E-flections

Is this the future of interactive, collaborative online courses?

Tina Brown’s new online vessel, the Daily Beast, has just launched, with the philosophy that means it is not an aggregator, but rather in Tina’s words, a site that  ”sifts, sorts, and curates.” What this means is that it provides a variety of ways to intersect with a story, and entry points to interact with it too. A range of invited experts on the  ‘buzz board’ give their recommendations on a range of topics including foreign affairs, entertainment and politics; highlights from other news sources provide the ‘cheat sheet’.

There is one ‘big fat story’ of the day which provides roll overlinks organised a bit like a mental map of the story. All of this is dynamic and updating constantly. The home  page is too cluttered and confusing  for my taste,but the other pages are much cleaner with lots of white space and clean design, with big images and a pleasing grey font that is easy on the eye.

For me Tina’s philosophy chimes exactly with where I think education, especially higher education and lifelong  learning, is going. We are shifting from the top down model of teacher/student to the bottom up model of collaboration and equality, and of guide, mentor, curator and collector. This resonates with Michele Martin who in a post on Instructional Designers and Trainers as Digital Curators? argues that  the

‘role of the “trainer” or the “instructional designer” really is fundamentally changing into someone who may no longer be designing learning “events” but is in fact facilitating the development and ongoing use of personal learning and work environments’

and Steve Rubel, who in  ‘The digital curator in your future’ maintains that

‘The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts. Digital Curators are the future of online content.’

So something like the Daily Beast, with a core team of ‘curators’ mixed in with invited experts to give fresh and deep insights into the subject area, and then combined with interaction from the participants adding their links, uploads and insights provides a powerful model for what an online course site might look like in the future…..

from the TED 2007 winners page

James Nachtwey’s Wish:

I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.

Watch the Video Talk

Update:

• TEDsters Jon Kamen, David Rockwell and Stefan Sagmeister acted as the creative trust, developing the idea and the design around the idea, including the slideshow created by Sagmeister and the architecture of the displays, created by Rockwell.
• Clinton Foundation and Partners in Health have been responsible for getting James access to Health Ministries in a number of different countries, allowing him to shoot stories that have been intentionally kept in the dark.
• TEDsters Bob and Colleen Benoit from Mode Studios, have acted as lead producers, helping to package the exhibition model to spread out to global partners. Mode Studios is going to produce the NYC event, which will act as the cornerstone of the global display.
• Scharff Weisberg will provide the production equipment.
• Time Magazine is running this story as an 8-page spread to be released the day of this worldwide event.
• PR Newswire has committed to time on the Reuters screen in Times Square, to create press around the event and to display the images on the evening of OCT 3rd

Photographer James Nachtwey will be breaking a big story globally on October 3 — using his powerful photographs to share a vital story that the world needs to know about.

TED is asking bloggers to support this initiative by embedding a badge on their sites (see below)

Photojournalist James Nachtwey is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades. He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries. he was a TED prize winner in 2007 with the following wish James Nachtwey’s Wish: I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age. The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources that are generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, that’s the least of what they get. The real prize is that they are granted a WISH. A wish to change the world. For more details on the 2008 winners — including blog entries and updates on their wishes — visit TED.

bloggers can add a link to the project by visiting TED  and the project can be seen live at locations world wide by visiting a list of global venues

TED press release: James Nachtwey: Photojournalist Why you should listen to him: For the past three decades, James Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues, working in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States. Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time since 1984. However, when certain stories he wanted to cover — such as Romanian orphanages and famine in Somalia — garnered no interest from magazines, he self-financed trips there. He is known for getting up close to his subjects, or as he says, “in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit,” and he passes that sense of closeness on to the viewer. In putting himself in the middle of conflict, his intention is to record the truth, to document the struggles of humanity, and with this, to wake people up and stir them to action. He is the winner of the 2007 TED Prize, awarding him $100,000 and one wish to change the world. This was his wish: “I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.” On October 3, the story breaks … and we would like you to witness it. “Reticent about discussing his own life beyond the basic facts, he’s clearly one of those rare characters who focus singularly on their work with a missionary-like sense of purpose.” — Salon.com

This is potentially a very powerful combination of viral marketing and visual journalism – watch this space…

A story about blogging, journalism and education this week that reflects the grey boundaries of professionalism in the digital age. 

Alana Taylor,

a journalism student at NYU,  blogged about one of her classes on new media “Reporting Gen Y (a.k.a. Quarterlifers)” for Mediashift, a pbs andKnight foundation backed blog on digital media hosted by Mark Glaser.

The original post is hereand the follow up post on Mediashift is here

Alana’s original post was a description of her first day of class, and what has caused the controversy is that she posted it to media shift without asking her tutor if she could do so – she had been asked by Glaser to act as an ‘embed’ and write a blog about her studies at NYU. The post offers a critique of the class and the professor as being essentially out of touch with social and new media, although it has positive things to say about the professor too. What turned it into a controversy was that after the mediashift blog the professor banned the class from blogging about the class anymore – despite the fact that having a bog was a requirement of taking the class itself. 

This has generated a debate about the ethics of undercover reporting, and of privacy issues, as well as academic freedoms , rights of free speech etc etc. What emerges from Glaser’s followup report is the NYU didn’t have any established practice relating to blogs in the classroom and what is and is not acceptable. Interstingly, the comments on Alana’s original post (of which there are many) mostly focus on the discussion of what should j-schools be teaching about social media and whether blogs etc are journalism or not. a few question the ethics of Alana’s writing about her class, but the trust is elasewhere. The ethical debates really surfaced after her censure by the professor, both in private and then, apparently, in class. 

To me the main issue here relates to what territory can and should blogs cover in education?

I think the point is that anyone using blogs in an educational context should lay out the ground rules for the project in advance of starting it, making clear what territory the blogs are to cover and in what way. Simply asking students to blog without any context is not enough; if you dont set out guidelines you are opening pandoras box and you cant ask students to set up a blog and then object to what they write on it if you dont give them some direction in advance.
As blogs are publically viewable and searchable, this blog could well have surfaced to anyone interested in journalism education at nyu or mediashift for example anyway.


We have lots of potential applicants to our course for example who apply because they have read the blogs of current students that they find by looking for search terms relevant to the subject area we cover- and someone like Michael Wesch‘s auto searching of blogs would have picked it up if it as relevant to his area of interest I’m sure…..

We use blogs on our course as a central part of the student’s reflective practice, deploying them to act as learning journals and to assist in building a community of practice collaboratively. As part of this, we have found that the blogs, because of their more informal nature, are a great vehicle for healthy critiques of the course itself, in both positive and negative ways, and we actively encourage this kind of feedback as it is far more valuable that the kind usually obtained from anonymous student feedback questionnaires and the like, as it is precisely focused on the course itself, not abstract concepts about student satisfaction etc.
getting this kind of real time feedback about the course means that we can quickly respond when students feel that they are not getting what the need, and also celebrate with them when the feedback is more positive. This keeps us on our toes and prevents us from falling into complacency and stagnation, and is especially useful on newer, innovative courses as we acknowledge that we are unlikely to get it right every time, especially in the beginning.

In terms of the details of this particular case, it seems that asking students to keep a blog as part of their studies and then denying them the possibility of writing about their studies in it seems counterintuitive, we make it clear from the very beginning that the blogs should offer a ‘warts and all’ description of the students learning journey.

Blogs are a fantastic tool for reflective learning, but they cannot be deployed without thinking through the implications of the relationship between private and public spheres, especially in terms of professional practice – in fact they offer a perfect opportunity for students to explore these boundaries in a relatively safe environment, a kind of sandbox to explore what we characterise as professional not confessional.

But they do have a public face and students need to be aware of the implications of this – one student of ours had their blog read by a client who was not too impressed with their descriptions of the PR company that had set up a story they had been assigned to cover.

So we have established up a clear set of rules of netiquette that cover how to post about others work , the course etc that serve to act as guidelines for how the bloggers can navigate these treacherous waters.

It also raises issues about what technology can students use in the classroom? I regularly use my laptop at conferences etc to take notes and to follow up on the speaker if they mention a name I don’t know, I google it and check out the reference immediately, which often helps to make sense of what the speaker is discussing. And i’ll happily admit to checking my email at the same time – not writing it though, generally. And half the audience at conferences these days seems to be twittering live. So if this is acceptable behaviour at academic conferences, which it seems to be, why not in class??

To me, having the resources of the world at my fingertips during a lecture is a fantastic resource, and i encourage it in my classes – often the students will look up urls in real time on our online course and post them into the webconferencing software we use when i mention a new photographer or issue, acting almost like teaching assistants or on the spot researchers for me – i’ll even ask them to do this too if we come across a relevant issue in discussion.

In A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism, Jay Rosen of NYU’s Journalism programme defines citizen media as

‘When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.’

That got me thinking as always as to how this insight about the media might be applied to education. So we could reframe it to say

‘When the people formerly known as the students employ the research tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen educators.’

The parallels between media and education are striking; both are seeing a massive shift in their role from monolithic providers of knowledge from on high to just one possible source of material competing with many others. Michael Wesch’s experiments with his social anthropology class, particularly in things like his class collectively taking notes on his lectures and then putting them together as a wiki resource for future and current classmates is a great example of how he classroom can be turned inside out, so that the traditional one way route from lecturer to audience is reversed, and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ of the students is enhanced. There are countless more ways that social media could help with this flow reversal, from graduate students helping undergrads as mentors using blogs and wikis, social networking sites to enhance cross faculty and course collaborations, and sites like delicious and diig to share and collaboratively build databases of links relevant to an area of research or practice that would take an individual researcher years to compile.

Apply this too to the professional world, and you can harness the experience of senior players to the enthusiasm and contemporary knowledge of their juniors, and build research and learning environments to enhance the knowledge of the whole organisation. The parallel with academia is again relevant, think of switching the focus from training to research, and then develop activities that combine both together, so that the training that is delivered produces a real world benefit in terms of a new piece of information or understanding for the institution. That way the learning is enhanced by being mare more experiential and relevant, and the research is enhanced by being embedded into the staff development of the company.

An interesting post today from charlie beckett about why news organisations are resistant to moving into the online arena that has interesting implications for education. Charlie argues that because editors typically see online as a drain on limited resources and dont see any incentives: “All the managers could see was a threat. This Online business would drain their budgets and take audiences and staffing away from the main shows.”

The solution at a leading media producer was to  allocate specific resources for extra online budgets, and  making “all the online targets part of the main business proposition. All the Online people were placed at desks alongside their broadcast colleagues.”

This moved the organisation  “from a broadcast and Online strategy to simply having a Media Strategy”.

Do university managers see online education as a threat to established empires, rather than an inevitable and welcome opportunity to reach new audiences that a traditional face to face instution cannot attract.

A lot of the talk at the recent Blackboard Europe conference was about exactly this issue, how do we move out of the ‘e learning pocket’ and transform education from using e learning and technology in isolated clusters, and into an e-culture, where they are seamlessly integrated into everything we do.

To mark Memorial Day in the US, the LA times has put up a statistical analysis of the military casualties from the State of California to date of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. Called ‘California’s War dead’, it provides a fascinating insight into who is actually doing the fighting, and of course the dying. The page uses the now familiar visual roll call of faces of the dead, but with the poignant addition of quotes about each victim by friends or family.

The total stands today at 493, and the site displays data on them in a variety of ways, showing their hometown, where they are buried, marital status, high school and gender. But the viewer can dig deeper, and search the database by number of children, place of death, branch of military etc.

This to me really brings home a human side to the conflict, the apparently neutral display of numbers becomes personalised when you realise that half of the fallen were either married or engaged, and that about 170 had children, with half having 2 or more. Mix that in with the average age of the troops being 21, and you have to conclude that that’s a lot of very young children who will grow up without their fathers. The figures reveal to the demographics of the war: the majority of the dead come from small towns across the state, with big cities like San Diego and LA contributing 23 and 22 respectively. San Francisco provides only 2 of the dead. One high school, Buchanan High in Clovis, suffered 6 casualties alone. And 59 of the troops were first generation immigrants, looking for the military to further their integration to US society.
And the Marines continue their unfortunate tradition of suffering relatively high casualties respective tot heir size, with a quarter coming from their ranks, although more than half came from the army. The vast majority of the dead were killed in Iraq, where 419 fell, with 46 in the Afghan conflict illustrating the relative scale of each theatre of war.

The data for the survey comes from icasualties.org, which catalogues all of the deaths and injuries suffered by coalition forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Their data is staggering, every casualty recorded, with its cause and location and date.

Perusing their material, it becomes clear the California has indeed borne the brunt of the US war effort, with approximately 10% of the total dead, the highest overall total, with 3158 wounded. Texas follows in second place with 386 and 2891, far more than the next states, New York and Pennsylvania with 178/1417 and 18/1247 each.

Almost half of these were caused by IED’s (improvised explosive devices)

What does al this data do? For me, searching through it made interaction with the story an active experience, not a passive one, and the responses from families and loved ones on the LA times blog like the one below carry a powerful emotional charge that the raw data multiples 4000 times.

‘Someday, were going to wake up and find a big whole in an entire generation of our population. Our small towns, without jobs or opportunity to offer these young men and women, have borne the brunt of this war. Joshua Wayne Dickinson, a native to Yucca Valley California will always live in my heart, although he resides in heaven with his mother. At 26 Josh was killed by an IED in Falluja on December 12 2004, he left behind a father, brother, and sister and young daughter. Joshua will always be my hero.’

We are probably all familiar with maps of the world with the south pole at the top, or showing relative size per capita income or use of global resources etc: they act as an immediate visual paradigm shift in our perceptions in a way that simple raw data on a subject can’t match.

In the same vein is this wonderful presentation by Alisa Miller, the CEO of Public Radio International of shows why we get the news we deserve. by mashing stats on seconds of airtime given to news stories on US networks, it comes up with a compelling argument why US foreign policy bears no relation to the understanding of the world of its citizens.

watch it here http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/248

This is from the inspiring and entertaining TED talks series, which i watch every week or so, almost at random, to be amazed and educated at what the world contains. i’ll post periodically from them, as they are one of the best things on the web in my opinion, and since actually attending a TED conference costs thousands of dollars, getting them for free is a real bargain

Mashing up google maps and news events is a potentially killer app for delivering a better understanding of events on both a local and global scale. Ushahid is a very interesting site that was set up during the post election violence in Kenya to act as an incident reporting and tracking monitor for acts of violence.

anyone who witnesses an incident or has information on it can send in a report and the data is added to both the map and a searchable database: the map can show incidents by type (e.g. arson, rape, murder) and or date. This gives an immediate sense of the scale and distribution of the situation in real time.

One of the pioneers of this type of approach is http://chicago.everyblock.com/ (formerly chicagocrime.org, see the story on its development at http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2008/01/31/0102) which mashes information from police, local government, businesses etc with a detailed city map to provide an amazing amount of useful stuff on local neighbourhoods: from crime rates and types to building permits and more. Founded by Adrian Holovaty, one of the pioneers of interactive online journalism, it has grown to cover New York and San Fransisco as well as Chicago.

This is a viable alternative to making local news exciting, the ability to ‘drill down’ into your local area on a street by street level is tremendously powerful.

This puts me in mind of charlie beckett’s post a few days ago about the parochial yet over the top nature of US news, and how UK local news is no where near as comprehensive, nor as energetic. This kind of mapping of local news trends is a potential answer to the conundrum of how do you package news in an interesting, accessible way without the overblown production values of the local US networks

traditional photojournalism in the form of the ‘sunday supplement’ photo essay is under siege: many have seen the web as the saviour of the genre. but does this mean simply transferring an old model into a new medium, or does it need a complete re writing of the rules?

this thought provoking piece by stephen mayes, the new director of photo agency VII, adds to the debate

http://www.rethink-dispatches.com/the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king.php

he is critical of many of the simplistic multimedia put out so far:

‘It’s time for a complete re-think – it’s simply not enough to animate a slide show with a few graphics and some atmospheric audio.’

and sees the issue not as a lack of news, or of people interested in it, but in a lack of ways to bridge the gap between then in a compelling way:

‘The “crisis” in photojournalism is not an absence of newsworthy events, nor even the absence of an eager audience, it is the absence of imagination in bridging the two, and we are limited by the constant backward hankering for the way things used to be.’

the idea of some ‘objective, truthful observer’ too is long gone:

‘photojournalists need to engage the new audience by recognising their own place in the world and integrating this new self-awareness into their coverage of the world at large. Photojournalists are no longer disembodied observers; in the world of blogs, citizen journalists and hyper information sharing, we are all participants in the affairs of the world and in the reporting of events.’

and his critique of the ‘long tail’ of the web is as true of photography as it is the rest of journalism:

‘The fatal information trap that is built into the Internet is the ability to find people around the world who think like you, and to talk to them to the exclusion of all others; in this aspect the Internet is the antithesis of mass communication and its ability to filter ever-narrower interests is a snare as much as it is a liberation. The challenge is to break out, to find wider audiences and to connect meaningfully. And to do this, new languages must be learned.’

but what is better? reaching a passive mass audience who are only slightly engaged witht he subject, or a small but active one who are actively trying to impact on the situation