Students suffer media withdrawal: clue to future of journalism? May 21, 2010
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentRegina McCombs reports: “Students use the language of addiction and withdrawal in talking about their experiences going without technology for 24 hours during a study at the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism.
‘I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening,’ said one student. ‘Although I started the day feeling good, I noticed my mood started to change around noon. I started to feel isolated and lonely,’ said another. [...]??Students equated technology with media — the phones, iPods, computers, laptops and televisions were just a means to get to information, whether that information was about the world around them, or about their friends. And much of that technology is mobile. Phones in particular [...] ‘A truer mapping of those pathways could provide direction to journalists in their search for relevance in the century ahead’. ”
Digital Doorstepping Done Right January 17, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentAdam Tinworth (RBI) on digital doorstepping, “the practice of media diving into blogs or social networks looking for quotes and interviewees for their stories, particularity in the aftermath of a tragedy”.
He recounts “an example of digital doorstepping done, as far as I can see, right” — using interviewees/quotes found through (RBI’s) Community Care magazine forums [fora?].
The Future of Journalism in 560 Words (Four Tweets) « J-School: Educating Independent Journalists January 16, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentFrom Christopher Anderson, PhD student at Columbia:
"Successful journalism is social; the powerful institutions they watch are bureaucracies. What to do?
Social movements are social, like media, and they watch powerful institutions the same way journalism should and used to.
Therefore, a successful– and moral– future journalism will be place-based aggregations of the struggles of relevant social movements.
And objectivity will not be an attitude of disinterest, but an “objectfulness”– a gathering together of objects (once called “reporting.”)"
How The Times followed a trail to find Barack Obama’s aunt – Times Online November 5, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentFollowing clues from Obama’s 1995 book, reporters tracked down Aunt Zeituni via Kenya, searches of public records, and persistent fieldwork. This took them to Boston but they still needed someone to identify Zeituni positively:
“It was not until Wednesday evening that The Times obtained a formal identification of Ms Onyango by George Hussein, Mr Obama’s half-brother who had known her throughout his childhood.
Whatever the Democrat campaign may imply, there is nothing suspicious about the story or its timing. The only mystery, perhaps, is how so many people read Mr Obama’s book in the US without wondering what might have happened to the mysterious relative, lost in America.”
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Glasgow Uni launches SoTL website October 25, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Academic, HE, SoTL, educational development , add a commentIs this a first for a UK university? Glasgow has launched a website dedicated to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), punningly called BeSoTLed — and it’s more than just a page with links to some of the (much more plentiful) sites in North America.
This initiative has grown out of a learning community of teaching staff at Glasgow University, particularly Lorna Morrow (psychology), Rob McKerlie (dentistry) and Jane MacKenzie (Learning and Teaching Centre). Congrats to them. These three seem to have an open and encouraging way of describing their involvement with SoTL — for example, I like the way they
do not see themselves as SoTL experts but as SoTL enthusiasts.
Glasgow University seems to have been encouraging SoTL more actively in recent years. It became the only European member of the Building SoTL Communities project, supported by the Carnegie Academy. The six others are all in the USA or Canada. Glasgow also set up a SoTL journal a few years ago — the Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
The BeSoTLed website points to other activities, too — indeed, there’s an accompanying Moodle site, which sadly is accessible only to Glasgow staff.
Good stuff. Which also it makes me wonder why the HEA hasn’t created something like this, as far as I’m aware, as a central resource to encourage SoTL in UK higher education. Of course the HEA has supported initiatives such as this one at City, where we do our bit for SoTL, too, with an international conference almost annually, and schemes for SoTL research and recognition. Among other things.
New image search tutorial from Intute and TASI October 15, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentWorth a look. I find the interface clunky but it's a useful resource to which to point people who might not know their way around this area (from the Intute blog):
"Internet for Image Searching is a new, free online tutorial to help staff and students in universities and colleges to find digital images for their learning and teaching:
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/tutorial/imagesearching/
[…]
The emphasis of the tutorial is on finding copyright cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources."
Does online-only news narrow readers’ understanding? | The Australian October 12, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThat’s what an Australian ad/comms agency suggests, drawing on its survey of 200 people:
“…by using online as an exclusive source of news people are starting to consume more information but — and this is the important point — across fewer topic areas. […]
…as consumers of news we’re becoming increasingly intelligent or knowledgeable about very niche topic areas, but from an overall perspective, our understanding of world and national events is a bit more superficial. […]
…70.1 per cent claimed that the internet allows them to avoid news topics that are not of interest. […]
…online news readers are not typically venturing outside the same few topics or information areas — 59.9 per cent tend to read information from the same sections.[…] However, 62.7 per cent of people claim that when they buy a paper they often read articles that they hadn’t intended to.”
Time for journalism academics to get real (Tim Luckhurst) | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk September 30, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentMight reflect lack of funding for such debates/research; low level of cross-over between business and journalism within universities; and the focus primarily on teaching journalism and, for most research, on other aspects of journalism more likely to attract funding (for research). Perhaps Luckhurst will be asking Kent Messenger group to fund it…
"There is a real opportunity here for journalism academics to step beyond the stale and abstract and engage with harsh reality. Can we stimulate a plausible, productive debate about the media economics of the internet era? Can we devise a model in which good reporters can be employed and good journalism can thrive? It would be the best possible response to those who doubt whether journalism has a place in universities."