Online Journalism Blog

A couple weeks ago I took a group of students away from the classroom for an experiment in teaching blogging and social capital – the Birmingham Social Media Treasure Hunt.

After a quick briefing and some pointers on using Posterous and Twitter from a mobile phone, the students fanned out across the city, finding people with a social media presence, talking to them, and blogging, tweeting and audiobooing all the while. The idea was to get them to stop thinking about ‘the story’, start building social capital, and think of online journalism as something that can take place away from a desk.

Now some time has passed I wanted to share how the experiment went and how the students found it.

In short: it worked. [Read more]

If you want to skip the background, go to the next subheading

Last week the BBC Education website published a piece about a report into the use of technology by schoolchildren: “Tech addiction ‘harms learning’”:

“Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned,” the intro led, before describing the results of the study. No one other than the study authors was quoted.

But GP and Clinial Lecturer AnneMarie Cunningham, hearing of the report on Twitter, felt the headline and content of the article didn’t match up: “The headline suggests a causal relationship which a cross-sectional study could not establish, but the body of the text doesn’t really support any relationship between addiction and learning”, she wrote, and she started digging:

“It … was clear that none of the authors had an education background. The 2 main authors, Nadia and Andrew Kakabadse, have a blog showcasing their many interests but education doesn’t feature amongst them. They descibe themselves as “experts in top team and board consulting, training and development”.”

AnneMarie bought the report for $24.99 – the only way to read it – and started reading. This is what she found: [Read more]