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 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

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

‘“What are we supposed to tell our newsrooms when they tell us they don’t have time to do anything special for the Web?” Or put it another way: “What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?”

It’s easiest to say what news organisations should do. They should work through their web-based journalism rather than see it as an add-on. That in itself would save time and resources.

But accepting the challenge of the zero-sum hypothesis, what should we lose in our newspapers and TV’

this got me thinking what happens when we ask the same question of education – what do we have to lose in order to gain? How do we shift out of the ‘e-pocket’ into a ‘e-culture’ where technology is embedded in what we do , not an extra add on?

Charlie gives one possible answer, ‘New media technology is like a Tardis. It turns a small space with limited time (the newsroom) into a large space (the online network) that can travel through time.’

This applies to education as well as to journalism. We have to accept that our students can access vast amounts of ’stuff’, some of it massively powerful and some of it massively irrelevant, and we as educators have to enable them with the critical framework with which to analyse and understand for the rest of their lives. That is an end result that for me is worth far more than just cramming them with information that we supply. We have to help them understand how to find their own information, and then turn it into knowledge for themselves.

This paradigm shift I think has implications too in terms of how it opens up our understanding that knowledge is an artificial construct, the sheer weight of information and volume of opinion on the web cannot but lead to the realisation that nothing can be ‘objectively true’ and that everything is socially constructed.

We have to therefore constantly engage with the web in an ongoing dialogue of assessment and evaluation of the sources, trusting some and abandoning others according to out personal perceptions of what we believe in, and what others that we believe in, believe in.

This constant process of sifting in a conscious way maps closely onto Douglas Schon’s theories of the Reflective Practitioner, an approach to understanding how professionals navigate the ever changing problems they encounter by testing them against their existing set of practices, or repertoire, and then adapting and developing that repertoire in response to the solving of the new situation.

The potential for the web, especially in blogs and the other forms of social media that entice us to evaluate our positions e.g. linkedin, means that we are potentially able to seamlessly upgrade our reflective practice in a way that becomes embedded in our daily rituals of gathering information about the world and then disseminating and explaining it to others

In this blog I will try to map out my (and others) thoughts on this ever changing landscape, and highlight innovations and new perspectives, as well as think through some of the issues myself