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.

The plus version allows more interaction with the images including camera movements, and the beta version allows full screen mode, which should make for very exciting presentations. With a price of only $69.95 and a shallow learning curve it is a fantastic way to start making slideshows without having to learn complex flash or final cut pro techniques.

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.’

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

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

‘“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.