‘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.

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