Teaching Examples

I’ve been invited to give a Flash journalism workshop at the NPPA 60th Anniversary Photojournalism Summit, June 23-25, at the
Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay in Tampa, Fla. I’m very excited about this, because the National Press Photographers Association is the premier organization for U.S. photojournalists, and this is their biggest event of the year.

Technorati tags: photojournalism | Flash journalism

The Guardian put up A teacher’s guide to blogging in January. It’s very brief, nicely done. The article is part of the larger Special Report: Weblogs from the renowned British newspaper, which has a fine Newsblog of its own.

I required journalism students to keep individual blogs last fall. I liked the results and will probably do it again the next time I teach the course.

Larry Pryor, who teaches in USC’s journalism program, wrote (PDF file) that he “began using a Weblog as a teaching tool in 1999.”

I won’t kid you — most of my students didn’t like it. By the end of the semester, they got really tired of writing two posts a week — even though they had chosen their own topics. But I thought, hey, if you don’t want to write two short news items a week, maybe you’re not cut out to be a journalist.

Technorati tags: blogs | teaching | journalism

Today I looked at QuackTrack — more specifically, QuackTrack’s list of blogs in the Journalism category. Journalism is a sub-category of Media. The only subcategory within Journalism is, interestingly to me, Photojournalism, where I discovered the engrossing blog PhotoJournalism, by Mark M. Hancock. (Today he has Mardi Gras pictures.) There are 43 blogs in Photojournalism, compared with 641 blogs in Journalism.

There are lots of sites where we can search for blogs by category and/or by tags. These include Technorati, Kinja (try a search for online journalism) and Google Blog Search.

I’m making a note of all this because there are times when I feel a need to check and see what’s happening off the radar, away from the big and better-known blogs that either discuss journalism or practice it, or both.

Technorati tags: blogs | journalism | photojournalism |

Today NPR did a radio story about one of my current favorite examples of great online multimedia, Folk Songs for the Five Points. I love this package not only because it’s different from anything else I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a LOT of multimedia) but also because it tells a story in a truly nonlinear way, a story about New York — specifically the Lower East Side, where I lived in 1982 when it was not yet the trendy boutique locale it later became. So maybe I have a bias, because I know these “songs”; they resonate in my memory and take me to a place that I once knew well.

I love so many things about this piece — the way it invites us to explore; the way it encourages us to listen before we read, before we see the photograph; and (sure, of course, absolutely) the way it uses Flash to do things we couldn’t do in print or broadcast media.

Folk Songs for the Five Points was produced for the Tenement Museum, not for or by a news organization.

Technorati tags: audio | multimedia | storytelling | Flash journalism | examples

Six years ago I concentrated on teaching my students the “browser-safe” palette. That’s not so important nowadays. But a lot of journalism students still don’t know anything about using color effectively.

The Color Scheme Generator is a great help.

I’ve used a lot of similar tools over the years, but this one is the best ever. I still see a need to introduce students to the color wheel and the idea of color as a science (rather than something we just cook up based on luck and personal preference), but there’s so much material to cover, I have to keep color theory to a very small portion of the course.

Technorati tags: color | design

OhmyNews (English version here), the robust Korean citizen-journalism Web site, got US$11 million from Softbank, a Japanese investment firm. Softbank received a nearly 13 percent stake in OhmyNews in the deal. OhmyNews said it will start a Japanese-language news site (when? Don’t know).

Full story at Red Herring.

Technorati tags: journalism | citizen journalism | online journalism

Ray Villalobos has started posting FREE Flash tutorials on his Web site. For example, here’s how to build a slideshow that loads photos or animations from an external source.

Ray is the director of multimedia for Mega Communications and former interactive designer for the Orlando Sentinel’s Web site. He’s going to share one new Flash tip with us every week! Wow!!

To view the video tutorial, you need to have the latest version of Quicktime or iTunes installed; most other players are not compatible.

See the list of all Ray’s latest Flash tips.

Technorati tags: Flash | tutorial | podcast | multimedia

Pierre who? Yeah, I know. So I read this very nice (and SHORT) piece written by the always excellent Katha Pollitt on the occasion of Bourdieu’s death in 2002.

While reading Bourdieu’s (also very SHORT) book On Television, I can’t help but marvel at how the Internet is hardly even mentioned (I think he might have said “information superhighway” once). Yet much of what he said then (in 1998) is very relevant to today’s journalism online, as well as on television and in print. (I’m thinking of the so-called A-List bloggers in particular.)

It’s the kind of criticism that makes journalists’ hackles stand up. He calls us “anti-intellectual,” after all — and to most journalists, that sounds like he’s saying we are stupid brutes. Bourdieu isn’t saying that, in fact. I’m quite sure he isn’t.

But he is saying that we — both journalists and journalism educators — are products of our field, the journalism field. We are acculturated just as biologists are acculturated in their field, and politicians in theirs. Come on, can you really argue that that is not true? How could we offer courses in journalism ethics if that were not true?

I’m not prepared to expand on this yet (must read more first; e.g., Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field). But I’m thinking about those tried-and-true phrases, “speak truth to power,” and “gatekeeper,” and “watchdog.” I’m thinking about what we say and what we do, and whether those two things are in conflict today. And if so, how much.

Technorati tags: books | Bourdieu | theory | journalism | journalism practice | journalism field

Okay, sometimes I will just have to post something about blogging and bloggers. Not that I consider these unimportant in today’s media universe, but bloggers writing about bloggers writing about bloggers is really just too incestuous for me most of the time.

But what I’ve been reading THIS WEEK about blogging and bloggers is of interest in relation to journalism in general, and online journalism in particular.

First, there is this report by David Sifry from Technorati data. My capsule summary:

You look at where most links from blogs go, and you find that of the top 33 sites linked to, only four are not mainstream media (MSM). Fact: Many blog links point to traditional journalism on the Web.

But then you go down the list, after those 33, to what Sifry dubs “The Magic Middle,” and you find a lot more non-MSM blogs there. Sifry points out that these are niche blogs, well-written, focusing on such subjects as food, technology and music. He suggests that — and here’s the tip for savvy journalists — THIS is where you’ll spot new trends before they seep into the mainstream. And just to make it easy for you, Technorati has herded them into a special little place called Explore.

So, cool.

Then there was this Linkology thing from New York magazine, part of a clump of articles that includes a timeline of blog history.

I was not going to mention the New York Magazine articles because they struck me as just more of the incestuous blogger-link-party lifestyle, which is terribly important to a rarefied community of blogophiles but really does not come down and rub shoulders with the masses, especially those of us living far from the centers of media power. And yet, there are some tasty factoids in there, and maybe they’ll come in handy for a little blog research project I’m working on with a colleague.

Technorati tags: journalism | blogs | blogging | Magic Middle

Something I have been thinking about a lot this semester. I left my comfy home environment last year and spent eight months in Malaysia. In addition to all the cultural knowledge I gained there, I also thought a lot about how we teach and what results we should be trying to produce (because I was teaching students in a foreign university, and I was making all kinds of mental comparisons).

When I first started teaching here in Florida, I thought I could structure my courses in a way that did not require me to spend a lot of time grading the students’ work. Well, that didn’t work well. I learned that both undergraduates and graduate students will not do the work unless they know they are getting a grade on it.

This leads me to quizzes and how I am using them now. It seems to be working pretty well.

The quizzes I give in my skills courses are designed to reward a student who has read the assigned readings for that day. These quizzes are tedious to write (for me) and I think they are somewhat tedious for the students to take too. But they seem to achieve the desired result. I can tell that almost all of the students are really reading what was assigned — and that means I can go further and faster in my lecture, and they are better prepared to do the practical work assigned to them.

Now that we have started working on Flash in my advanced Web design course, I even tell them pretty much explicitly (on the online syllabus) what questions I will ask in the quiz. The point is not to trick them, or to make them memorize trivia. The whole point of the quiz is to encourage them to BE PREPARED when they come to class that day.

I was searching online for some kind of guidelines for teachers creating quizzes. I found a lot of technical stuff about quizzes for “online learning” — but very little about how to create a useful quiz. I did find one very informative site, About Tests, from a mathematics professor at the University of South Florida. He covers some really good points. (Be sure to read the part about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That ought to make you think long and hard about what tests do measure.)

Two things that I have concluded:

(1) Whenever possible, make the question a short-answer question. It is very difficult to write truly fair and clear multiple-choice answers for most questions. Short answer also shows whether the student really knew the answer.

(2) Go over the answers in detail immediately after the quiz. Everything a student didn’t know for the quiz is thus emphasized. To reduce the number of beggers (“But I really meant …”) after grading, prompt the students to shout out the answers. It is then obvious to the beggers that there really WAS one right answer.

And finally, as much as I dislike entering all those grades every week, I have found that weekly quizzes work very well for the students. They acquiesce. They quit kidding themselves. They read the assigned texts — because they know they will do badly on the quiz if they don’t.

And then, quite simply, they learn more.

Technorati tags: teaching | quizzes | assessment | testing