Category Archives: Teaching

International survey on use of websites in journalism education

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We are currently conducting an international survey into the use of news and magazine websites in journalism education.

We would be most grateful if you could assist by completing our survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/websites-in-journalism-education

We are interested in the views of both staff and students, so please circulate as widely as possible.

The survey is completed anonymously. For staff it takes no more than 10-15 minutes to complete, with the student section possible to complete in 5 minutes. All staff and students on undergraduate and postgraduate journalism courses are encouraged to partake and we welcome your participation.

The research is funded by the Association for Journalism Education, and is intended to map and share the experiences and best practice of all immediate stakeholders in use of news websites.

Survey results will form part of a larger study entitled “Strategies for use of news websites in journalism education”. Findings from this research project will be made available online and as contributions to relevant scholarly journals.

If you would like further information on the project, you can view the original project brief.

Strategies for use of news websites in journalism education

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Funding Source: Association for Journalism Education
Chief Investigators: Dr Einar Thorsen and Sue Wallace, Bournemouth University
Research Assistant: Dr Caitlin Patrick, Bournemouth University

Project Brief

Journalism is among the most rapidly changing industries, affected by both technological advances and shifting consumer habits. This makes it paramount for journalism education to keep pace with trends such as changing journalism practices and the migration of audiences to online journalism. One possible outcome of this imperative is for online news or magazine websites to be developed to a) showcase student reporting, b) serve as an educational tool in professional journalism practices, and c) facilitate research into news and journalism innovation. Journalism courses are increasingly making use of their own websites in one or more of these ways, but development, as in the news industry itself, has tended to be haphazard and quite often on a trial and error basis.

This proposal seeks to address this problematic by conducting a survey of news and magazine websites used in AJE member’s courses, their history, evolution and integration into education practice. The aim is not to produce a standard model to be applied in every case. Rather, the intention is to collect and share experiences to inform education and curriculum development. The sharing of best practice can also help to maintain high standards in journalism education.

Research questions

Questions that will be addressed by this project include:

  • What are the different teaching and learning strategies for use of news or magazine websites in journalism education?
    • How are websites integrated with the journalism curriculum?
    • To what extent are websites used for submission of assessed work and feedback to students?
    • Do institutions manage a single website for all cohorts and degree programmes, or multiple websites?
    • How is editorial control exercised and how is this resourced?
  • Which content management systems and extensions are being used?
    • How do these compare to industry standard software and workflows?
    • How is multimedia / converged newsgathering and storytelling approached?
    • How is social media and community interaction approached?
  • How do student websites meet requirements from accreditation bodies and industry expectations? 

Methodological approach

Phase One of the project will involve two online surveys. The first questionnaire will be sent to all AJE members to map how many have course websites, in what form and for which uses, and also to elucidate views on the biggest challenges and successes encountered. The second survey will be targeted at students in AJE member associations, to ascertain their experience of using course websites as part of their journalism education. Both surveys will gather quantitative and qualitative data.

Phase Two of the project will involve up to five site visits to observe how websites are used in live news days simulating real-life news operations. During these visits we propose to conduct follow-up interviews in conjunction with examination of websites, to scrutinise in finer detail the patterns of application and usage.

This project will investigate both technological and editorial issues. The intended outcome is a report to be made available to AJE members and / or contribution to the AJE journal, outlining experiences and advice. It may be possible to draw together the threads of those experiences into different models of application. The findings may also be of use to accreditation bodies and industry panels.

Using WordPress as a news website v2 (list of 32 useful plugins)

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William Davis and Lauren Rabaino’s posts about how Bangor Daily News adopted WordPress (and indeed Google Docs*) as part of their publishing workflow (it even feeds InDesign) has inspired me to revisit my own post about using WordPress as a news website. That was a slightly crude list of plugins that might be useful in adding functionality to WordPress required to implement important features for journalism and effective newsroom routines.

We are currently embarking on a redevelopment of a news website for our postgraduate journalism programmes at Bournemouth University, so I welcome any thoughts and suggestions on experiences with the below plugins – or indeed how you have implemented WordPress as a news website in your organisation.

* I remain unconvinced by using Google Docs as part of an online news workflow since it removes the writing process from the hypertext environment of the story (read: digital storytelling). There are other benefits, for sure, including better ability for real-time collaboration and subediting, but I’m not certain those outweigh the negatives.

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Student Wiki Pages: reflecting on new e-learning strategy for collaborative student notes

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Below are parts of a formal report I have written about my experience of using wiki tools as part of a wider e-learning strategy. You can read about the background to the experiment in part 1 and part 2 of this series.

Summative assessment component (30%) for Communication Skills, Level C unit on BA (Hons) Communication and Media, BA (Hons) English.

Pedagogic aim was to assess students’ ability to working effectively in a computer-mediated environment by applying interpersonal communication skills taught in the unit, in addition to fostering a professional engagement with the unit’s theoretical foundation.

Each of the seven seminar groups had a dedicated wiki section on myBU, which students used for collaboratively producing notes from the weekly lectures and set readings. Comments were used to discuss the lecture and readings with fellow students, as well as strategies for formulating the joint text.

Students were required to contribute to 8 out of 10 lecture weeks. Each student’s contribution was evaluated quantitatively (proportion of text written, number of edits, number of weeks participating) and qualitatively (accuracy, detail and self-reflexivity of final entries).

Evidence of impact
The Student Wiki Pages was an integral part in inspiring students’ commitment to learning on this unit, evidenced by:

1. Ensuring good attendance at lectures and professional attitude to learning

  • The requirement for each student to contribute to a set number of weeks, meant attendance at lectures was essential.
  • Attendance was regularly above 80%, despite being held at Lansdowne campus due to building works at Talbot campus.

2. Inspired student understanding of scholarly literature and engagement in lectures

  • Students developed a competitive spirit about who could be the first to contribute and who would write the most each week. They came prepared and were confident in their contribution to discussion during lectures.
  • Typically around 15% of students even contributed directly to their wiki during the lectures, using laptops or iPads to write and mobile phones to take pictures / record audio.

3. Facilitated electronic peer support and discussion groups

  • Students used the wiki to support each other’s learning by using the collaborative text for revision, asking questions, and discussing lectures and readings.

4. Improved engagement with scholarly literature in both summative assessment components

  • Weekly wiki entries were frequently around 10,000 words, often with 10-15 comments discussing relevant topics – both far exceeding expectation.
  • The quality of the second assignment, an extended essays, was noticeably improved compared to 2009/10. In particular students had a much more solid grasp of conceptual vocabulary and in-depth engagement with a wider range of scholarly literature.

5. Increased grade average for students taking unit

  • The overall grade distribution was significantly improved, including 13 firsts compared to none in 2009/10.

Feedback from a student retaking unit, with experience of wiki pages as both formative and summative assessment:

I also want to say how good an idea it has been to mark the wiki pages. Last year they were up and I paid no real heed to them, as they didn’t affect my grade. However this year they’ve made sure everyone turns up to lectures (which I and others didn’t last year) and will also be an integral part of the bigger assignment. This has also increased my understanding of the unit as I’ve had to do the further reading, which I clearly didn’t last year.

Transferable learning
The Student Wiki Pages assessment encouraged students to develop active learning techniques and scholarship at the start of their degree programmes, providing a solid underpinning for their future studies. Collaboratively producing notes meant students had to be proactive and critically evaluate their own notes from the lecture and the set readings on a weekly basis. This contrasts with a passive form of study, where students superficially read only a selection of the required material, often towards the end of the unit.

Whilst part of this assessment was subject specific, i.e. facilitating students’ experimentation with computer-mediated communication in the context of the theoretical foundation of the Communication Skills unit, this was not integral to the pedagogical benefits of using wiki tools as outlined above. The Student Wiki Pages could form part of any e-learning strategy that complements a series of lectures, seminars or workshops to enhance the overall student experience.

Part 4: I will follow up this post with some more in-depth reflections soon, specifically about how to manage the complexity of this type of assignment (relating to both setting student expectations, reassuring them about ongoing performance, and managing marking).

Update 5th May 2011: Yesterday I received the Vice Chancellor’s Educational Innovation of the Year Award at Bournemouth University for this project. More on the award in Part 4 of this series. Thanks to all the students who took part in the experiment!

Edit Flow – newsroom workflow plugin for WordPress

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I have just come across the Edit Flow plugin. Currently at version 0.5.3 it promises to deliver a unified plugin for implementing a newsroom workflow within WordPress. In other words:

  • Custom post statuses (e.g. assigned, draft, pending review, pitch, waiting for feedback).
  • Editorial comments to provide feedback on posts.
  • Email notification of changes to posts.
  • Custom user groups.
  • New post meta-data (e.g. description, due date, location etc).

The authors promises to bring additional features in the future and are currently conducting a survey to gauge priorities from their user base.

Currently the plugin offers similar features to what can be achieved from Peter’s Collaboration and Post Notes plugins, which I have used on other news websites. The idea of unifying these features in a single plugin specifically targeted at newsroom workflows is interesting though… and it will be interesting to see if this effort can provide an even better solution to this challenge. I’ve installed it and testing now.

Update: slides from Andrew Spittle describing the philosophy behind the plugin and functionality future releases.

Student wiki notes – additional guidelines

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The Student Wiki Pages experiment I described previously is going very well so far, with students collaboratively producing notes of (mostly) very high quality and using the comment facility to discuss issues that come up in the lecture and their readings.

However, I have had a few emails over the past days from students concerned about various aspects of the assessment. These do not apply to all the seminar groups, but in order to ensure consistency, I provided some additional guidelines for all students as outlined below.

  • The wiki pages will never be complete, so the argument that people before you have written “everything” does not stand. You can contribute 1) notes from the lecture, 2) notes from the readings, 3) notes or observations on the videos from the lecture, 4) additional examples illustrating points from lecture or readings, 5) post comments discussing or reflecting upon the wiki page contents.
  • However, the wiki pages are NOT designed to be a competition! They are intended to be a collaborative process. To this end, you may want to contribute your notes in batches, so as to allow other people to add their own notes (but this is entirely up to you and there are no formal restrictions concerning this). It is your collective responsibility to ensure that everyone feels able to do so and that you all engage in dialogue with fellow students. If concerns remain about how to best do this, please discuss in your seminar group and agree on how to best tackle it.
  • You are marked on the quality of your content as well as the extent to which you are able to collectively work to produce the notes. That means a page written by a large number of contributors will likely score higher than one written by only one or two contributors, provided the content is of a similar standard. Hint: this is a unit on communication skills, use them!
  • If you are editing the wiki simultaneously, the tool may generate a new page with your modification or text. There is no way around this at the moment, other than to manually move your content across to the main page for that week (I’m trying to find a fix). Please make sure you do so if you are having conflict issues like this, though I will look at all pages submitted for each week when marking. To this end, could you all please ensure the pages have a common naming structure (e.g. Week 11, Week 12 A, Week 12 B, Week 13… or whatever you have decided upon)?
  • I can assist with technical issues of not having the correct permissions, but if you are having technical difficulties beyond this, please contact IT helpdesk who should be able to help.

    • So far it appears this resolved most people’s concerns (judging by comments posted on wiki pages), though I’ll know for certain come Monday’s lecture…

    Using WordPress as a news website

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    This is the start of a blog post I never finished before I joined Bournemouth University in January. Publishing it here as it was anyway, since whatever is there might still be of use. Comments on each plugin are from official descriptions. If you want details about how specific plugins were implemented, please get in touch.

    For the past year I have been involved in developing a student news website called Tside, written by journalism and media students at Teesside University.

    The site is powered by WordPress, hosted internally on university servers, and uses a custom theme designed by the Centre for Design in the Digital Economy, d|lab. Most of the advanced functionality that allows us to utilise a blogging platform as a fully fledged news content management system comes from a wide range of plugins. Taking a cue from Paul Bradshaw’s blog post about which WordPress plugins he has trialled for blogging journalists over at the Online Journalism Blog, I thought it would be useful to detail some of the plugins we’ve evaluated as part of this process, for the benefit of anyone considering using WordPress to power their news websites.

    Continue reading →

    Will the paperless office pollute more?

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    We finally convinced the School to introduce recycling bins in our part of the University! Well, trialling it at least – one floor of the building initially and then the rest of the School if it works out. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?

    Well, my immediate feeling was: great! But this is negligible compared to how much we could be doing!

    So I fired off an email to colleagues suggesting we should consider a more encompassing green strategy for reducing our overall impact on the environment – including reducing paper waste from our day-to-day routines (especially meetings!), reducing carbon footprint of travel, reducing energy consumption and switching to green electricity.

    This appears to have gone down well with several positive responses – Paul Denison even pointing to the excellent work already having been done by the University in the previous year. In his own words:

    SAM [School of Arts and Media] initiated a university wide discussion last year under the banner of ‘sustees‘. A symposium was held and week-long series of talks and activities held. The university is now looking to incorporate sustainability into its corporate responsibility statement and I have been part of this consultation. We have also developed a new programme in sustainable design which is hoping to recruit this year.

    What also followed was a string of suggestions as to what we could do – three specifically about removing paper from our workflows:

    1. No longer print study guides, module- and course handbooks, but instead make them available online via Blackboard. We can run off copies for those students who still require them, and perhaps make a folded single-sheet of A3 version with timetable on the inside and other information perceived as essential in paper form on the front and back.
    2. No longer print grade sheets for module and award boards (that will be where you’ve got a bunch of academics all sat with their own pile of 500-odd grade sheets just to nod in acknowledgement for each page). It has been suggested we use a computer and project the grade sheets for all to see (and collectively nod at), thus saving us printing anything.
    3. Meetings. We go through quite a few of those every year and it seems a phenomenal waste to have to print agenda, minutes of previous meeting(s) and all reference documents for each and every person. All essential, but often only referred to sparingly during the meeting. Again an obvious solution seems to be to project the information for all to see and discuss during the meeting, thus saving everyone from printing it individually.

    Clearly then the solution to removing paper from academics’ workflow appears, at least in the above examples, to be the use of electronic resources – one way or another. Thus my question is this: will this ‘paperless’ office actually pollute more or less? That is, what is the net benefit (indeed if any) in environmental impact of replacing paper with electronic resources?

    Some issues to consider:

    1. The electricity consumed by accessing the replaced papers electronically – this is not simply a one off cost, but required each and every time the document is accessed, by every person that needs to access it.
    2. The electricity consumed by storage – i.e the electronic storage of that document on a centrally located server that is always on.
    3. The obvious environmental impact of producing the computers used to access this electronic information.

    These points might appear as if they are going to have a miniscule impact, but just as each single sheet of paper has a minimal impact on its own, it is the cumulative volume of each usage that causes a problem.

    Of course, there are other practical advantages and disadvantages by moving away from paper – deserving of a blog post in their own right. However, my concern here is that we must not immediately assume that just because we can remove one problem (the arguably wasteful use of paper), we are necessarily free from the larger impact of this problem (environmental impact, or if you like carbon footprint, of academia).Indeed any strategy that considers the reduction in wasteful use of paper should simultaneously consider how to minimise the impact of the electronic resources that replaces this – for instance by reducing the need for repeatedly accessing information, by streamlining procedures that rely on this information, and (perhaps most obviously) move to using renewable energy sources to support this increased use in electricity.

    Please feel free to offer your thoughts and comments below – the above is just my stream of consciousness on the issue. I particularly welcome any feedback on research that compares the environmental impact of paper use versus electronic resources. I’m sure there is a threshold where one becomes more environmentally friendly than the other, but would love to know what it is!