One of the problems in teaching online journalism is that what you teach today may be out of date by the time the student graduates.

This is not just a technological problem (current services stop running; new ones emerge that you haven’t taught; new versions of languages and software are released) but also a problem of medium: genres such as audio slideshows, mapping, mashups, infographics and liveblogging have yet to settle down into an established ‘formula’.

In short, I don’t believe it’s wise to simply ‘teach online journalism’. You have to combine basic principles as they are now with an understanding of how to continue to learn the medium as it develops.

This year I set MA Online Journalism students at Birmingham City University an assignment which attempts to do this.

It’s called ‘Communities of Practice’ (the brief is here). The results are in, and they are very encouraging. Here’s what emerged:

‘Communities of Practice’

The ‘Communities of Practice’ assignment asks students to focus not just on developing technical skills around a particular medium of their choice, but on exploring the communities of practice that exist around it. In fact, at this stage the development of technical skills was one of the ways of making contact with those communities.

If, for example, you are developing skills in data journalism, it makes sense that you should be joining relevant mailing lists, following particular blogs, attending meetups, and having conversations (in person, or via email, Facebook or Twitter) around your area.

In addition, as a Masters level student, I’d say you should really be actively contributing to the development of the medium, by publishing your own experiences and reflections on those platforms, and on your own blog.

Two side benefits of this: you build your social capital within those communities (because you are contributing to them, not just taking away), and you build your professional status and reputation.

Hedy Korbee’s blogging on data journalism, for example, led to contacts with Microsoft Canada’s Open Source Strategy Lead, and raised awareness of her soon-to-be-launched hyperlocal website. Other students attended events and made other useful contacts in their fields.

A small aside here: the assignment constitutes a minor part of the Multimedia Journalism module on the course, accounting for 25% of the final marks, and it is assessed on 3 criteria: research, reflection, and creativity. The design of the assessment is geared to ensure that students focus more on learning than execution, and are therefore prepared to take more risks in their work (the second assignment, for which this builds the foundations, focuses more on execution).

The importance of a community’s culture

The culture of the communities of practice was important. Desi Velikova found a warm welcome on this Flash forum, and found that she was able to contribute without being an expert as one of the members needed to put himself in beginners’ shoes to write some tutorials.

Hedy Korbee, meanwhile, identified the divide between journalists and data experts and the problems for people joining those groups who, like her, don’t possess the expertise to actively contribute:

“I’ve learned that the culture of these groups requires asking practical, answerable questions based on specific problems that users face and I don’t think my skills are at a level yet where I can make a useful contribution.

“In light of this, I’ve also joined groups with meetups, such as Toronto OpenStreetMap, where I can interact with and hopefully get inspired by others who share an interest in data and mapping.  I am particularly looking forward to attending my first Hacks and Hackers Toronto meetup.”

Finding workarounds was key. In one instance, Hedy contacted a particularly approachable member of the community directly. Andy Watt, meanwhile, struggled to find communities around audio and video, so he created his own on LinkedIn, and two Twitter lists. Interestingly, he rejected the option of using his own website to host discussions “as it may have been perceived as a ploy to drive traffic to my own site.” Samuel Negredo identified communities around a blog, forums around particular software, and events.

Identifying best practice and reflecting on your own

Identifying best practice was a key process for students. Hedy Korbee’s ‘Five great audio slideshows‘ is a good example, and clearly influenced her own work. Desi Velikova compiled a list of resources for starting Flash 8.

Andy Watt’s blog focused more on documenting his own processes, posting various stages of particular experiments as he continued to edit them. Samuel blogged about the process of filming architecture. And Desi blogged about using one dataset as the basis for exploring 4 visualisation tools.

Being required to talk about process publicly in this way does two things: firstly, it engenders a reflexive approach to production, identifying what works and what doesn’t so that further work is of higher quality. Secondly, it provides material around which other members of the production community can talk: those who are not as proficient will learn from it, and be inclined to help in return in future; those who are more proficient may chip in with their own suggestions now. In short, it’s an investment.

Breadth versus depth

In terms of the structure of the MA, this assignment marks the point at which students move from breadth to depth. To my mind an online journalist needs an awareness of the wide range of storytelling possibilities in the medium, and the variety of newsgathering and distribution tools and techniques. But they also need to stand out in a particular field.

Communities of practice are key to both. One student commented that “Although I will never be a Flash expert, I will feel much more confident if I am in a situation to work on such a project”. Another said “Maybe I won’t be able to keep up with every development, every day, but the work I have done around communities of practice is helping me to identify and organize better the resources which are available”.

This is the nature of working in networks: our connections are key assets we need to work to build, and the ability to access expertise and advice a key skill. You do not achieve either by learning in isolation, producing in seclusion – the traditional mode of education. As these students go forward to specialise in online audio or video, slideshows, infographics and data, they do so within networks.

Written by Wilbert Baan

Today is the day of the US elections. I don’t think we ever had a live event on the web that will get so much live coverage. This means incredible amounts of information will be published over all kind of services and social networks. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger and many more.

Most popular web services have programmable interfaces. These interfaces allow developers to extract information out of the system. This creates a whole new genre of storytelling: storytelling with public databases. You can aggregate the information you need and sort it the way you want.

To prove the concept I made three small mock-ups. They all use search.twitter.com to see how people voted.

When I made the first the first animation Erik Borra replied by developing the idea into something that stores the data retrieved from Twitter in a database. I made a new interface that shows a graph based on what people say they voted on Twitter. And the result is a Twitter Poll.

These three examples are not representative data, it is extracted from Twitter. But it shows you how much personal and valuable information is in the public database. All you have to do is ask yourself what you want to tell to your readers and if this information is available.

I voted

This animation gets the latest twitter message where someone says they voted on McCain or Obama. It automatically refreshes.

What Twitter votes

In this animation Erik Borra stores the “I voted” messages in a central database. And I made a visual interface for the data. Obama is popular on Twitter. Refresh the window to see if results changed.

We say

In this animation you can click on keywords to construct a query. It searches the Twitter database for matching Twitter messages.

This season, after years of loyalty to the BBC/Channel 4 fantasy football competition, I’ve switched to The Guardian’s. Their game takes advantage of the reams of player data now available to newspapers – not just goals scored, clean sheets and assists, but also clearances, interceptions, tackles, shots on target, and so on, making for a very different challenge indeed.

The move mirrors that made by The Telegraph a year ago when they introduced a Flash element to their match reports that allowed you to look at an incredible range of match statistics. As I wrote at the time: it’s like having your own ProZone.

What’s all this got to do with the future of news? This: data. It’s one of the few advantages that news organisations have, and they should be doing more with it. What the Guardian fantasy football and the Telegraph demonstrate is the flexibility of that data.

And if we can do it in sport, why aren’t we doing it more elsewhere? Schools tables, pollution records, crime data, geotagged information, and election results are just a few that spring to mind – can you add some more?

For a good example of a particularly creative use of data (again with a sport twist), see Channel 4′s alternative Olympics medals table, which matches medals results against various other country stats, such as human rights record.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to join my fantasy football friends’ league, search for Game 39 – or just post a comment below…

More database-related posts

CNN have a fancy new tool which allows you to see the “history, context and background to a developing story”. BackStory presents previous stories in a slideshow format with links to the full articles.

I’m not sure if this is a ‘Previous Stories’ link box for the broadband age that brings new life to a story, or a waste of resources that might have been better spent elsewhere. The timeline could work well, but doesn’t seem particularly usable in the Anthrax example. What do you think?

Rachel Clark, senior producer, tells more on CNN’s Behind the Scenes blog. (via Journalism.co.uk)

Vuvox is to Flash what WordPress is to Dreamweaver. Vuvox is, effectively, a content management system for multimedia content – an easy way to create Flash interactives without having to know Flash.

I first explored it a few months ago, but still haven’t had the time to really see what it can do. But here’s some things:

• Photo gallery
• Image slideshows with hyperlinks
• Panoramas
• Audio slideshows – simply upload the audio and the images and it does the rest. These already have a tradition in online news, with Soundslides becoming something of an industry-standard tool.
• Interactive image maps (click on the speech bubbles)
• Integrated video galleries (or links to embedded media)

Vuvox also works with RSS feeds, Flickr, Buzznet and Picasa, so you can create dynamically updated content.

One problem: the resulting movie is hosted by Vuvox  (although you can embed it). If you want to get the movie to host yourself you’ll have to use an .swf ripper, which is probably breaking the terms and conditions of Vuvox.

Anyway, over to you – what uses can you think of?

Remember when newspaper editors thought it was impressive to have a virtual version of their newspaper, turning pages and all? Remember how no one read them?

Well it seems the same mistakes are being made all over again by Arabic daily newspaper An-Nahar.

The newspaper now features a Flash version of itself – complete with a virtual desk littered with virtual pencil, magnifying glass and, er, CD.

It has to be one of the most elaborate, confusing and pointless pieces of newspaper design I’ve ever seen.

You can imagine the conversation:

“Click on the pencil and you can move it over the paper, see? And you can ‘highlight’ stuff. Well, yes, actually when you try to highlight stuff you get an uncontrollable red scrawl not unlike that of a deranged two-year-old… but it’s just like real life!

“And the coffee cup tips over when you click it! Oh we laughed and laughed when we spent all afternoon getting that to work. In fact, we loved it so much we spent twice as long on the mobile phone that changes wallpaper.”

And the magnifying glass? If you designed a newspaper so badly that everyone needed a magnifying glass, would you be proud?

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen is widely known for his opinions on the weaknesses of Flash (he’s also written on the problem of using physical metaphors for navigation).

Flash tempts people to reinvent graphical user interfaces, confusing users (check.) It is expensive to create and maintain, and sucks up valuable resources that can be better spent on core services (check.) It presents problems for internationalising and localising content (well, I can’t read the content, so I’m guessing here).

What else? Oh yes, you can’t email it to a friend, or bookmark it, or even copy and paste from it. And it’s not searchable, which also means it presents accessibility issues, and that search engines are less likely to rank it highly.

In short, it’s a dud.

Amazingly, however, the original newspaper website does have podcasts, widgets, photo galleries, mobile services and RSS feeds. With that sort of web literacy, why on earth did they feel the need to go all virtual?

Thanks to Tuuli Platner for the lead.

Eric Ulken has taken “all the online job descriptions on JournalismJobs.com from this year, omitted the non-technical words (like “editor”, “seeks” and “self-starter”) and built a tagcloud out of the rest”. This is the result:

Eric Ulken | Technical skills in journalism jobs

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