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Ronda Wery

10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media - 0 views

  • 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 () or 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.
  • 1. Promoting Content Social media tools are bringing readers to news sites and in many cases are increasing their Web-traffic. This isn’t just through the news organizations’ own social media accounts, but those of their writers that tweet, post, share and send links to their organization’s content. Each writer has a social network, and using social media tools to promote and distribute content increases the potential readership of the article being shared. Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said this is one of the most basic and yet very important social media uses for journalists.
  • 3. News Gathering and Research The power of real-time search is providing journalists with up-to-the-second information on the latest developments of any news, trends and happenings, worldwide. Jeff Jarvis, a professor and director of interactive media at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, said it’s important for students to know how to use real-time searches to gather information and keep up on what is breaking. This includes, but is not limited to, using search on Twitter, FriendFeed (), OneRiot, Tweetmeme, Scoopler, and SearchMerge.
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  • 6. Blog and Website Integration Because so many news sites are incorporating live blogging into their daily dose of content and conversation with readers, Katy Culver, a faculty member in the journalism school at University of Wisconsin at Madison, had her students learn how to use CoveritLive, which can be embedded within a site.
  • 5. Publishing with Social Tools There are many social media tools that journalists can use to publish information, and this variety is something that journalism professors are encouraging students to explore. Publishing via social media tools can be as simple as updating readers or “followers” on Twitter during a breaking news event or building an entire news site focused around Facebook connectivity and conversations about local news – something Northwestern University students created with “NewsMixer” as a project at the Medill School of Journalism last year.
  • 4. Crowdsourcing and Building a Source List It’s amazing how many websites don’t include their staff’s contact information, and the WhitePages really no longer cut it. Luckily, because of the nature of social media in networking, most people post their contact info on their profiles. Social media tools are becoming vital in building source lists. One can track now fairly easily down a source on Facebook or Twitter and send them a message. (Of course, picking up the phone too still can’t hurt.) Students are also being taught the power crowdsourcing using social media. A journalist can tweet a question involving their reporting or announce that they are looking for a source via their FriendFeed and get some remarkable responses.
  • 7. Building Community and Rich Content Sure a journalist can use social media tools to have a conversation with their audience, but what’s the point? The greater goal is to build a community through engagement. Crowdsourcing, live blogging, tweeting — it’s about building a network around issues that matter to the community. In a way, social networks are the new editorial page, rich with opinions and ideas.
  • 8. Personal Brand Students can’t stay in school forever — eventually they need to get jobs. Social networks can be used to build a personal brand that can help students land a reporting gig after college. But Jones emphasized this applies to students only, which is what he teaches.
  • 9. Ethics: Remember, You’re Still a Journalist Sreenivasan from Columbia said there are no hard and fast rules for ethics and social media yet. But told me that what a person posts or shares or produces on social media reflects on the person’s judgment and students should be cautious. He used the example of broadcasting your affiliations on Facebook through notifications on your wall.
  • 10. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment Sreenivasan, Culver, Jarvis and Jones all pointed to the importance of students experimenting with social media tools. For example, if Flickr isn’t meeting your needs, try another tool that suits your use better. Sreenivasan pointed out that we are all still learning the best practices of social media. Journalism students experimenting with these tools can learn how to apply them once they join the workforce. Here are a few tips from Bradshaw for how teachers can encourage social media experimentation: - Use the tools themselves to teach the class. Use them in any setting possible. - Do it publicly and socially. For example, Bradshaw paired students up with “Twentors” to help students that were new to Twitter. - Less talk, more action. Put the students out there and get them using the tools one by one.
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    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.
Ronda Wery

There is no information overload.There is only filter failure. « newsmango - 0 views

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    In our new world of news on the internet, we're going to need lots of smart ways of discovering and making sense of the good stuff without the junk. Why? Because it's a sewer out there. And because there are troves of treasure too. Filters-they're our first job. We're bringing lots of different filters to the news. Visualizations-they're our second job. We're bringing lots of different visualizations to our filters.
Ronda Wery

TweetNewz : Bringing Feeds,Twitter, And The Social Web Together | (jeff)isageek.net - 0 views

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    A new service launched today called TweetNewz which allows you to bring your news, rss feeds, and even your google reader subscriptions to your desktop as a news ticker, share with others, and find out what others are saying.
Ronda Wery

Social media takes to the streets - 0 views

  • The SoMo experience begins with tools like GPS that can identify where we are and where we are going in real time. GPS is further enhanced through the marking of actual physical locations -- geotagging. Geotagging can include everything from "soundprints" to video markers, and the tagging of locally relevant reviews and news. GeoGraffiti, for example, allows mobile phone users to record a message tied to a specific place that is later retrievable by anyone who finds themselves near the same location. Geotaggers can leave a virtual "Kilgore was here" tag at any place, freezing in time and making publicly available their location-specific activities, interactions and thoughts. Mobile social networking is also coming on strong with applications like Foursquare and Britekite. Mobile phone users can discover each other, both friends and strangers, via profiles they make available at a particular location. Such applications are good for networking on the fly and immediately finding out if your friends are nearby at a given time.
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    The SoMo experience begins with tools like GPS that can identify where we are and where we are going in real time. GPS is further enhanced through the marking of actual physical locations -- geotagging. Geotagging can include everything from "soundprints" to video markers, and the tagging of locally relevant reviews and news. GeoGraffiti, for example, allows mobile phone users to record a message tied to a specific place that is later retrievable by anyone who finds themselves near the same location. Geotaggers can leave a virtual "Kilgore was here" tag at any place, freezing in time and making publicly available their location-specific activities, interactions and thoughts. Mobile social networking is also coming on strong with applications like Foursquare and Britekite. Mobile phone users can discover each other, both friends and strangers, via profiles they make available at a particular location. Such applications are good for networking on the fly and immediately finding out if your friends are nearby at a given time.
Ronda Wery

The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution | Open The Future | Fast Company - 0 views

  • n noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide.
  • In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis: the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter]; the use of a completely new style of communication; the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists; a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience. All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well. It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too. This shouldn't be read as an indictment of social networking technologies in general, or of Twitter in particular. As I said at the outset, I'm thrilled at how critical this technology has been to the viability and potential success of the pro-democracy demonstrations. As the cat-and-mouse game around proxy servers further suggests, the only way for a state to entirely cut off the use of these kinds of tools is to kill its own information networks, blinding itself and effectively removing itself from the global economy. What I'm arguing, however, is that we shouldn't see the positive political successes of emerging social tools as being the sole model. We should be aware that, as these tools proliferate, they will inevitably be used for far more deadly goals.
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    In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis: 1. the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter]; 2. the use of a completely new style of communication; 3. the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists; 4. a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and 5. a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience. All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well. It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too. This shouldn't be read as an indictment of social networking technologies in general, or of Twitter in particular. As I said at the outset, I'm thrilled at how critical this technology has been to the viability and potential success of the pro-democracy demonstrations. As the cat-and-mouse game around proxy servers further suggests, the only way for a state to entirely cut off the use of these kinds of tools is to kill its own information networks, blinding itself and effectively removing itself from the global economy. What I'm arguing, however, is that we shouldn't see the positive political successes of emerging social tools as being the sole model. We should be aware that, as these tools proliferate, they will inevitably be used for far more deadly goals.
Ronda Wery

Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers - Chronicle.com - 0 views

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    The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.\n\nSome scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.\n\nA new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students - including Mr. Otuteye - is probably the most extensive to date.
Ronda Wery

The Fischbowl: My Personal Learning Network in Action - 0 views

  • We’ve spent a lot of time at my school thinking about the concept of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). We live in an age of information abundance. Our students need to learn how to find, evaluate, organize, synthesize, remix and re-purpose information in order to understand and solve complex problems.A PLN isn’t a particularly new idea; learning networks have existed for a long time. What’s new is the reach and extent that’s now possible for a PLN, with technology and global interconnectedness providing the opportunity for a much wider, richer and more diverse PLN than ever before.
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    We've spent a lot of time at my school thinking about the concept of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs). We live in an age of information abundance. Our students need to learn how to find, evaluate, organize, synthesize, remix and re-purpose information in order to understand and solve complex problems. A PLN isn't a particularly new idea; learning networks have existed for a long time. What's new is the reach and extent that's now possible for a PLN, with technology and global interconnectedness providing the opportunity for a much wider, richer and more diverse PLN than ever before.
Ronda Wery

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Designing Choreographies for the New Economy of Atte... - 0 views

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    The nature of the academic lecture has changed with the introduction of wi-fi and cellular technologies. Interacting with personal screens during a lecture or other live event has become commonplace and, as a result, the economy of attention that defines these situations has changed. Is it possible to pay attention when sending a text message or surfing the web? For that matter, does distraction always detract from the learning that takes place in these environments? In this article, we ask questions concerning the texture and shape of this emerging economy of attention. We do not take a position on the efficiency of new technologies for delivering educational content or their efficacy of competing for users' time and attention. Instead, we argue that the emerging social media provide new methods for choreographing attention in line with the performative conventions of any given situation. Rather than banning laptops and phones from the lecture hall and the classroom, we aim to ask what precisely they have on offer for these settings understood as performative sites, as well as for a culture that equates individual attentional behavior with intellectual and moral aptitude.
Ronda Wery

Citizen Journalism: The Key Trend Shaping Online News Media - Introductory Guide With V... - 0 views

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    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.
Chris Andrews

News: 'Scholarship in the Digital Age' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Taken together, this environment offers a wealth of opportunities for new kinds of data-and information-intensive, distributed, collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship.
  • it doesn’t shift quickly.
  • tenure system is a much stronger driver of scholarly infrastructure than is technology
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  • cholars have been complaining about too many books and journals since Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) day
  • “control” is more the issue than is “ownership.”
  • open access repository.
  • support both collaborative and independent
  • ccess to information resources and to the tools to use them
  • ability to use their own research data and that of others to ask new questions and to visualize and model their data in new ways
  • ew ways to explore and explain culture – and to mine all those books being digitized by Google, Open Content Alliance, and other international project
  • sustainable
  • Open access
Ronda Wery

Tracking News Life Cycles With Systems Like Media Cloud - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace
Ronda Wery

Social Connectivity, Multitasking, and Social Control: U.S./Norwegian College Students'... - 0 views

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    This study discusses several central roles that the Internet and mobile phones play in college students' daily lives. Focus group interviews at a U.S. and a Norwegian university generated a wide variety of concerns and experiences. Three themes stand out - social connectivity, multitasking, and social control. The informants were seemingly involved in constant conversations with their friends and families. Also, there was a high degree of multi-tasking, involving several activities or media at the same time. E-mail and instant messaging supported near-continuous contact. Their constant multi-tasking could reflect a feeling that they need to be busy, but also an acquired proficiency to handle multiple simultaneous media tasks. For many of our interviewees the mobile phone was used for daily conversations and text messages as much as could be afforded. New media seem to be an integrated part of these people's lives. The thought of being without their mobile phones created feelings of anxiety for some, and their use of these media for maintaining connectivity constituted some new forms of control, even of themselves.
Ronda Wery

How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom - 0 views

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    Did Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey or even Mark Zuckerberg ever portend that their means of connecting among social circles would be the news du jour in many newsrooms across the country? Social networking sites are some of the newest tools for reporters to use in news gathering, networking and promoting their work. But many newsrooms are fuzzy on the usage.
Ronda Wery

Party Animals: Early Human Culture Thrived in Crowds | LiveScience - 0 views

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    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
Ronda Wery

JISC infoNet - The Think Tank: Anytime Anywhere Computing - 0 views

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    Delivering 'Anytime, anywhere computing' was identified as the top concern in the UCISA Top Concerns survey of 2005. Delivery is a difficult balancing act - staff and students require access to office tools and applications, filestore and business applications from a variety of devices and locations (mobile phones, PDAs, laptops as well as home desktops). Service heads have to try and provide this securely to protect their institutions' assets, but in a way where authentication does not compromise ease of access and where managing connectivity does not come at the cost of a heavy demand on resources. Governance and security issues require appropriate policies for remote use of corporate information and applications, particularly on systems that may not be owned by the institution, and maintenance of security patches and antivirus software on remote systems add to the complexity. The growing use of mobile devices, increasing student ownership of 'cutting edge' devices, growth in the use of online learning and demographic changes in the student body have all contributed to systems resilience and availability becoming the major new concern for IT Directors. The expectation that services, particularly e-learning, are available 24x7 brings new demands - achieving this is a significant investment in infrastructure and maintenance and operational resource. Network security continues to be a concern - although many institutions have external antivirus and spam filter mechanisms in place, there is often a threat from within from poorly maintained systems.
Ronda Wery

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Paper on empirical study of smart mob behavior an... - 0 views

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    n recent years mobile communication has emerged as a new channel for political discourse among close friends and family members. While some celebrate new possibilities for political life, others are concerned that intensive use of the technology can lead to small, insular networks of like-minded individuals with harmful effects on civil society. Drawing from a representative sample of adults in the U.S., this study examined how mobile-mediated discourse with close ties interacts with social network characteristics to predict levels of political participation and political openness. Findings revealed that use of the technology for discussing politics and public affairs with close network ties is positively associated with both political participation and openness, but that these relationships are moderated by the size and heterogeneity of one's network. Notably, levels of participation and openness decline with increased use of the technology in small networks of like-minded individuals. However, these trends are reversed under certain network conditions, showing the role of mobile communication in civil society is highly dependent upon the social context of its use.
Chris Andrews

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 0 views

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    This new form of learning begins with the knowledge and practices acquired in school but is equally suited for continuous, lifelong learning that extends beyond formal schooling. Indeed, such an environment might encourage students to readily and happily pick up new knowledge and skills as the world shifts beneath them.
Ronda Wery

What educators can learn from brain research - 0 views

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    As technology advances, new discoveries based on brain mapping are helping researchers understand how students learn. And those discoveries, in turn, are enriching and informing classroom practices in a growing number of schools.
Ronda Wery

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities in the Digital Age: An I... - 0 views

  • This week, Sonia Livingstone's latest book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, is being released by Polity. As with the earlier study, it combines quantitative and qualitative perspectives to give us a compelling picture of how the internet is impacting childhood and family life in the United Kingdom. It will be of immediate relevence for all of us doing work on new media literacies and digital learning and beyond, for all of you who are trying to make sense of the challenges and contradictions of parenting in the digital age. As always, what I admire most about Livingstone is her deft balance: she does find a way to speak to both half-full and half-empty types and help them to more fully appreciate the other's perspective.
  • My book argues that young people's internet literacy does not yet match the headline image of the intrepid pioneer, but this is not because young people lack imagination or initiative but rather because the institutions that manage their internet access and use are constraining or unsupportive - anxious parents, uncertain teachers, busy politicians, profit-oriented content providers. I've sought to show how young people's enthusiasm, energies and interests are a great starting point for them to maximize the potential the internet could afford them, but they can't do it on their own, for the internet is a resource largely of our - adult - making. And it's full of false promises: it invites learning but is still more skill-and-drill than self-paced or alternative in its approach; it invites civic participation, but political groups still communicate one-way more than two-way, treating the internet more as a broadcast than an interactive medium; and adults celebrate young people's engagement with online information and communication at the same time as seeking to restrict them, worrying about addiction, distraction, and loss of concentration, not to mention the many fears about pornography, race hate and inappropriate sexual contact.
  • I think it's vital that research seeks a balanced picture, examining both the opportunities and the risks, therefore, and I argue that to do this, it's important to understand children's perspectives, to see the risks in their terms and according to their priorities.
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  • But my research made clear that quite the opposite occurs - the more you gain in digital literacy, the more you benefit and the more difficult situations you may come up against.
  • Many of us have argued for some time now that the concept of 'impacts' seems to treat the internet (or any technology) as if it came from outer space, uninfluenced by human (or social and political) understandings. Of course it doesn't. So, the concept of affordances usefully recognises that the online environment has been conceived, designed and marketed with certain uses and users in mind, and with certain benefits (influence, profits, whatever) going to the producer.
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    This week, Sonia Livingstone's latest book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, is being released by Polity. As with the earlier study, it combines quantitative and qualitative perspectives to give us a compelling picture of how the internet is impacting childhood and family life in the United Kingdom. It will be of immediate relevence for all of us doing work on new media literacies and digital learning and beyond, for all of you who are trying to make sense of the challenges and contradictions of parenting in the digital age. As always, what I admire most about Livingstone is her deft balance: she does find a way to speak to both half-full and half-empty types and help them to more fully appreciate the other's perspective.
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