Eje team

This link posted by colleagues at CMALT is great as it gives guiding principles in making instructional videos.  Can be applied across a number of disciplines while not telling you how to suck eggs.  I can see it will be extremely useful in the restructuring of our journalism programme as the teaching will become more student-directed as we raise the stakes in this multimedia environment:

(See https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/ for example).

As we continue to embrace alternative methods of teaching in higher education, I came across this post which was shared by CMALT:  http://elearningstuff.net/2011/07/11/podcast-workflow/

Trying to embed my Shorthand story in wordpress:

Danni’s Shorthand

Joel’s shorthand:  Joel’s Shorthand

Danni’s Spark

By Sarah Jones (Salford University)

Just reminding myself how good this interactive video is that was produced by Sarah Jones:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/mojo-tips-tricks-to-make-great/id1054049137?mt=13

This article from Mediashift discusses how an American academic is bringing social video into the classroom.  The author makes some good points about industry expectations, and the clip at the bottom of the page is worth a look.

Media Shift link

My summer thoughts are on Facebook’s new initiative to develop “journalists” of its contributors.  So this post aims to give some context to what was announced by Zuckerberg and his  team on Wednesday.

As we know, there has been a global adoption of online platforms and devices for news – largely as a supplement to radio and TV broadcast news but often at the expense of print.  Data from  the Pew Research Centre and Reuters tell us what we already figured:  more and more audiences are getting their news through aggregators and social network rather than a published news websites.  The latest report from Reuters (2016) which surveyed 26 countries (didn’t include NZ but did include Australia!) found that overall more than half of all people (51%) say they use Social Media for news so that’s sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.  But certainly, Facebook is the biggest social network in the world in popularity, a dominant position it has held for two years now.   Across 26 countries, 44% of respondents say they use Facebook for news, which in turn represents two-thirds of all Facebook users. YouTube is also a key network (19%) while Twitter remains an important social network for news (10%) favoured by journalists, politicians, and heavy news users in particular.

In light of this trend, Facebook has made a few moves in the past year which add context to what comes next.

Last year, Facebook suffered embarrassment when it was publicly discovered that their news was based on subjective selection (not just algarithms) rather than news feeds. Interestingly Twitter and Instagram ducked that one to some degree.   Then they introduced a feature allowing users to flag fake stories in their news feed, but in all reality, it has done little to stem the flow of false information.  Those of us in the sector are recognising that the verification of published news has become a significant issue, highlighted most recently with the “false news” phenomenon. False news of course, is nothing new … it’s been around for hundreds of years in various shapes and forms. But the publication of a piece of information without first checking it flies in the face of one of the key tenets in journalism. And many would argue that it serves as a fundamental boundary between journalism and other forms of public communication, citizen journalism and that kind of thing.

So it’s not surprising that we’re at a time when attitudes around trust in news is declining. And part of this is being blamed on the affordances of the Internet, such as social media sharing and our ability to create and publish content in varying ways. People see the same news stories coming from different editorial stances. And as we look at sources information which are ever more diverse, we see news mixed with hoaxes, speculation or subjective reports on social media. And it’s believed that all this is leading to heightened skepticism about the truthfulness of news outlets.

Mark Zuckerberg and his team have announced the Facebook Journalism Project to capitalise on reversing the distrust. And – he’s a smart man – this announcement is timely (false news, Trump etc.).  So they’ve hired a high-profile former CNN Reporter, (Ms) Campbell Brown who has a had over 20 yrs in broadcast journalism (renowned for challenging Barak Obama as been too paternalistic in the way he addressed women) and some pretty solid/credible project partners.  The main ones are the  Poynter Institute, journalism school based in Florida, born out of the Modern Media Institute in 1975. It is known as a school that would help working journalists improve their skills to the benefit of their communities. Today, the paper, now called the Tampa Bay Times, is the largest in Florida and one of the biggest in America.  The other is First Draft, which is a nonprofit coalition created 18 months ago June to raise awareness and address challenges relating to trust and truth, and in particular verification and fact-checking. First Draft partners with a number of companies including Youtube, Twitter and about 20 NGO’s.

The tools Facebook is using to promote this initiative sound sexy:

CrowdTangle – basically a social analytics tool which curates data into “top ten” series and posts it on the CrowdTangle blog site e.g. “Top Retweets of 2016” that kind of thing.  In journalism we’d call it “listicles”

Facebook Live – real-time video from public figures you follow and your friends will appear in your News Feed. When you’re watching a live video or a video that was live, you can tap or click Subscribe to get notified the next time that Facebook account starts a live broadcast.   News orgs will tell you that you almost double your hit rate when you put video on your site, yet Reuters research shows that people still have a preference for text due to time constraints.

Conclusion

In my opinion,  I think we will see more of these initiatives.  Facebook is not the only one; for example, last year Google created the News Lab to support the creation and distribution of quality journalism, with a teaching programme, and a fellowship for budding investigative journalists.   However, with access to the Internet and social spaces, the boundaries have shifted – and journalism studies academics have been writing about this for about 15 years now. There is no doubt that journalists have lost the gate-keeping role when it comes to news, they are now part of a wider conversation.

At the same time, social networks like FB see that quality content attracts audiences. News organisations all use FB, so perhaps they may to be blame for unleashing this monster!  It is certainly the beginning of a new phase of media disruption.   And I tend to agree with the Reuters Institute that it’s hard to know how far – or how fast – the shift to news distribution by social media companies.

But as newsmakers, journalists and journalism educators, we can’t stomp our feet and say “that’s not on!”. News organisations will need to keep adapting to the changes ahead.  And while there is a growing influence of platforms, subjective news treatment and selection, and algorithms, I think that people still want, value, and identify with traditional news brands that they trust.  So perhaps it’s a case for news organisations recognising that their ability to maintain audiences lies in their trustworthy content?  As it is that content which reinforces our role as the fourth estate within a democracy.  And content is king.

Reference:

Reuters Digital Report 2016 retrieved http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/

Taking on the Challenge of Verification at the J-School Hackathon at Georgia

Some interesting examples of VR usage:  FRONTLINE AND EMBLEMATIC VR

This year we attempted to introduce more multimedia into the general  journalism curriculum ahead of the new multimedia practice papers coming on-stream in March next year (2017).

What has become very clear during the curriculum design period is that professional development for all teaching staff is important. Most of us had left the news industry some years ago before the introduction of many of the new tools.

Therefore, we held a couple of professional development days at the beginning of the year, and were involved in discussions about this at the DCT Learning and Teaching Forum in February.

Several of us also discussed our plans and presented our research at the World Journalism Education Congress here at AUT in July, before writing up our experiences for an edited book to be published early next year.

Here is the programme for the first of the professional development days:

general-event-program

And here are photos from the afternoon of that day showing Danni with star video trainer Andy Day.

The discussion at the Faculty Learning and Teaching Forum kicked off with a presentation giving an overview of how our curriculum redesign had come about, the concepts that had guided it and where we had progressed to at that point.

Here are the slides of that presentation.

prezi-rewrite

First glance at the CMALT accreditation application I thought “cripes, another long-winded essay I can do without” but I am embarrassed to say, that I actually LIKED writing about myself (doesn’t sound like you, I hear my EJE colleagues say!).

The portfolio I was required to produce, forced me to apply my practical teaching resources within a learning and teaching technology context.  It made me realise how much I had achieved while on auto-pilot, just getting on with ploughing through the coursework and bringing new ideas to it for 12 years. I was able to use content I had created dating way back in past history, but actually going back to and reflecting on it made it valuable after all.  Such as a 15-week course I had produced for Oman (Engish second language University) that I had completely forgotten I had done! Even though it took days/weeks/months of hard work to do it.  Yet, it was quite effective in helping me to be able to demonstrate one of the MALT principles I needed to address.

To be honest, it was hard to track down evidence in a few cases, a salient reminder to keep up with my personal file content management and using logical file names and places.   But the more I got into it the more I enjoyed doing it.  The application requirements are really well laid out, they have marking criteria and exemplars (sounds like a University assessment).  So you just have to follow their instructions and proposed structure, and reflect on key areas backing up your claims with evidence (colleague statements, screen shots, links to content etc.)

I know that I will draw on elements of this within future projects where technology – whether smart devices or traditional equipment – are used to enable learning and teaching in my field.

I still need to go through one last time to check for spelling and grammar, but if you are interested in looking here is the portfolio I created.  I recommend anyone considering apply for CMALT accreditation, to go for it:  https://daniellemulrennan.wordpress.com/