The last year-and-a-half has seen the Journalism team at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) involved in reworking the curriculum in the light of both the huge changes in journalism practice afforded by mobile and social media and the reshaping of the news industry post the internet.

If you have read earlier posts on this blog, you will know that we have been researching the use of mobile and social media in journalism education for more than four years, and gradually introduced it into some parts of our curriculum beginning in 2012. See a report at http://idealog.co.nz/venture/2012/12/revolution . During this time we kept a record of our experiences at https://ejeteam.wordpress.com/page/3/. Our success in these pilot projects encouraged us to use our experiences for a much bigger project.

I became the Curriculum Leader of Journalism at AUT in February 2015, and straight away talked to the team about their willingness to become involved in an overhaul of the entire journalism curriculum. They were all prepared, and hence we divided into two teams: one reworking the undergraduate curriculum; the second the postgraduate curriculum. Every member of the journalism team is involved in one team or the other and I sit on both teams. My role is to oversee the project as a whole, ensuring there is consistency and writing up reports on the meetings each week.

The process we embarked on had these stages:

1. First, there needed to be justification for the change that we all agreed on. You don’t just change things for change’ sake. To help us come to an agreement, research was carried out ethnographically in several newsrooms in New Zealand and abroad (this continues), and visits were made to two leading journalism schools in the UK and the US. We also completed a comprehensive literature review to see what other academics as well as commentators in the trade press were saying. Following this research, we all agreed that the news industry was disrupted and traditional ways of being a journalist were no longer relevant, accordingly our curriculum needed a root-and-branch update.
2. Secondly, staff needed to be prepared for the changes, emotionally and in our skill-base. Most of us had trained as journalists when manual typewriters were still the norm, and hence there was a lot of fear around the new technologies involved in journalism now. Frankly, modern journalism is a tech industry and some of us didn’t even have Twitter accounts. The piloted courses had helped and more than half the staff were involved in a community of practice we set up in 2011/12 to model the use of social media tools. Before the re-write occurred, we were clear that we were all in this together and nobody would be left behind, but we accepted we all had to up-skill. To this end, we had been helped enormously by two technical stewards from our Centre for Learning and Teaching who worked with our community of practice on a weekly basis, and were involved in two full-day professional development workshops to introduce us all to important social media tools.
   

   
3. These training days also involved working with a video tutor on the shooting and editing of video and a digital media expert on the use of online verification tools. The technical stewards are also attending our weekly re-write meetings. Crucial to all of this was the provision of equipment such as mini ipads, smartphones and certain accessories for these. CfLAT provided much of this kit, without which we believe none of this updating would be possible.
4. At the start of the re-write process we laid out our pedagogical philosophy to ensure we were all on the same page. This philosophy stated that we believe our curriculum should be multimedia and we accept that most journalists now work in a mobile-first environment. Also that we would encourage student-directed learning (known as Heutogogy) through various strategies such as reflective blogging, use of twitter and reading around and about the industry. Finally, we believe that this student-directed learning leads to the acquisition of life-long learning skills needed for our students to stay relevant professionally. We also agreed that each week I would write up the notes from the meetings and share them via Google Docs. 
5. Our final step before starting on the re-write proper was to decide what is the aim of the change in terms of our students. What do we want them to know. In order to determine this we discussed graduate profiles and outlined some journalism-specific attributes. For the postgraduate re-write we actually wrote a profile – see below: 

   Postgraduate profile – Creative Practice

    A student who has successfully completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Communications, Journalism Pathway, will be able to appraise and reflect on the role of journalism in the 21^st century. They will demonstrate professional, legally sound and ethical reporting capabilities that reflect the requirements of today’s multimedia journalism. They will employ and appraise innovative and flexible approaches to news production that take advantage of the growing opportunities in the digital media environment.

    A graduate of the course will understand the need for and demonstrate competency in the delivery of fast-breaking, accurate news on social media and other online media. They will be able to initiate and develop in-depth stories with elements across multiple platforms and engage professionally with their audience in the delivery and development of stories.

   Postgraduate Certificate students who have successfully completed the journalism pathway will be able to assess and edit news stories with text, images, audio and video for inclusion in online and print news production, and manage their production and publication to a professional level. They will also demonstrate competency in the production and evaluation of a piece of long-form journalism to a publishable standard.

   These graduates will have the ability to competently reflect on and report the activities of the courts, local authorities, the emergency services and other publically accountable bodies. They will also be able to professionally assess the role of the journalist with respect to bicultural and multicultural relationships.

    Finally, a graduate of the course will be able to reflect on and assess their news-related decision-making with an eye to continual improvement and to meeting the ever-changing world of today’s journalism.

    

6.  Then came the serious job of what shape of the both curricula should take and how best to staircase the learning, that is what to include and when. To help us achieve this, we established what kind of flexibility we had. In the postgraduate curriculum, we were able to change the shape radically to allow for more learning around news production in the first semester, as this requires learning around news selection, structure and writing, as well as audio and still and moving image skills. The undergraduate curriculum had no flexibility and so we had to stick with the structure and up-date the existing papers. The next step was to write a new prescriptor and learning outcomes for each paper. We laid these out clearly in a matrix to clearly see a) that the necessary learning was being enable. B) that staircasing is occurring.
7. Our next job is to design the assessments. We have this underway, but are not finished yet.  Among our first decisions were those to reduce the number of assessments and put some of the learning and testing of this learning online, including for shorthand and style and grammar. We expect that our new curriculum will be taught from January 2016.

 

The AUT Newsroom

Running alongside the rewrite to the curriculum, but also considered crucial to it, was the establishment of the AUT Newsroom with a journalist-in-residence and a web editor.

Running a newsroom with working journalists was considered the best way to give the students an authentic learning experience in an environment as close to reality as possible. Proposals were put to the school, the faculty and the university and a pilot of the newsroom was run during semester 1 and semester 2 of 2015. At the end of 2016, it was decided that a full-time newsroom would run at least until the end of July 2016. We hope its value will be recognised and it will be funded year round on a permanent footing.

The newsroom serves the print editions of Te Waha Nui and the website tewahanui.nz .Students spend two weeks in the newsroom working alongside our journalism team and feeding stories on a daily basis.

We believe a lot has been achieved in the year since we started the re-write, and we continue in 2016 confident that we are on the right track.

Outputs from our research

The journalism department at AUT is hosting the World Journalism Education Congress, the largest and most important gathering of journalism educators in the world, in July and the team has had five papers linked to the curriculum rewrite accepted for presentation.

In addition to those latest papers, the following outputs have resulted from the research.

Journal articles and book chapters

Smith, P., & Sissons, H. (Under review). Social media and a case of mistaken identity: A newspaper’s response to journalistic error. Journalism

Cochrane, T., Sissons, H., Rive, V. $ Mulrennan, D. (2016). Journalism and Law 2.0: Collaborative Curriculum Redesign. In: Parsons, D (Ed.). Mobile and blended learning innovations for improved learning outcomes. IGI Global, Web. 17 Mar. 2016.doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-0359-0

Cochrane, T., Sissons, H., Mulrennan, D. & Pamatatau, R. (2013). Journalism 2.0: Exploring the impact of Mobile and Social Media on Journalism Education. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 5(2).

Sissons, H. (2014). Using social media. In Grant Hannis (ed). Intro: A beginner’s guide to journalism in 21st-century Aotearoa/New Zealand. Lower Hutt: New Zealand Journalist Training Organisation.

Sissons, H. & Mulrennan, D. (2014). Writing for news websites. In Grant Hannis (ed). Intro: A beginner’s guide to journalism in 21st-century Aotearoa/New Zealand. Lower Hutt: New Zealand Journalist Training Organisation.

Conferences

Cochrane, T., Mulrennan, D., Sissons., H., Pamatatau, R., & Barnes, L. (July, 2013). Mobilizing Journalism Education. Paper to be presented at ICITE, International Conference on Infromation Communication Technologies in Education, Crete. Also full paper published in the proceedings.

Cochrane, T., Sissons, H., & Mulrennan, D. (April, 2012). Journalism 2.0: Exploring the impact of Mobile and Social Media on Journalism Education. In I. A. Sánchez & P. Isaias (Eds.), Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Mobile Learning 2012 (pp. 165-172). Berlin, Germany: IADIS International Association for Development of the Information Society.

 

This week we had our first opportunity to formally assess how willing and receptive the students have been to the introduction of social media into the teaching of journalism here at AUT University in Auckland. Our preparatory research had shown us that few studies have been conducted into the effects of introducing social media into the classroom, although papers have been written about their use outside the classroom and how they might be incorporated into education. Therefore, our analysis of their effectiveness will add significantly to the field.

The project aims to influence the development of the journalism curriculum by encouraging lecturers to integrate the use of mobile social media using student-owned devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets). We believe the rapid growth of social media and its use by journalists and their sources must be reflected in the courses we teach. Further, by incorporating real experiences of social media and the modeling of their use within courses we aim to engage and empower students. Therefore we afforded opportunities to use social media to communicate inside and outside the classroom and reworked several assessments.

Besides introducing Twitter as an excellent way to encourage or further discussion during and after class, we wanted to revamp the academic essay. Hence, this term, for the first time, we introduced an essay assignment in one post-graduate class which, instead of being written in a traditional format, could be compiled in Storify.com. Storify allows the writer to embed into their work photos, tweets, blogs etc which have been posted on social media sites. In order to create a story, the website asks for a title and a description after which it directs the writer to the search tool where they can search for information relating to their topic on the internet. Once the appropriate information is found, it is dragged and dropped into the story. The user can then write their thoughts and link to the content found online. We asked that the students mix academic sources, referenced as usual, with at least three social media sources.

Students were allowed to choose whether to utilize Storify, although we did encourage them to have a go with the application before making their decision. Of 24 students in the class, only three did not use Storify: one because he had problems with an internet connection during the time set aside to write the essay and another because the software failed him.

The question the students had to answer was: How if at all have social media altered the way journalists and public relations practitioners interact?” Use real examples from at least three social media platforms as well as academic sources to back up your arguments.

Two members of staff marked the essays and very quickly realized that while a Storify essay can take longer to mark, a well-crafted one is far more engaging, being multimedia, than a traditional essay. The marks students received were spread from C to A+ which is the spread we would expect in a traditional essay. Several students lost marks because they failed to address the question and because their examples lacked relevance. Other students failed to make the most of the new format and wrote their essays as they  would a regular essay, and used the minimum of social media examples.

The best essays, however, made the most of the platform and the freedom to include multimedia examples. These students also altered their style and the way they wrote into the examples to make their essays fit the medium. Further, by using a mixture of books, journal articles and discussions on social media, these students were able to explore the question far more deeply than most of those who stuck to the more traditional format.

Initial feedback from students suggests they enjoyed the opportunity to explore social media in a way other that for social purposes. Most also realize the need to be confident using social media for their future role as professional communicators.

In conclusion we believe the use of Storify in this essay was a success. The question was particularly suited to the use of social media tools. It perhaps would not have worked with a different essay question.

The project

It’s been five weeks since the start of the new year at AUT University in Auckland and when we began to implement ideas developed as part of the Social Media Project. However, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to reflect on our progress.

The project aims to explore the use of social media in the classroom to teach journalism; specifically to teach how journalists employ social media tools.In other words, we want to teach the use of social media through the tools themselves.  In the past year or two we have used case studies to study how journalists are using social media, but we believe this new approach takes the learning to a deeper level. We are now asking students to use the tools themselves to talk about and analyse their case studies.

Eventually we hope the project will influence the development of the journalism curriculum to take into account the rapid growth of social media and its use by journalists and their sources. This is our first goal.

The second goal looks at we, the educators. In order to model the use of social media tools, we as educators have to have access to the tools and the ability to use them. So the second goal of our project is to up-skill the teachers. To try to achieve this we have set up a Community of Practice which I’ll talk about later.

Why we believe this is important

The goal of Journalism education is two-fold; firstly it is to train practitioners to a level where they can enter a newsroom and work as competent juniors. Secondly, it is to teach them in a theoretical sense to explore the processes and consequences of their industry.

To be able to succeed in either of these goals, journalism educators have to keep current and relevant. However in the last ten years thanks to the internet, the industry has transformed. According to the BBC’s newsroom deputy head, Kevin Bakhurst, social media is the latest “tectonic plate to move and change the landscape” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2011/09).

These changes have led to the recognition that to survive news organisations have to innovate. It has also led some organisations to look to their newest recruits to be the innovators. Yet in our experience, while students may know how to use these tools to run their social lives, they have little idea of how to employ them in the professional sphere. Research I carried out while developing the project showed me that some newsrooms view young journalists with a mixture of awe at their ability to use the tools to source stories, and horror at their “unprofessionalism”. They find their style overly familiar, they raise their eyebrows at their habit of talking about their social life while communicating professionally and find they are liable to blurt out a scoop before their own newsroom has published it (although this last sin isn’t restricted to young journalists).

Besides visiting newsrooms, I also visited two leading journalism schools at Cardiff University and the University of Arizona to see how they were developing their curriculum to reflect industry changes. Professor Bob Franklin of the Cardiff School of Journalism argues that journalism is primarily a vocational subject, no matter how much of a “university-style” theoretical added-value we give it. Therefore, he says, all courses have to teach their students the tools they will need.

“The question you have to ask if you are serious about offering a vocational education is what do they do at 9 o’clock on Monday morning when the new employer says to them ‘do this’ and they say ‘we never did that on the course’? If they say that, you’re in deep trouble and you can’t expect to recruit people who these days pay high fees. They come to learn a trade, a lot more than that, and a trade they can exercise on a range of platforms and we fail them if we don’t do that.” (Personal Communication, 25 June 2011).

Senior Associate Dean, Marianne Barrett, of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism said that her school had also recognised the importance of social media to journalists. From 2010 all students were taught how to use the tools.

This project is a response to the findings outlined above. We believes that if AUT is to remain New Zealand’s leading journalism school, then the curriculum must recognize the importance of social media to the industry. Therefore the project will explore the possibilities and implications of Journalism 2.0 within the context of journalism education. Journalism 2.0 is defined by us as involving the exploration of two parallel aspects of social media in journalism education: exploring the embedding and modelling of social media in the delivery and pedagogy of a journalism course, and the exploration of the use and impact of social media on the practice of journalism in authentic contexts.
Who is involved

To develop the project, I have been lucky enough to receive funding from AUT’s Centre for Learning and Teaching. A grant to buy me out of some of my teaching has given me space to rethink the curriculum of the two courses I am leading this semester. I was aided by one of my students winning a summer research assistantship and so she was able to work alongside me exploring different social media platforms and how we might integrate them into the courses.

As AUT is a former polytech and journalism is a vocational subject, traditionally our staff have heavy teaching loads. This has not changed despite the expectation that we pursue postgraduate qualifications (I am writing up my Phd at the moment) and produce more research outputs. Therefore grants such as that offered by CfLAT are imperative if these kinds of projects are to succeed.

I also had the support of a technology steward (Dr Thomas Cochrane from CfLAT) in building my abilities to model the tools. Thomas and I immediately set about creating a Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) within the journalism department to support  other lecturers build expertise in the use of the tools. Two of my colleagues were keen to join from the start: Danni Mulrennan who leads the television journalism papers and the large second year journalism paper, and Richard Pamatatau, who is programme leader of the  Graduate Diploma in Pacific Journalism and teaches on the core third year journalism writing paper. We are hopeful that others will join as several staff members have indicated a wish to learn more and it is recognised within the department that the practice of journalism has been transformed by the internet and social media.

I believe the creation of  this Community of Practice along with the involvement of Thomas are crucial to stair-casing  lecturer learning and encouraging familiarisation with the tools in a safe environment. This idea of a technology steward working with a CoP  has real merit for us if we are to get real change.

Both Danni and Richard came to the CoP with exciting ideas for how to embed social media into their curricula and a real desire to learn more about and examine these new platforms.

Progress so far

My next post will discuss the progress so far.