactly they want to be journalists, a majority tell me it's because they "like to write." Considering most of them are in their 20s and grew up with the Internet, this response always surprises me. With a seemingly endless supply of emerging technology and digital storytelling tools at their fingertips, why pursue...
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EducationShift
Virtual Worlds Are Scary for Parents, Liberating for Kids
There are more than 1 billion users of virtual worlds, online communities where people have avatars and participate in various simulated environments. Even more impressive than that number: Roughly half of those virtual world users are under age 15. With a number of news stories lately about kids under 13 on Facebook (violating the social network's Terms of Service), you'd...
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Social Networking
The Twitter Effect: How Social Media Changes the News Narrative
The Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, best known for the bleak and cynically fatalistic love poem, "Dover Beach," once described journalism as "literature in a hurry." As the news cycle has been spurred on by Twitter and social media, and quickened to the point of being nearly instantaneous, I can't help but wonder what Arnold would think of...
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Media Usage
Silicon Sisters Builds Videogames for Women by Women
The stereotypical videogame player is a young male under age 18, but study after study has shown that the majority of the game-playing population does not fall into that demographic. Only 18 percent of gamers are under age 18, and women over 18 represent a significantly greater proportion of this population (37 percent) than do boys age 17 or younger...
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EducationShift
The Case for Videogames as Powerful Tools for Learning
The famous videogame designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, known for creating some of the most iconic and successful videogames in history, such as Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda, once said, "Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock n' roll." In retrospect, we know rock 'n roll's influence has gone beyond creating a new kind of...
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EducationShift
Scienceline: A Case Study in Teaching Specialty Journalism
I learned how to be a journalist at my college paper. I didn't go to journalism school. But I teach at one, and from the time that I became an adjunct at New York University's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) in 2002, I would periodically think about how to recreate the experience of working at a college paper...
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EducationShift
Why Every Student Should Learn Journalism Skills
How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That's exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, Calif., is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STcenturylit. I interviewed Esther...
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EducationShift
Children and Facebook: The Promise and Pitfalls for Social Media
With more than 500 million Facebook users across the world, it's hard to refute that the social networking site has profoundly changed the way we communicate and share information. But what's the Facebook effect on kids? When it comes to navigating the social networking world -- whether it's Facebook or fan fiction sites -- the terrain becomes even murkier. Parents...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #8: LinkedIn's Bubbly IPO; Grueskin on the New York World
Welcome to the eighth episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week's show looks at the big IPO of business networking site LinkedIn, with the stock price doubling to more than $90 per share in its first day of trading, valuing the company...
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World View
3 Non-Profits Train Foreign Journalists to Boost Global Coverage
About seven years ago, Global Press Institute founder Cristi Hegranes was working as a foreign correspondent in Nepal. During a visit to a village in the Eastern part of the country, Hegranes offered a pen and notebook to the matriarch of the village, and asked her to write down her own story. "What she came up with was a really...
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EducationShift
NextGen Journal Gives College Students' Spin on Global Events
Connor Toohill is attempting to break the college bubble. Last fall, with the help of friends, Toohill launched NextGen Journal, a student-run news and commentary site, writ large. Its roughly 90 contributors are currently enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. In terms of sheer geography, Toohill has arguably filled college media's biggest niche. At the moment,...
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EducationShift
Columbia J-School Students Try to Keep Professor Off Social Media
News of Osama bin Laden's death brought a huge surge of activity to Twitter and other social media platforms Sunday night and Monday. So it's a strange quirk of timing that this is the week that Sree Sreenivasan -- digital media professor, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and longtime social media enthusiast -- has agreed...
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EducationShift
Live-Blog at RJI: Fellows Share Lessons from Spot.Us, NoozYou
COLUMBIA, MO. -- I am live-blogging from the Reynolds Journalism Institute, which is holding a week-long RJInnovation Week. It's a chance for the Institute to look at an incredible number of projects and ideas that are flowing through the organization. Today is focused on the 2010-11 class of RJI fellows. Each fellow gets 45 minutes to present what they worked...
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EducationShift
5 Great Media Literacy Programs and How to Assess Their Impact
Increasingly, Public Media 2.0 projects are moving not only beyond broadcast to social and mobile platforms, but into the realms of digital and media literacy training. Producers of such projects recognize that in order to participate fully in the new media world, children and adults need to be able to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a wide variety...
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Business
Dan Gillmor Excited by Experiments by Entrepreneurial Journalists
Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here. He's an entrepreneur, author and outspoken evangelist of entrepreneurial journalism, but Dan Gillmor wants you to know he doesn't...
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EducationShift
Many Journalism Schools Put Minimal Effort into Facebook Pages
As students at the Missouri School of Journalism, we've learned about the importance of social media to the news industry. But beyond the scope of journalism, we use social media every day just to communicate with each other. From perusing Spring Break pictures to keeping up with friends' birthdays, Facebook and Twitter are constant companions for many college students. So...
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EducationShift
5 Teachable Lessons From the Washington Post's Mistake
It's rare for the public to see news sausage in the grinder. The gore of the editing process is kept from view. Yet while the factory floor of the newsroom may be less sanitary than a meat processing plant, a glimpse inside the news process may still be more likely to inspire confidence in the final product. We got such...
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EducationShift
Why Missouri's J-School Should Rethink Its Approach to Twitter
Do you check the official Twitter feed for the Missouri School of Journalism on a regular basis? Probably not, based on its dismal number of followers. As of today, the official Twitter account of Mizzou's J-School had just 630 followers. That is a far cry from most other top journalism schools and a negative reflection on our own. How does...
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EducationShift
What John Keats Can Tell Us About Teaching Journalism
Perhaps it's because I've got a Ph.D. in English and a background in print journalism, but when I consider the state of the press today, it brings to mind the poet John Keats' idea of negative capability. In a letter he wrote to his brother in December 1817, Keats described the concept as "when man is capable of being in...
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EducationShift
How to Integrate Social Tools into the Journalism Classroom
Integrating social media into university classrooms can be a daunting task for many journalism educators. Professors are typically required to use clunky online systems for grading and communicating with students. It's an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. These awkward systems don't inspire creativity, enrich collaboration, or instill a passion for experimentation -- all of which are required to survive and succeed in a rapidly changing media industry.
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EducationShift
UPIU Mentors, Publishes Student Journalists Around the Globe
Suleiman Abdullahi was recently an eyewitness to the birth of the world's newest nation.
In early January, the 20-year-old Kenyan journalism student flew to Juba, Sudan to cover the massive referendum responsible for the creation and upcoming independence of South Sudan. As Abdullahi wrote, he arrived in the prospective nation's capital city with a travel visa, a press pass, a story budget, and a 48-hour window to interview, observe, and report upon "the history that was about to be made."
By the end of his first day, he was under arrest.
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EducationShift
Blizzard Builds KOMU Community with Mobile Video, Facebook
I've always dreamed of a time when my community could come together with the help of our on-air and online collaboration. All it took was a blizzard to make it happen. Mid-Missouri was hit with a blizzard-like storm that dumped 17.5 inches of snow into Columbia, Mo., and even more south of the city. The entire viewing audience of KOMU-TV was home and stuck inside.
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EducationShift
5 Principles for Teaching Journalism Ethics in the Digital Age
Our global media ecology is a chaotic landscape evolving at a furious pace. Professional journalists share the journalistic sphere with tweeters, bloggers, citizen journalists and social media users around the world. The digital revolution poses a practical challenge to journalists: How can they use the new media tools responsibly?
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EducationShift
NYU's Studio 20 Creates Innovative, Collaborative Hothouse
This week, three senior staffers from ProPublica will visit the second class of students enrolled in the Studio 20 program at NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. The reporters and students will begin formally collaborating on a question the non-profit newsroom has puzzled over since its founding in 2008: How can you quickly and clearly summarize the basic facts of the investigations ProPublica specializes in?
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EducationShift
Aussie Academic Journal to Publish Peer-Reviewed Journalism
An Australian journalism professor has started an online academic journal with a twist: It publishes journalism, rather than just studies of journalists and their work. The fledgling journal -- believed to be the first of its kind in the world -- is called Research Journalism and it's the initiative of Edith Cowan University journalism lecturer Dr. Kayt Davies.
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EducationShift
Learning How to Teach Multimedia Journalism
Doing multimedia journalism and teaching it are two very different things. The past semester marked my first as an adjunct professor. It was probably the best thing I could have done for my own education.
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EducationShift
Should Journalism Schools Give Students Specialized Beats?
Does journalism education need a new approach? The University of Toronto thinks so. In fact, Robert Steiner, director of the journalism lab at U of T's Munk School of Global Affairs and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, thinks the school's proposed master's of journalism program currently under consideration is the future of journalism.
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EducationShift
J-School Incubator News21 Balances Investigations, Innovation
During the slow news week of Thanksgiving, two articles about the shortcomings of the National Transportation Safety Board were published on the websites of Fox News and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Maryland. On the busiest travel week of the year, their story selections would be unsurprising were it not for their provenance. Both were written over three months earlier by students taking part in News21, an immersive journalism education program.
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EducationShift
J-Schools Shift from Learning Labs to Major Media Players
Perhaps the most striking change for journalism schools is the degree to which we have shifted from being learning labs whose actual journalism (if any) was limited in its distribution and impact, to being significant -- even major -- media players in our communities. It is clear that in journalism schools across the United States major projects are increasingly making substantial contributions toward filling the holes left by the hollowing out of local "legacy" media.
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EducationShift
UBC Students, Globe and Mail Investigate Hidden Cost of Shrimp
Twenty-something university students usually head to Thailand in search of exotic adventures. But when a group of 10 University of British Columbia journalism students went almost a year ago, they were searching for the untold story of shrimp, a seafood delicacy that has become common in North America.
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EducationShift
10 Reasons Our Student Newspaper Blog Stinks
Amid many scoops and successes this semester, The Minaret, the weekly campus paper I advise at the University of Tampa, has endured a major bust. Roughly three months in, our efforts to launch a buzzworthy and newsworthy blog have failed -- spectacularly.
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EducationShift
Why We Gave Our Students Droid Smartphones to Capture News
This semester at Ryerson University in Toronto, thanks to help from Motorola and Telus, a major Canadian cell phone provider, my fellow third-year online journalism instructor Vinita Srivastava and I have been able to provide all our two dozen students with Android-powered Droid smartphones.
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Thought Leader Q&A
Knight Fellows Switch from Sabbaticals to Hands-On Projects
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. For much of the past 40 years, the idea of a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University was a dream come true for mid-career journalists,...
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EducationShift
How Journalism Teachers are Failing, and How to Stop It
I am writing this article on an iPad which is tapped wirelessly into a coffee shop's WiFi. The device knows where it is in space and, if I allow it, will broadcast that information to any application I choose. Nearby, a young man browses the web on his iPhone. A woman is using a Blackberry. We are all online, all wireless and all capable of sending video, audio or text anywhere in the world.
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EducationShift
The Challenge of Digital Media in the Classroom
This fall, more than 70 million students headed back to school in America, of which 50 million are going to public elementary and secondary schools, and a record 19.1 million are enrolled in colleges and universities. These students are wired as never before -- in school, at home, and at every stop in between. It is now commonplace to see third-graders with their own cell phones, and even junior high schools expect students to work from a laptop with an Internet connection.
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EducationShift
Professors Speak Out About Changes Coming to J-Schools
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. This article was co-authored by Abby Moon. A previous article on MediaShift mined the OurBlook series of interviews with leading journalists and academics to...
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EducationShift
NYC J-Schools Take Divergent Paths on Training, Hyper-Local
Universities around the country have had to shift the approach of their journalism programs to accommodate a quickly changing media landscape. New York City's journalism schools, in particular, are working to rethink their offerings and adapt to the new world.
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EducationShift
Columbia, Medill Training New Breed of Programmer-Journalists
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. Roughly two years ago, a group of prominent journalism educators, administrators and academics gathered in a room at Columbia University. Attendees included Nicholas Lemann,...
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EducationShift
How College Students Became Mini-Media Moguls in School
In April 2007, Zephyr Basine arrived at school for her noontime biology seminar -- and immediately zoned out. Instead of learning science, the sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst carried out a "fashion-scoping session." While the professor spoke about organisms and evolution, Basine focused on her fellow students' outfits and accessories, scouting for something new, chic or trendy.
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EducationShift
Spending the Summer in 'Journalist Law School'
What do you get when you cross a lawyer and a journalist? Most of the time, of course, you get a lawyer. You know: The kids who worked so hard on the college paper but jetted off to Boalt when the prospect of years of unpaid internships scared them off. Most journalists remember a few people like that. (I know a dozen or so.)
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Helping Journalism Students Get Tech Skills
In this week's 4MR podcast I talk about MediaShift's "Beyond J-School" series so far, including the stories on teaching social media, the 5Across roundtable and Jen Lee Reeves' take on getting j-students over their fear of technology. I talked with Reeves more about how she is asking her students this semester to pay $36 each for Lynda.com courses on learning the basics of Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash. Reeves talked candidly about her students and their fears of failing with technology.
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EducationShift
Business, Entrepreneurial Skills Come to Journalism School
For decades, journalists in mainstream news organizations were shielded from the revenue side of the operation. Many argued their lack of knowledge helped avoid even the appearance of commercial influence in the editorial well. But with increased stress in the news industry and new disruptive technologies giving even entry-level reporters an understanding of audience behaviors and income streams, things have started to shift.
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EducationShift
How to Conquer Journalism Students' Fear of Technology
In a time and age when many of my generation assume the younger generation understands technology, I have been surprised by the number of students who walk into my class and announce that they "don't know anything about computers." It's a rampant attitude. I beg each and every student who says this to pretend they never said it and try everything I introduce to them in my class.
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EducationShift
Revamping J-Schools in Australia to Bring in 'Citizens Agenda'
As Australian democracy hangs in the balance, and with the outcome of the August 21 national election unlikely to be resolved for weeks, I'm considering the implications for journalism education -- and how we can invent new models for political reporting.
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EducationShift
Special Series: Beyond J-School
After the success last month with our "Beyond Content Farms" series, we decided to do another in-depth special series on MediaShift. This time the series will look at "Beyond J-School," chronicling how journalism education and training are changing, and how journalists need more than traditional j-school. They need multimedia skills, social media knowledge, community management chops, and must learn to collaborate with their audience. It's more than just learning the basics of journalism: They also need more background in business, entrepreneurship, technology and even programming.
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5Across
Just as traditional media has struggled with disruptive technology and the Internet, so too have the institutions that run journalism education. Most journalism schools and training programs are run by people whose careers were framed by print, broadcast and traditional PR, so how can students get the skills they need in the digital age? We convened a group of journalism educators, a trainer, a student and a J-school dropout to discuss how journalism education is shifting.
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EducationShift
How to Teach Social Media in Journalism Schools
Social media is such a new phenomenon that it is easy for someone to claim to be an expert in the subject. A search on Twitter throws up all sorts of people claiming to be social media gurus. But at journalism schools, professors are working out how to teach social media to ensure that graduating students are proficient, if not expert, in this new addition to the curriculum.
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EducationShift
Social Media, Entrepreneurship Dominate AEJMC 2010
The problem with five jam-packed days of panels and events is that you can't do it all. Presentations and business meetings for the 93rd annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), which was held in Denver earlier this month, ran concurrently from 7 a.m. until, for some, after midnight. I hustled from my booth in the exhibit hall to sit in on sessions across the different groups, but especially to eavesdrop on discussions among attendees.
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EducationShift
Journalism Education 2.0: Training in an Age of Radical Change
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. "We are not going to make it with uninspired and uninspiring teachers!" Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged delegates in his closing address to the second...
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EducationShift
Learning From Failure in Community-Building at Missouri
I recently had an opportunity that is rarely handed to a journalism school professor: The chance to be a member of the inaugural class of the Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellows in the 2008-09 school year. I already have a unique job.
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EducationShift
How Content Farms Train Their Writers to Write for the Web
At the core of every content farm's success is an ability to rapidly recruit and integrate new writers. Publishers like Demand Media, Examiner.com, Suite 101 and others are always hiring, always looking to expand their ranks and replace talent that churns out. These operations rely on abundance: of contributors, of content, of traffic.
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EducationShift
Rethinking the Role of the Journalist in the Participatory Age
Students who dream of a career in journalism are entering the profession at a time when the question of who is a journalist, and even what is journalism, is open to interpretation. The function of journalism is still to provide independent, reliable and accurate information considered vital to a vibrant democracy. But defining who is a journalist is much harder.
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EducationShift
The Influencer Project Showcases 60 Speakers in 60 Minutes
The world is flooded with multi-day web marketing conferences and other educational opportunities aimed at teaching people how to use social media. But this week the shortest social media conference ever lined up 60 thought leaders to speak for 60 seconds each.
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EducationShift
Free Online Journalism Classes Begin To Gain Ground
The CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, is currently teaching a free online journalism class through Peer 2 Peer University, an online community of "open study groups for short university-level courses." The online class syncs with a graduate-level class Ito teaches at Keio University in Japan, and features a UStream presentation and IRC chat once a week.
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EducationShift
Your Guide to Digital Training Programs for Mid-Career Journalists
The pace of change in journalism over the last few years has left many experienced journalists feeling as though the profession is passing them by. So how can a mid-career journalist build their digital and multimedia skills? Get training, and fast. Luckily there is a wealth of free or reasonably priced workshops, tutorials and other forms of training available online and in person.
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EducationShift
Is Aussie Journalism Education Lagging in Teaching Online Skills?
I graduated last year with a journalism degree from Curtin University of Technology in Bentley, Western Australia. As with many journalism programs, the first year was an introduction to print and broadcast. It wasn't until the latter half of second year that the word "online" was used. That's too late in my book.
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EducationShift
What Skills Will Future Journalists Need?
Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at learn.news21.com. For the past two years, OurBlook.com has been conducting interviews with top experts in journalism and media about the future of journalism. In my...
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World View
College Media in Iraq Offers Independent Voice for Students
When Namo Kaftan was 9 years old, his father, a biomedical engineer, brought a laptop from work home to the family's residence in Sulaimani, Iraq. For Kaftan, now 21, it was love at first boot-up. "I was really amazed to see a new advanced technology like that," he said. "I guess at that time nobody even knew what it was...
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EducationShift
How Arizona State Teaches Digital Media Entrepreneurs
Two weeks ago, I sat in a room at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State University and listened as several groups of students delivered their pitches. At most journalism schools, this would have involved the students proposing ideas for articles or TV or radio reports. Instead, the groups of three or four students stood...
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EducationShift
How Going Online Can Help Save Struggling College Papers
In an old episode of "The West Wing," a leader of an AIDS-stricken African nation tells the president plainly, "It's a terrible thing to beg for your life." The quote comes to mind as I read about the current plight of the Technician, the student newspaper at North Carolina State University. In a recent editorial, the few remaining staff at...
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: Apple's iAds; Journo-Programming Degree
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at Apple's plan to enter mobile advertising with its new iAd platform. Apple has been known for hardware and software but has never handled ad sales before, and now finds itself squarely in competition with Google and AdMob in that arena. Plus, Columbia University announced a...
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EducationShift
Journalism Fellowships Adapt to Meet Economic, Digital Challenges
For years, journalism fellowships have afforded young and mid-career journalists the opportunity to hone their craft, pick up new skills and learn more about their beats. These paid programs last anywhere from a couple of weeks to a full year, and often require journalists to take time off from the newsroom. The resource site JournalismJobs.com lists more than 40 programs...
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EducationShift
Flexibility, Freelance Key for Journalism Grads in Tough Job Market
Stephanie Lim is a bright twenty-something who graduated top of her class in May 2009* from the UBC School of Journalism in Vancouver, Canada. When she returned home to Toronto, she had to face the reality of looking for a position in an industry reeling from fragmented audiences, declining profits and job losses. "Even though I had high hopes upon...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Stanford Program Breaks Down Walls Between Business, Tech Journalism
I am so used to hearing about innovation in journalism that when I first heard about the Innovation Journalism program at Stanford, I assumed that's what it focused on. Not exactly. The VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism actually focused on helping journalists cover the field of innovation. David Nordfors, a Swedish punk rocker-turned-molecular-physicist-turned-journalist, found that journalists were stuck in...
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EducationShift
How Programmer/Journalists Craft Their Own Study Programs
After writing about the skills a journalist/programmer might need, I thought it would be interesting to see what college students are learning. For the most part, journalism education has not caught up with the innovations taking place in the industry. Many programs don't offer more than an introduction to working with the web, so some students have to teach themselves....
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Media Usage
The Importance and Challenges of Universal Media Literacy Education
Elizabeth Thoman, the godmother of the "media literacy" movement recently told me that the Internet has endowed her field with a sense of salience, if not urgency. "As long as media literacy education was about television, it was perceived to be fluff," she said. "But when the Internet came along, kids didn't know how to cite sources online, and they...
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EducationShift
Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand
As a journalism professor, I have found there is one thing guaranteed to set off a flurry of frenzied activity in the classroom. It has nothing to do with exams or story deadlines. Rather, it is prompted by a simple question to students: How many own your name as a domain name? This seemingly innocuous question acts as a trigger,...
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EducationShift
Why Do Some College Newspapers Still Have No Web Presence?
Summer's almost over and college newspapers across the country will be cranking up to full speed soon. Likely, they'll be getting ready for further adventures in online journalism, expanding their online presence while attempting to keep the print product financially successful. But hard as it is to believe, there are still student newspapers around the country that have no online...
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EducationShift
Revamped Journalist's Role More About Mindset Than Multimedia Tricks
With a new Web 2.0 service apparently springing up every week, it can be bewildering for a journalist trying to remain relevant in a digital age. Too often, new technology is seen as a burden that adds to an already packed workday. But while many journalists want to embrace new ways of reaching audiences, they flounder when it comes to...
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EducationShift
Why is American University Becoming Center for New Journalism?
I visited American University last month to try to answer a burning question for me: Why was the School of Communications there becoming such a hotbed for new forms of journalism? The Center for Social Media is there. The J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, moved to American from the University of Maryland. And Charles Lewis, the founder of...
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EducationShift
Is University of Missouri's iPod Touch 'Requirement' Fair?
The news out of the Missouri School of Journalism two weeks ago was a little confusing. The school announced it would be requiring all incoming freshmen journalism pre-majors to purchase an iPod Touch or iPhone. At least that was the lede in stories by the Columbia Missourian and The Maneater. But the "requirement" wasn't really a "requirement," if you read...
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NewspaperShift
Should Newspapers Create Consortium for E-Readers?
COLUMBIA, MO -- I am attending a half-day symposium here at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri's journalism school, this time a meeting of the "Digital Publishing Alliance," a group of newspapers and tech folks who are looking at how newspaper content might work on various e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. The timing of the meeting is...
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Business
Live-Blogging RJI Symposium on New Tools, New Business Models
COLUMBIA, MO -- I am at the new Reynolds Journalism Institute building on the campus of the University of Missouri, my alma mater. It's interesting to be in a new building looking out on a campus that is so familiar and so different now. The mission of the RJI is to "develop and test ways to improve journalism through...
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EducationShift
Advice from the Pros to Journalism Graduates
It's an anxious time to be graduating from journalism school. The economy is in the tank and newsrooms are being decimated. But yet, it is also a great time to be a journalist, with more news and information available than ever before and more ways than ever to reach audiences. At the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at...
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EducationShift
NYU J-School Students Unsure of Future in Changing Industry
I have no idea what I will do when I graduate. I am majoring in journalism at New York University -- a fantastic university in an incredible city -- but my confidence in what career I will pursue after graduation remains unclear. Should I go after my passion for writing? Should I take a crack at my web video skills?...
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EducationShift
How to Teach Yourself About Social Media When J-Schools Fail
Journalism is changing rapidly due to social media, and these changes can be bewildering as people wonder how to keep up. I recently gave a social media workshop for journalism students, and I soon realized that many students were still unaware of social media other than Facebook. They were shocked to hear about feed readers, blogs, or micro-blogging and asked...
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EducationShift
Turning a College Lecture into a Conversation with CoverItLive
Journalists who also teach will know that one of the challenges of teaching a large, undergraduate class is the sheer number of students. It can be hard to foster a discussion in a lecture hall, where many students may be too intimidated to speak up. So instead the lesson often becomes a lecture, as the professor stands up in front...
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Business
College Media Miss Opportunities Covering the Economic Crisis
If you're like me, you know more about economics now than you ever thought you'd want to know. I can describe a Credit Default Swap (CDS), a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO), a Mortgage Backed Security (MBS), mark-to-market accounting, and the LIBOR index, not to mention the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP), U3 and U6, and the difference between a liquidity...
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EducationShift
5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them
When people talk about online innovation in college media, they tend to start big and stay there. And it's true that large circulation college newspapers (and big name journalism programs) have been doing some impressive things online, but the need to innovate extends to smaller journalism programs as well. And for them, the challenges can be daunting. So what are...
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EducationShift
Budding Journalists Use Twitter, Blogs to Open Doors
One of my students landed her first A1 story on Monday. Amanda Ash's story on auditions for the sequel to the teen vampire blockbuster "Twilight" was splashed across the front page of the Vancouver Sun. But she first alerted me, and her 130 other followers on Twitter, to the tears and tantrums at the event on Sunday evening when it...
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EducationShift
How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections
The micro-blogging platform Twitter was the breakthrough social media tool for journalists in 2008. It became a pipeline for breaking news for both professional reporters and citizen journalists, with the massacre in Mumbai, the Hudson River plane crash and Obama's inauguration highlighting its effectiveness as a source of live, user-generated online content. Journalists increasingly used it to cross-promote their own...
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AdvertisingShift
College Newspapers Finally Hit by Economic Downturn
As the newspaper industry has struggled with declining revenue, some analysts predicted that college newspapers would weather the storms of the changing media environment better than their peers in the wider industry. (See also this Chronicle of Higher Education article.) Now the national economy indicates that the future might not be quite so rosy: The widespread economic pains in the...
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EducationShift
UBC Begins Study Program of New Media and Society
The young men and women entering university today are digital natives who have grown up in a world of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They have lived through a time when the Internet went from being a highly specialized system used by scientists to a ubiquitous utility that defines how they engage with the world. But while today's students may blog...
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Education
Experimentation (Not Stagnation) Should Flourish at J-Schools
Some journalism academics may be even more scared of new technology and more resistant to change than the worst print "dinosaurs" working in media today. But Web 2.0 has made getting online so simple that there are no more excuses for being disconnected. While some reporters see journalism education as a potential refuge from the rapid pace of change in...
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EducationShift
The Place of Blogs in Journalism Education
Blogs have become part of the editorial furniture of most news sites. In the U.S., 95% of the top 100 newspapers feature reporter blogs. So it seems appropriate to include blogging in the curriculum of journalism schools. For the past couple of years, my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism have written blogs as part of their course...
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EducationShift
J-Students Take Multiplatform Approach to City Politics
Here's a recipe for how to cover local elections. Take a bunch of bright and eager journalism students. Give them two weeks to fan out across the city and come back with multiplatform stories on issues as diverse as creating bike-only roads, spending almost $30 million on a dog pound and treating Vancouver's sewage. This is what the first-year students...
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EducationShift
College Media Has Come A Long Way Online
With the swift pace of change in the media landscape, it's easy to overlook how far college news media has come in a short time. There has been some great innovation in college media, even as some lag behind. I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas,...
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Embeds
NYU Local Blog Connects a School with No Campus
The idea for NYU Local, the newest addition to New York University's list of publications, was born last year when founder and editor Cody Brown, 20, came up with the idea for a survey to be conducted by the Foundations of Journalism class. The survey question asked other NYU students: "Would you trade your right to vote for an iPod...
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EducationShift
Learning How to Make Multimedia Story Decisions
Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism. We started by first asking...
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EducationShift
J-Schools Use Geo-tagging, Wikis, iPhones to Teach
Professors are commonly stereotyped as people who know more about books than technology. But as classrooms are now filled with a generation who grew up with computers, iPods and the Internet, more and more professors are starting to experiment with new digital learning tools. At last week's Convergence and Society conference at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, academics...
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Digging Deeper
NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student
After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn't take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting -- even though the class she...
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Embedded Report
Journalism Grads Need Basic Skills Plus Openness, Flexibility
At journalism schools, professors like myself are trying to figure out what we should be teaching students so they can succeed in the newsrooms of today and tomorrow. At the recent Online News Association annual conference in Washington DC, I posed that question to some of the brightest minds in the media, from editors to professors to entrepreneurs. The advice...
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Embedded Report
Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School
"Nowadays it's essential for journalists to blog," says Professor Mary Quigley to a class of 16 NYU journalism students. The class is titled "Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers)," and it's one of the few NYU undergrad journalism classes that focuses on new media. I sit in Professor Quigley's class unsure of what to expect. As a member of Generation...
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EducationShift
Journalism School Students Get Fewer Textbooks, Collaborate More
With students flooding back into classrooms in universities across North America, the key to getting through this demanding first week of term is simple -- planning, planning and more planning. In practice, this means an August that becomes a hectic month of preparation, getting syllabi in order, ordering textbooks from the bookstore and making sure the technical gear and software is ready to go.
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EducationShift
Teaching the Technical Without Losing Sight of Journalism
Classic Hollywood movies tend to idealize the job of the reporter, from Cary Grant in "His Girl Friday" to Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." All they needed was a pen and a notebook. Fast-forward to the 21st century and the picture changes dramatically. Not only would they need to have strong research, reporting and writing skills, the journalists would also be expected to file for the website, upload some photos, shoot video and, of course, write for next day's paper.
more »EducationShift
University of British Columbia Takes Integrated Approach to Teaching Journalism
"Multidisciplined" and "flexible" were just two of the words in a recent ad for a paid internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. The posting listed a whole series of multimedia skills as mandatory. There was no mention of traditional journalism attributes such as accuracy, good writing or ethics, perhaps because it goes without saying. The posting demonstrates how the demands of the industry are changing as news organizations grapple to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The issue for those of us who have moved from the newsroom to the classroom is how to make journalism education relevant for the 21st century.
more »EducationShift
Last week, I had the honor of giving a speech at Arkansas State University, as part of their Lecture & Concert series -- at least, once I made it through the mechanical mayhem of American Airlines cancelling dozens of flights the same day I flew out. I also got to address a few classes in the College of Communications...
more »Digging Deeper
In Digital Age, Journalism Students Need Business, Entrepreneurial Skills
The traditional path of a journalism career has clearly shifted. In the past, a journalism student would learn about being a newspaper reporter, then take a job at a small-town paper, eventually moving up to a medium and then larger paper. Now, the reporter might launch a blog, an audio podcast or video reports as a one-person operation, handling editorial and business duties simultaneously.
more »Philosophy
New media have certainly changed the landscape of communications and education in an even more dramatic manner than electronic mass media did as was documented and analyzed by "Marshall McLuhan" in 1964. I had the good fortune to collaborate with Marshall back in the 1970s and have tried to carry on his tradition, as have others, by focusing on the impact of media independent of their content. McLuhan's pithy way of describing this approach was through the use of his one-liner "the medium is the message," which he made famous in his '64 book "Understanding Media."
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
'Open Universities' Try to Bring College to Masses
A college education in the United States can be one of the most costly in the world. For many young people, college isn't an option because of the economic strain it represents for their families. And many older people who would like to attend classes must forego studies to make ends meet. But thanks to the power of voluntary...
more »Digging Deeper
New Media Literacy as Important for Educators as Students
For so long, the focus of media literacy education has been on helping students understand the media they consume. What are the biases? Who owns what outlet? How are news reports produced? But with the rise of new media, perhaps the focus of media literacy education should shift to educating the educators -- and other adults -- about blogs,...
more »EducationShift
Journalism Education Stuck in Same Oldthink Mode as Big Media
When I visited the campus of Ball State University recently, I was struck by the number of innovative programs the school had carried out, from a live interactive TV local broadcast to its converged newsroom. Ball State is also home to the well endowed Center for Media Design, which conducted one of the most comprehensive (and expensive) usage studies,...
more »Digging Deeper
News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?
In May 2005, you could almost hear the flourish of trumpets when the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation joined with five prominent journalism graduate schools in pledging $6 million over three years to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.
more »Media Usage
'Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education'
Some years ago, my wife, my son, and I came to a parting of the ways with the Sommerville Public School System. We felt the schooling process was failing our son. The science teacher conducted no experiments but simply had students write answers to study questions while he worked crossword puzzles in front of the class. The literature instructor had managed to walk them paragraph by paragraph through a single, not particularly challenging novel for the entire school year. And the history class had not progressed much past the American Revolution after 9 months.
more »Media Usage
According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 57 percent of American teens who use the internet could be considered media creators. For the purpose of the study, a media creator was defined as someone who "created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations." Most American teens online have done two or more of these activities. 33 percent of teens share what they create online with others. 19 percent create new works by remixing content they appropriated from another source.
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