LIVE | D.O. Palooza
D.O. Palooza is a conference put on by The Daily Orange of Syracuse University. I'll be livestreaming the event throughout the day.
You can watch here, or on my newly launched Mogulus Channel.
LINKS | Inspiration Only
Spotted: The Chicago Tribune puts Twitter in their masthead
This has been a really inspiring week for me. Everything from my talks with John Lowe, to activity at CoPress, to a phone conversation with Daniel about the future, to progress at The Daily Orange to this fantastic piece at Nieman Labs. With that in mind, I'm going to limit myself to links that inspire this week. (Also, it's been two weeks since I did one of these posts due to vacation. There's a lot of links.)
These are my links for March 8th through March 20th:
- Joel Kramer: Lessons I've learned after a year running MinnPost Nieman Journalism Lab: Great look at how the MinnPost works by its founder, Joel Kramer.
• Short form content monetizes better than long form
• Uncut video is much less expensive than docu and popular
• Have funding for a few years before you start
• Donations will be just as important as advertising - Social Weather Mapping | smalltalk: Great proof of concept: datamine twitter to show the current weather conditions across the country.
- Nick Bilton Keynote O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009 | Metaprinter
- There are stages people go through when they’re introduced to a subject:
- Rejection as irrelevant (too much change)
- Knowing nothing, and admitting it
- Know just enough to hurt themselves
- Knowing that you know nothing
- Knowledgeable, enough to get by
- Respected authority
- Master, even the experts defer to you
-
Image via CrunchBase
There's always time to launch your dream - (37signals): A great call for, “don’t sacrifice your education for the sake of school.”
- Printed Matters Five ideas for display ads: 5 crazy and good ideas for how to change online ads.
- RevenueTwoPointZero Improving online display advertising: A summary of how online ads are broken and two suggestions on how to fix it:
• Limit to one ad a page. Make it a dominant element again
• Make homepages on news websites more like the rest of the web… - “Anyone who runs a newspaper should be watching this experiment under a microscope. Someone should even go so far as to obtain copies of the last month of Seattle PI in print and call up every display advertiser and ask them what they plan to do.”- The Great Seattle Advertising Experiment: What Will Happen to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Print Advertising Dollars? - Publishing 2.0
- Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Clay Shirky: Cheers to Clay Shirky, for so eloquently stating what we’ve all be thinking.
- Telecommuting can replace newsrooms | The Journalism Iconoclast: A strong argument to replace the newsroom with telecommuters. It saves money and increases efficiency.
- #FollowFriday: The Anatomy of a Twitter Trend: Look at how twitter trends start. Good research implications.
The new short film by Blu
an ambiguous animation painted on public walls.
Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)
http://www.blublu.org/
Bre Pettis | I Make Things - Bre Pettis Blog - The Cult of Done Manifesto
Newseum | Today’s Front Pages | Seattle Post-Intelligencer
How Newhouse Can Become Relevant Again
This post is in part a response to Lauren Rabaino’s post on how to change the Cal Poly journalism program in part an answer to the #collegejourn call for posts on how to improve college journalism education.
Lauren’s analysis of the way to overhaul the her journalism program seems to go down the right path. I would take it just a set or two further though and stop the broadcast concentration. I'm looking at:
- writing track: teaches reporting as any old print/newspaper prof would typically teach it, but with a strong emphasis on writing for the web. This naturally includes social networking, blogging, and audio production.
- visual-content track These are are photogs, broadcast people, & designers. Teach a little bit of print design, but go 40-60% with web design. Photogs and video folk ought to know most of what each other does. Photogs may get some studio and photoshop time that the video folk won't and the video people ought to focus a little more on how to produce BJ style stories.
- tech track: We need to be teaching/recruiting coders as journalists. Now that we’re on the web, we need people who are capable of running that infrastructure. We ought to be training people in web site design, database management and display, data-mining, website development, etc
I mostly agree with Lauren’s idea of scrapping the print track, as I’ve said, teaching print design is a bit like teaching someone esperanto. It’s not like print design is going to go away, but it is far less important that teaching web design to those in the journalism field.
Video
I’ll go ahead and cautiously agree with Lauren, video should be taught in some form or another to all the majors. I say again: cautiously.
Newhouse has a the ‘kid in the candy store’ syndrome when it comes to video. Soundslides are taught in beginning writing and photo classes, video/multimedia has become an integral part of nearly every lesson plan. The thinking is, ‘new media’ involves heavy use of multimedia and video, and therefore every student should be indoctrinated into the ways of ‘new media.’
This thinking is just … flawed. Beginning photo students just don’t need to know how to shoot video … it’s advanced skill that just doesn’t need to be taught to beginning students.
Besides, the video that Newhouse emphasizes is short-form, heavily edited video segments that last 1:30. I’m not at all convinced that the ROI is there.
Instead, Newhouse ought to focus on the basics of shooting video (composition, lighting, uploading, etc) for those not in the visual track and long form video (10 min) for the visual folk.
Social Media
Every program should heavily emphasis social media. How to leverage it for reporting, maintaining a personal and professional blog, twitter, podcasting, etc…
One nice thing about Newhouse is it is home to a lot of up-to-date, high-end equipment. This makes the job of learning and reporting much easier, but it’s all for nought if we’re not learning applicable information.
An active blog ought to be viewed in the same light as getting an internship – a requirement.
Old media
Just like the mainstream media industry, journalism academia is run by Baby Boomers and a select few in Generation X. Generally, these folk just don’t ‘get’ social media in the same way that us Generation Y kids do. How can they be expect to teach the value of something that they don’t value? Read the rest of this post →
3.5 Years of College… Over?
I took a leave of absence from Syracuse University today. I’m a senior with 1.5 semesters of school left.
The whole experience was … weird. I looked up the process online and found that I had to go to my home college to get the correct paperwork. I appeared, and asked for an academic advisor. After 20 min, or so, I was politely escorted into an office of the only advisor available, only to be told she could of no assistance.
I’ve been to academic advisors at least five times in the past, and have had the same encounter. Each time, I’ve been told that I should have seen a ‘recorder’ instead of of an 'advisor.'
A bit frustrated, I asked why the Recorders seemed to have all the answers, and the advisors couldn’t seem to do anything. It seemed to me, that the title 'recorder,' was more administrative, and the advisor was more … advisory. Apparently, I was wrong. Recorders are for “anything to do with paperwork.”
Still rather mystified as to what an academic advisor actually does, I put my name on the list to see a Recorder.
When I sat down, to explain for the second time, that I wanted to take a leave of absence, the Recorder in front of me complained that my recorder (last name beginning with letters: A-G) wasn’t in today. But, she could take care of me.
The Recorder pulled the correct, half-sheet, in-triplicate, form out of the top drawer of her desk, and had me fill out my name, ID number, phone number, and check off the reasons why I was taking the leave. I checked off “personal/family” and “other.”
Her paperwork competed, she told me she'd have to make a copy of the triplicate form, but the phone rang and the Recorder had me wait while she finished the call. I waited a few more minutes, during witch time I grabbed the business card of "my" Recorder.
Once it was copied, I took the triplicate form back, and continued to the next building to turn the form over to the office of the Dean of Student Affairs.
After taking the stairs to the third floow, I handed my form to the secretary, who said that she thought she could get someone to talk to me directly. I patiently had a seat in the lobby, and patiently denied the kind offer for water or coffee from the secretary (administrative assistant?).
I picked up the only magazine that remotely interested me on the side table – Contact Sheet – put together by the on campus, non-profit, photo lab. I had just enough time to flip through it and determine that it was by-and-large graphics of words like “peace” and “love” and in no way resembled a contact sheet of photos, when I heard my name called.
I was politely ushered into the bare-walled, narrow office and offered a seat on a couch flush to the same wall as the woman’s desk. She already had my half-sheet form, and explained that the university liked to conduct a brief interview with students taking a leave. Right away, she found that the form wasn’t signed by my home college. Though not yet exasperated, I slowly explained that I had just been to that office, and that they were the ones that had given my the form. She asked who I had seen at the other office, and I played a guessing game between two similar sounding names that began with ‘M.’
I guessed wrong as it turns out, but all was straightened out after a phone call that consisted more of gossip than enquiring if I had actually been seen by the sole person who could give me the from I had presented to the woman in front of me.
Hanging up the phone, the woman from the office of Student Affairs looked down at the form, noted my check-off reasons for taking a leave, and enquired for more details. I explained that my family had determined that I was better off focusing on my extra-curricular activities for a semester and that I intended to return to school soon.
A few more details, and we shook hands. I walked out of her office with wishes of ‘good luck’ and ‘we hope to see you back.’
I walked out the office with the following train of though:
- That was really, really, easy to do. Granted, I had to go to two offices, and talk with five different people, but that only took an hour. It’s hard to believe that getting out of school, and receiving at $15,000 tuition refund was really that easy.
- The one thing that I kept hearing from each person I talked to was they hoped to see me back. It seems that college students taking a leave of absence is a frequent enough occurrence that the staff has become resigned to it. They're used to it enough that the form has check boxes that read something to the effect of ‘school isn’t right for me,’ or ‘my grades aren’t to my satisfaction.’
- What does this suggest about the education system? Advisors don’t advise, paperwork is paramount, and a students leaving school is far too common. At no point was I asked not to leave, it wasn’t even a hard process — they just had me fill out paperwork. My ‘exit interview’ was a joke. All they asked me was if I’d be coming back … not that it mattered outside of the box they’d have to check.
Looking back, I’ve never been into college. I recognize that I’ve had senioritise since freshman year…
…of high school. I’ve been saying since then that college was about the experience more than the ‘education.’ It’s not that I haven’t learned anything from class. I have. But, I’ve learned far more from my experience of college, than from sitting in a classroom. I plan to go back to school. I plan to get my degree — even if it’s just so I can get a piece of paper that shows I’m ‘educated.’ This experience though, has caused me to question the value of the degree more than ever.
If an education system is so used to seeing failure, what faith do I put in it? Is a piece of paper worth all the aggravation, and expense to achieve? Could I be better off going to work on topics that fascinate me, that need the help of my generation?
I'm "young man with my whole life" in front of me according to the academic advisor I saw today. Here's hoping she's right.
Generation Gap: Study Group 2.0
Thankfully, this student wasn't expelled, but the whole this is rather ridiculous.
Basically, this: a freshman at the university of Toronto (Canada) created a study group of facebook. His professors, apparently unaware of what goes on in a study group, not only failed him (he was earning a 'B'), but recommended him for expulsion based on 147 counts (the number of people in the group) of academic integrity violations.
Wow, do they not get it. Online does not equal cheating. Free access to more people and more information is one of the great things about the internet. Using a facebook group to post questions from previous tests, class notes, chapter summaries, etc… is just genius. I wish I could have had such things in high school. It's a logical use for not only the internet, but Facebook.
DailyTech - Student Wins Victory Over School in Facebook Expulsion Debacle
