World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) 2007 June 22, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : AJE, Academic, Education, WJEC, journalism education , add a comment
The first such gathering of journalism educators is taking place next week, in Singapore. It should prove an interesting gathering — with scope for some great discussions with those involved in teaching journalism from all over the world.
There is potential for some intriguing culture clashes (intercultural exchanges?), reflecting not only the different approaches to journalism in different countries but also how it is taught and learned. For each country, I suspect these approaches are influenced by the practice of journalism, of course — plus the tradition of training, education and recruitment in the industry or profession (there’s another debate — ’sector’ might be more neutral), and the educational system(s) involved. Plus a few other factors…
The WJEC programme (pdf here) lists the many papers and sessions scheduled. It looks like an intensive week!
I’m contributing to a ‘best practices’ teaching workshop with the theme ‘Teaching Journalists in an Age of Ambiguity’ — discussing how I’ve been using a blog to encourage journalism students to engage in critical reflection — and presenting a research paper on formative feedback to journalism students.
Formative feedback for student learning — informed by philosophy? June 13, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Academic, Education, Research, SoTL, formative feedback, journalism education, learning , add a commentBizarre, perhaps, that it was research on effective feedback to students that led me to the work of Richard Rorty, philosopher who died last Friday. He introduced the term ‘final vocabulary:
These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes
(from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, CUP, 1989).
For learning and teaching, this matters because using final vocabulary in feedback tends to close down discussion or reflection on the part of the student (or so the theory goes).
In any case, telling a student that their work is ‘good’ or ‘poor’ does little, on its own, to help them learn — explaining how and why, or pointing towards this, offers much more. I suspect that final vocabulary is prevalent in a great deal of feedback to students (including my own) — at some level it’s ‘natural’. But it’s worth keeping an eye on, if one takes Rorty, David Boud and others seriously.
The Telegraph obituary puts Rorty’s influence down to clarity — an essential in journalism, of course:
One of the reasons for Rorty’s popularity, and the esteem in which he was held, was his lucidity as a writer; even in technical works for an academic audience, he was at pains to spell out his analyses clearly, and not to duck their consequences. This alone made him stand out from almost all other writers and philosophers who adopted postmodernism.
deli.cio.us meets education: social bookmarking for educators June 4, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Academic, Education, Research, SoTL, Social networking , add a commentEdtags caught my eye: a sector-specific deli.cio.us. And education has plenty of web-using professionals to make it worth trying. It says it has more than 17,000 bookmarks so far, and unsurprisingly much of the content and many of the users appear to be based in North America. The developers have made it compatible with deli.cio.us, which seems sensible.
Still early days, which perhaps is why nothing came up when I searched for “peer assessment”. However, 63 hits for “assessment” — and even 13 for “journalism”.
This is from the Edtags blurb about the project, which seems to have evolved out of an initiative at Harvard (the splendidly named Edtags Sociosemantic Networking Project):
Edtags.org is a website for educators (e.g., teachers, education graduate students, professors, librarians, etc.) to connect with people sharing similar interests, discover relevant materials that may have “eluded” the traditional card catalogue search, and store and categorize your favorite bookmarks.
One to come back to when I have more time to explore more thoroughly. Meanwhile, it’s, erm, bookmarked.
Learning gets personal — but always has been? June 1, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : HE, Personalised learning environments (PLE), elearning, learning, student experience , 1 comment so farGo easy on the hype about personalised learning environments (PLEs) as something new, advises elearning expert Chris Yapp. His hypothesis is that learning always has been personal(ised) and always will be.
It’s the organisation of education that hasn’t been so personal, he suggested at a lecture last week.
He put his finger on something here. I suspect that student satisfaction is determined partly by the level of individual attention they receive from lecturers, tutors, support staff and the rest. How much is hard to say… as, too, is how much that level of individual attention in turn affects students’ learning.
Yapp, former head of public sector innovation with Microsoft, focused more on economic scaleability — and the hope that technology could make personalised learning (more) possible on a larger scale. He reckons it would take 30 years for elearning to transform the experience of education in this way, in a widespread and ‘embedded’ fashion. If so, I might be around to see it happen…
One example of research on PLEs (sometimes characterised as another step on from VLEs, virtual learning environments) is the PLE project at Bolton University.