New.Journalism.Review

Time to wave goodbye to old-fashioned lecture notes (Independent – 19th Nov 2009) reports on how Russell Stannard, principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster, uses technology to mark student essays.

This got me thinking. I’ve been dabbling with Camtasia 3 for a few months. The software came free with an issue of .Net magazine. I was attempting, with not a lot of success, to create tutorials on how to upload content to Joomla! (a CMS) for my students. Camtasia is a screencast tool i.e. it records everything that you do on your PC screen in video format and you can also record an audio commentary. This is useful for a number of purposes, such as those listed on the official Camtasia site.

But after reading the article in The Indie, I’ve found it’s also very useful for providing feedback on journalism assignments. Students submit assignments electronically using our Moodle-based VLE. I then get a student’s Word file on screen and edit it, whilst simultaneously giving a live commentary on the changes that I’m making. This is like giving a student their own personal tutorial. The file produced by Camtasia is then saved, compressed in size and can be emailed to the student for viewing.

The system has worked so well that I have invested in a newer version of Camtasia – 6 is the latest edition. I also bought a decent quality Logitech USB desktop microphone

Pros of using Camtasia:

1. An interesting way to deliver feedback: Getting students to read any feedback delivered in the traditional way (i.e. hand written corrections to their scripts) can be a problem – they normally just want to see the grade! This is a particular issue for weaker students who can sometimes feel intimidated when they see pages and pages of corrections. Of course, it’s the weaker students who really need to see (and understand) their feedback.
2. It’s quicker than correcting scripts the old-fashioned way: It takes ages to mark 60 or 80 scripts, so I always have one eye on the clock. I’m sure that I’m not the only tutor who times how long it takes them to mark each paper. If a bit of software doesn’t improve my productivity – it’s gone!
3. You can go into a lot more detail: It’s like a face-to-face tutorial. You can provide a lot more explanation verbally than you can using written comments. This is really handy for the weaker students. You can also ‘zoom’ in and ‘highlight’ individual paragraphs to provide detailed comments.
4. Good feedback from students: I have done a really small test sample, but I’ve had some very positive feedback from students.

Cons: The files must be compressed quite heavily if you are going to send them via email and this can take up to a minute or so to complete. I move on to reading the next assignment, whilst Camtasia is busily compressing away.

Camtasia 3 is widely available for free, but it doesn’t provide brilliant compression. It’s worth getting hold of a new-ish version. Feedback has to be logged and verified by external examiners, so sometimes it’s best to have it in hard copy format.

Cost: Camtasia 6 costs $299 or around £180. But there is a free web-based screencast technology called ScreenToaster that seems to do a similar job, although I’ve not tried this.

I am keen to find out who else is using Camptasia or similar screencast software.

It’s been a long time overdue, but this blog has finally moved to WordPress. As WordPress gets better and better, Typepad (or to be precise, Movable Type) has not really moved with the times.

I’ll be going through this blog attempting to remove all the duff links, but this may take a while.

The Independent asks whether Google News is killing-off newspaper journalism. (http://ping.fm/9pZzp), as Rupert Murdoch has been arguing.

Murdoch sees three evils preventing him from dominating the entire world (!)  – 1) The BBC (see previous posts) 2) Freebie 'newspapers' and lastly,  Google News. 

The Independent also has concerns about Google – it states in the leader:

"Google and other websites make big money from the audiences they attract for their content, which is Hoovered up from countless news sources all around the world. The creators of that content, meanwhile, earn not a bean from such aggregators – they often do not even give their permission for it to be taken – and are unable to sell it for themselves online because it has already been made freely available."

Google, on the face of it, contribute nothing to supporting quality journalism. It employs no journalists, just a massive database which pinches headlines from newspaper websites and prioritizes them to form a news page. We have no idea what its news biases are. Editorial selections are based on some top-secret algorithm. 

But it's wrong to suggest that Google's influence on journalism is entirely negative. What Google do, rather well, is direct shed loads of traffic to news sites, at least that's the general idea. Problems arise if Google allows its users to read entire stories on its own website rather than encouraging people to click-through. 

Google's dominance of search (dare I say, 'near monopoly') which is the problem here. We live in a world where few people care to use Yahoo!, Bing (or Bling! or Blip! or Blah! – whatever it's called), Ask or AltaVista. 

Newspaper sites can easily remove their content from Google. Or they could simply put it behind a 'pay wall'. But as The Independent newspaper knows from bitter experience, 'pay walls' simply don't work for general news.

So if 'pay walls' have failed and sites need lots of traffic to generate  ad revenue -  what then? Shouldn't they be paying Google to carry news headlines? I think that probably summarises the debate as it stands today. 

In an ideal world, it would be better to see some competition in search aggregation. Perhaps we should all start to use UK-based NewsNow (http://ping.fm/ok1sE) instead.

Until then, newspapers can learn from Google in so far as audiences these days want news content which is tailored to their individual interests. That's why paying £2 for a Sunday newspaper, only to chuck half of its supplements away into the recycle bin, just seems seems a bit of an odd activity in 2009.

Times Higher reports on the introduction of bar code readers to take registers at Derby University.
http://ping.fm/LowmR

Despite its problems, anything that can automate basic administration must be welcomed. Filling in registers of 100 students manually each week is the equivalent of doing the dishes by hand, when you could use a lovely Bosch dishwasher instead.   

Lecturers already undertake crippling amounts of non-academic / 'house-keeping' work. Each year more hurdles are put in the way which prevents them from doing what they are paid to do – i.e researching, writing and teaching. From a human resources perspective (or, indeed, any perspective) filling in registers manually is a total waste of time and money. 

The government now requires that academics have to take registers to keep tabs on those pesky overseas students (the assumption is that overseas students are all secretly plotting ways to stay in the country, rather than writing assignments).

I don't agree that lecturers should be asked to carry out what amounts to UK border control checks. If I have to do this, at least allow me to wear a nice blue uniform, with a hat and have some shiny metal handcuffs. But as it's now the law, let's at least do it vaguely efficiently.

It's Saturday and The Guardian is running yet another story about BBC funding. So what's new? Well, stories with an anti-BBC slant normally appear on a Monday and are confined to the Media section rather than splashed on the front page, so I'm already confused.

This time the Tories are saying that the BBC's growth must be curbed or it should expect the worst come the license fee renewal in 2012.

Tory spokesman, Jeremy Hunt, who The Guardian describes as an 'affable figure' and a 'moderniser' (so that's okay then – he's not one of those really nasty, right-wing types, who want to kill-off the BBC) says that the Corporation's growth represents a threat to democracy and there must be curbs placed on its websites and its executive's pay.

Of course, The Guardian reporters do NOT challenge him on the fact that the license fee remains incredible value at 39p a day ( You couldn't even buy a copy of The Guardian for the price). OR the totally unfounded portrayal of the BBC as being an evil predatory beast -  which is just looking for new markets to expand into. This is a myth that is repeated time and time again.

I convinced that most normal people (i.e. those who don't work for national newspapers or media companies with commercial agendas) believe that, at 39p a day, the BBC offers pretty good value for money. 

Well, there is the normal disclaimer… I am an avid listener to Radio 5 Live, I don't really care much for Radio 3 or, indeed, Radio 4. But I still want them to be there and at some stage in my life I will probably listen to it. I probably will never listen to BBC 1Xtra, but I teach some students who love it.

I've a feeling that when the Tory axe falls on the BBC, it will do so unevenly. The type of output that is loved by middle-aged white male MPs will stay, the rest will see cuts. 

To give a recent example of some great BBC output, BBC Sport's Formula One Grand Prix coverage online is simply superb. I'm loving these interactive circuit guides. Even those without slightest interest in Grand Prix should check it out.

Tory-boy Hunt, backed by new mate Rupert Murdoch, would probably prefer that we didn't get to enjoy this. They would perhaps argue that a commercial provider, given the chance, will offer an even better service.

Well, in my view, this argument doesn't wash with F1 coverage – ITV had F1 last year after all. There are a lot of F1 sites out there  and this assumption that they would all beneifit if the BBC didn't exist is just idiotic.

What is too often ignored is the fact that the BBC raises the  game. To put it crudely, for websites to succeed they have to be good -  there is nothing wrong with that when it improves quality. Anyone can create a really bad website and moan that it is terrible because we're in a recession and nobody is advertising.

When a terrible TV channel like Quest launches nobody watches it because we are used to decent TV in the UK. Although I realise that Quest has one good show -  TJ Hooker.

Taken to its logical extreme, free market broadcasting would mean perhaps all TV channels will end up looking like Quest…. now that's scary. Only someone like Jeremy Hunt or Rupert Murdoch would want that.

In the highly fragmented online and broadcast media market, where
advertising revenue is split between numerous players, the BBC is
required now more so than ever to ensure quality.

Those who attack the BBC say that it limits commercial competition, as Hunt puts it "the BBC could be the only show in town". But this needs to be challenged.

This argument always ignores the work that  the Beeb does throughout the UK in encouraging creativity and training talent (which the commercial sector benefits hugely from).  And let us not forget it  outsources much of its programme-making to independent production houses, which it has carried on doing throughout the recent advertising downturn.

I am convinced that the public really values the BBC and the huge variety of (mostly) high quality output.  These arguments from the Tories just won't rub. But the Tory party will offer the 'carrot' to media companies of curbing BBC power in return for political support, something that The Guardian does highlight in its article.

But The Guardian has a duty to challenge Tory policy on the BBC, as  it does brilliantly in just about every other area of policy. It can not and should not simply act as a mouthpiece for those critics of the BBC.

Come 2012 and the BBC license renewal, whoever is running the government will have the power to either enhance the BBC or, alternatively, cut its funding and legislate it out of existence.