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.

We’re introducing Second Life to L1 journalism students next week. I normally attempt to cultivate a cool, ‘technological determinist’ image. But in this case, I have had to work extra hard to explain the relevance of SL to our students.

The buzz surrounding SL was pretty high back in May 2008 when I was planning the teaching. Fast forward 10 months, and it seems about as academically sexy as receiving a £70 fine for spending five hours in an Aldi car park (thanks Parking Eye!) 

Statistics – it’s Second Life versus Twitter versus Britney – let battle commence!

In terms of blog coverage, SL was once the talk of the town.
Now that young upstart Twitter is the belle of the ball. Just to keep
it ‘scientific’, Britney is acting as our ‘base’ for blog buzz.    

Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere

This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords.

“Second Life” vs. Britney vs. Twitter

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UK universities using Second Life

Like many UK universities, the place where I  work has received research funding to create a cool-looking virtual campus and to investigate teaching possibilities (particularly in distance learning).

Eduserv released a detailed report of  Second Life usage in higher education in Autumn 2008 which outlines some great examples of good practise.

As a journalism lecturer, I have to consider SL’s relevance to unit outcomes.Fashion and interior design courses at the university are already using SL as a means to preview student projects and obtain tutor feedback.

SL in journalism teaching – any use?

SL offers the possibility to stage ‘virtual news events’. We do a number of these mock exercises in “first life” already. But these can be expensive to run, take considerable planning and we would like to do more of them.

Students also study ‘virtual communities’ from a theoretical perspective. So SL gives students real experience of this, outside the normal Facebook arena which most students seem to use. 

CNN is also still asking its iReporters to submit citizen stories, many of which can be found on the CNN iReporters site here. Although other large media brands seem to be scaling back their efforts and I’m not sure whether the CNN experiment has been particularly successful. 

SL is very bandwidth-intensive and this has presented networking problems. Only a few IT rooms have the software installed (the other university PCs are just not up to the job). So the ‘business case’ for teaching SL is starting to look shaky already.

SL also needs to be made easier to use. Philip Rosedale said in a .Net Magazine interview (February 2007) said that it took around four hours to learn the basics, which could be described as quite a ‘barrier to entry’. This need to change before it gets any sort of mainstream acceptance.

That said, I still think that virtual worlds are a key to the Web 3.0 model. And whilst it may not be SL that wins the race, we are fulfilling our duty in getting students’ pointing their heads in the right direction.

This is old news, but Zoe Corbyn wrote an excellent feature on academics who blog in the Times Higher - By the blog: academics tread carefully (October 2008).

Scroll down the article, stop about halfway and stuck between Zoe Brigley of Northampton University and David Petley of Durham, you can read about this blog!

Zoe's article outlines the key reasons why academics blog, which I have roughly summarised here (based on the main article and comments beneath it):

• Test area – float ideas or reflect when preparing papers and lectures etc.
• Obtain Feedback – from students, colleagues and others.
• Enhance reputation -People use blogs for a bit of personal online marketing, although that can also help their university or college.
• 'A day in the life' / diary - explain what it is like to  work as a scientist in a lab – if that's what you do.
• Accessibility – open up a subject / specialism. Some departments do this in a formal way to engage with A Level students and hopefully recruit.
• Personal reminder  – to record key events in the blogger's day or life.
• Feeds directly into teaching – many universities encourage students to blog /reflect online.

This list could  apply to just about anyone who has ever blogged, if you just remove the educational stuff. But there is an interesting debate about how much you reveal in the public space, particularly when it comes to scientific research. Research in the arts tends not to be so lucrative or competitive  – so nobody seems to give a toss if academics in the arts give away all the great 'secrets' for free (not that there are many!).

The article also states that there isn't really a community of 'academic bloggers' , as people seem to stick to their own subject fields. Most academics read blogs written by those in industry, as well as those in their field of education.

My ever-increasingly-long list of articles that I have starred in my Google Reader using my phone reflects this. It tells me I read a wide mix of journalism academics such as Paul Bradshaw and  Andy Dickinson.net in the UK (these have both set the standard in academic blogging and really should have made it into the THE feature), those written by full-time hacks like Martin Stabe, Charles Arthur and Neil McIntosh and those about IT and gadgets in general. These blogs (and, of course, many others) remind me of interesting developments that I really MUST discuss with the students.

Here are a few reflective thoughts about assessing student blog posts. Students were asked to contribute to a class blog as part of the online journalism unit that I teach. Eleven theoretical questions were posted on the blog and students were asked to choose five questions and post opinion articles (no more than 800 words each). This was completed over the course of a semester.

Planning the assessment:

The blog assignment had to achieve a number of objectives:

• Devleop practical skills in using a CMS – WordPress. 
• Develop practical blog writing skills and a consistent style.
• Demonstrate understanding of online journalism and convergence theoretical issues (previously this had been addressed by setting a good old-fashioned essay)

I begun by looking at marking criteria – such as  The Rubric For Assessing Reflective Writing from San Diego State University.

A few ideas that were considered and rejected:

• Using the blog service in Moodle (the VLE). The university uses a VLE called MyCourse (based on Moodle). It works brilliantly, but I felt its blogging tools were a little basic for our level three students. We wanted something more ‘industry’.
• Using Blogger and Typepad: Blogger is free, allows multiple authors (which I required) and could be made private – but design templates too restrictive.Typepad is viewed as being quite ‘industry’  – Sky News, Daily Mail and The Times use it – but there were costs involved.

…………………..it was decided to use WordPress.It proved to be reliable, robust and flexible. Students accessed it from home and through the university firewall.

Blogging about theoretical issues
Students were asked to contribute to a class blog. In other classes, I had done tests where I asked students to set up and design their own individual blogs.They then blogged on topics of their own choosing. This hadn’t worked.

Setting up a class blog allowed me to view all contributions in one place. Students were asked to blog on quite narrow, theoretical, topics. This "forced" them to research, reflect upon, and to form carefully considered analytical pieces. The blog had to address theory to comply with the unit’s learning outcomes.

We also wanted to see students comment on other blog postings and make links to reliable sources of information. This could include websites, audio and video.

They were encouraged
to take time to compose their entries as they would do when writing an
opinion article for a magazine or newspaper. Speed was not a priority for this particular assignment.

Blogs can be used to address plenty of learning outcomes.

• Critical reflection: I heard Jonathan Hewett talk last summer at an AJE conference about using blogs to encourage critical reflection on a postgrad journalism course at City University, London.
  Jonathan’s ideas were inspirational and I’m keen to develop some of his
  techniques further.
• Paul Bradshaw of Birmingham City University has used blogs to encourage journalistic transparency.
  This could be employed to ‘track’ how journalism students approach investigations – What sources do they
  choose to contact? What sources to they overlook or choose to ignore? Can they defend
  their selections? How methodical is the investigative process?
• The Bivings Report gives 16 ways the media can use blogs. Lots of food for thought here. Blogs are a conversation and we need students to interact more with the local community.
• How the BBC News uses Blogs: Report by Alfred Hermida

What worked / what didn’t.

From looking at the general standard of the assignments.

1) Learning the CMS technology: Good.Most students developed a good understanding of the technology, categories, tags, uploading images and video etc. That said, we had a couple of students who repeatedly forgot their passwords (ahhhhhhh!).
2) Addressing theoretical issues: OK/Good.All students  had to think through a number of theoretical issues, although quality of research could be improved.
3) Developing good blog writing style: Poor.Complete confusion over audience and appropriate style. This was mostly the tutors fault!

Some reflective thoughts:

• Students not used to blogging. Always a surprise. In a group of 20 only three admitted to running their own blogs and only around five read blogs regularly. Terms like "RSS", "Wiki" and  "SEO" need explanation!
• Writing a blog post is different to writing on a Facebook page: This is something I need to reinforce next year. ‘Text speak’ is not acceptable. 
• Seven questions down to five:  It became clear that it was  taking the students too long to research and  write well composed analytical posts. Fewer questions improved the quality of response very quickly.
• Blog was private (password protected): This was the hardest decision:
  • Pro: Allows students to make mistakes and experiment with different styles.The blog was a learning tool after all. 
  • Pro: It allowed the tutor to speak more freely to the students and open conversation to occur between students. (there was very little conversation in reality though – see later).
  • Con: Students confused about audience – some appeared to write in a way that they thought would please the tutor. We couldn’t examine page impressions or hit counts for postings.
  • Con: No conversation with the ‘outside world’.
• Students confused about appropriate blog style: We looked at many blog post styles, but there are very few editorial standards. Students were looking at theoretical issues, so some adopted an academic style of writing which probably wasn’t appropriate for a blog. This needs far more clarity.

• Providing informal feedback was a nightmare: It took ages to post comments on posts as they appeared (and nearly killed the tutor).
• Students reluctant to comment: They wanted to read my comments relating to their posts, but appeared unwilling to provide peer feedback. This was worrying for level 3 students. There was little in the way of ‘conversation’.
• Students concerned that assessed work could be read by their peers prior to submission: It’s rare for students to be able to read each other’s assignments before hand-in. And it was clear this unnerved a few of them. It was clear to see that some students worked consistently throughout the semester and created fantastic posts, whilst weaker ones left it to last minute. The site was very busy the 12 hours before deadline!

Do it again?

Yes, but with changes. Blogs have many uses in teaching and it is essential that journalism students are encouraged to create their own blogs. 

The exercise worked well in terms of learning the technology and getting students to reflect upon research. It’s a mostly a student-centered approach, despite the fact they were unwilling to provide peer feedback.

You have to be extremely precise in what you are asking for and this is something to work on!

The idea…a brief summary

I’ve just completed the PGCLT HE course. It took ages, but I got there in the end. A key part of the course develops skills in ‘reflective practice’. A short definition can be found on Wikipedia or a detailed version can be found at infed. The general idea is that reflection on past experience leads to improvements in action and professional development.

Work by Schön has given reflective practice currency. A few professions have adopted it as a way for staff to demonstrate continuing professional development (CPD), particularly in the legal profession and in the health service.

Reflection could be used in the training of journalists

Reflection could be widely used in the training of journalists and other media professionals.

Attempting to get hard-bitten hacks to take time out to reflect may be a futile exercise. It certainly won’t be easy. The pressure on deadlines and constraints on budgets often mean that journalists are working flat out.

It would require a massive cultural shift. The world of journalism is very transient. Once a magazine has gone to bed or a newspaper story has been filed you move on to the next deadline. You don’t sit around discussing it all day, unless a reader, PR or interviewee makes a complaint.

Those working at the coalface don’t have time to reflect…

Critics of reflection, of which there are many, see it as just ‘navel gazing’. And when reflection is done badly it can certainly be viewed as self-indulgent rubbish. It is also seen by some as being an activity which is best suited for those working in the ‘soft’ professions – public sector areas like higher education, social work and the health service.

But I believe that all new journalists should blog. This may not sound like a particularly new idea – a lot of publishers force their journalists to write blog content for narrow-minded commercial reasons.

Blogging as a form of reflection

What I advocate is something different. New journalists should have private blogs and use them to record reflective thoughts. It could also be used as a way of proving CPD. OK, so CPD is not a word you tend to hear in newsrooms. Career development? Does it exist in journalism? This is a problem that needs to be addressed as well.

Few journalists take time to consider their roles and the purpose of journalism. When writing news stories journalists should reflect on the research sources they choose to consult and the people they choose to interview (or omit). New journalists often source their stories from a relatively small pool of contacts and are heavily reliant on PR contacts – this needs to be challenged. The traditional ‘top down’ approach for sourcing stories also needs to be challenged. Some claim to instinctively ‘know’ what to serve up to the reader. When challenged, you find that this ‘logic’ is based on out of date information (a ‘focus group’ carried out 20 years ago) or reader stereotypes.

Paul Bradshaw asks his students to blog at UCE Birmingham. He highlights how they can be used to provide ‘journalistic transparency’.

Many of the blogs, such as Muddle Through Together (or how a music journalist gets to grips with writing for the Net), showcase some fantastic reflective writing.

The key question is how
much do you reveal online? This is where things get interesting. By its nature, reflective writing is very personal. What do you reveal online? What do you self-censor?  Journalists need to work in an environment where they don’t get crucified for making mistakes.

Can it work?

It would take a massive shift in culture. I’m not expecting editors to start asking their staff to reflect anytime soon. Let’s face it, there are always far more pressing deadlines.  It’s even harder to talk about CPD when journalists are fearing for their jobs.

But hopefully we can move away from the idea that these are just ‘trendy teaching methods’, advocated by academics with far too much time on their hands.