Group items tagged

With news organizations beginning to create special positions to manage the use of social media tools, such as the recently appointed social editor at The New York Times, journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula. That doesn't mean having a class on Facebook (Facebook) or Twitter (Twitter), which many college students already know inside and out, but instead means that professors are delving into how these tools can be applied to enrich the craft of reporting and producing the news and ultimately telling the story in the best possible way.

You could spend this summer working on your killer tan... or you could use the downtime to get heads up on the thousands of other grads competing for journalism jobs. Use this checklist to improve your journalism skills and set yourself apart from the pack:

Citizen Journalism has put democracy back in people's hands. An army of individuals with mobile phones, portable cameras, and blogs is rapidly replacing traditional media as a reliable and wide-ranging source of information. In this milestone report, Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman were among the first to try to explain what citizen journalism really is and why this bottom-up distribution approach could be the future of news.

Journal of Interactive Online Learning Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2009

Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.\n\nA new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.\n\nThe research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.\n\n

Course description for JOMC 449 - Virtual Communities, Smart Mobs, Citizen Journalism and Participatory Culture\nFall 2009 MW 3:30 - 4:45\nUNC Chapel Hill\nInstructor: Paul Jones\n\nYes, I am goofing quite a bit throughout, but the content is serious as the course will be.

Howard Rheingold, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University, was an early adopter of Twitter and often turns to it for teaching advice. He explains to his digital journalism students how to use the site to establish a network of sources and, using tweets, how to entice those sources to follow them in return. In his social media course, he has his students employ Twitter for what he describes as "student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours."

After two years of number-crunching in his cluttered office at UC San Diego, Hirsch had it-an invention important enough to warrant publication in the (very prestigious) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations-your h-index is 32. Or to put it more technically, the h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.

Overload! Journalism's battle for relevance in an (age of too much information

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace

Online Classes See a Surge in Interest During the Struggling Economy To Help Students Finance College Courses, eLearners.com Offers the Debt-Free College Guide, a Comprehensive Database With More Than 300 Financing Options

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II "Newspapers have discovered civic function awfully late to be taken seriously"

Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I "There's always a new Luddism whenever there's change."

This paper explores the potential of artificial intelligent (AI) systems in the university's core functions of teaching, learning and knowledge nexus, against the background of rapid technological change, globalisation and challenges facing universities to respond to societies' needs in the knowledge age. As knowledge and innovation will drive competitive economic advantage in increasingly Internet defined infrastructures, a new university paradigm is needed where telecommunications and computers replace roads, buildings and transport technology that underpinned the industrial university that operated in the industrial age. As the Internet a global communication tool continues to impact on all human activities and enterprise changing the way we shop, bank, do business, entertain ourselves, communicate and think, it is radically changing how, when and what we learn. This paper introduces the idea of a HyperClass based on HyperReality, an advanced form of distributed virtual reality where physical reality and virtual reality, and human intelligence and artificial intelligence intermesh and interact to provide anyone, anywhere, anytime learning, in which teaching could be done by Just in Time Artificially Intelligent Tutors (JITAITs) that will pop up when needed, whilst students use avatars -online simulacra of themselves - to interact as telepresences in classes from different countries and locations.

investigated student perceptions of factors influencing participation in an online computer science ethics course and developed a conceptual framework with four categories: attributes of the medium, design of the learning activities, student dispositional factors, and student situational factors. Bullen identified many potential obstacles to online participation in each of these

Special Theme: Social Network Sites