Tag Archives: collaborative journalism

Does your class want to collaborate on an investigation?

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Do you have students or classes who want to do something investigative but lack support or ideas?

Next week students in Birmingham, Portsmouth and Strathclyde will be starting new investigations focused on education and the arts. Their focus will be local, but by exchanging notes the investigations should be quicker, easier, and potentially bigger.

They’ll be supported by new editors at Help Me Investigate Education who have put together the list of potential investigations, along with mentors from the media industry.

If that sounds like something useful – or you have an investigation you’d like them to help you with – contact me at paul@helpmeinvestigate.com

PS: Further supporting this is a free resource on teaching collaborative journalism, and an accompanying pack for students.

Free ebook on teaching collaborative journalism and peer-to-peer learning

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Stories and Streams free ebook on teaching collaborative journalism with peer to peer learning

I’ve just published a free ebook documenting a method of teaching collaborative journalism. Called ‘Stories and Streams’ the method, which was piloted last year, uses investigation teams and focuses on student-driven, peer-to-peer learning. Traditional lectures are not used.

You can download the free ebook from Leanpub.

You can read more about the background to the project here. A research report co-written with Jon Hickman and Jennifer Jones is published in a research report in ADM-HEA Networks Magazine. A fuller report will be included in a HEA publication on collaborative learning soon.

I’m also about to start a new class using the same method again, so if you have a class you’d like to get involved, let me know.

Stories and Streams: teaching collaborative journalism with peer to peer learning

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In January 2012 I was facing an old problem: as I prepared to teach a new undergraduate online journalism class, I wanted to find a way to encourage students to connect with wider networks in the area they were reporting on.

Networks have always been important to journalists, but in a networked age they are more important than ever. The days of starting your contacts book with names and numbers from formal organisations listed in the local phonebook are gone. Now those are instantly available online – but more importantly, there are informal groups and expert individuals accessible too. And they’re publishing for each other.

Because of this, and because of reduced resources, the news industry is increasingly working with these networks to pursue, produce and distribute stories, from Paul Lewis’s investigative work at The Guardian to Neal Mann’s field reporting for Sky, the Farmers’ Weekly team’s coverage of foot and mouth, and Andy Carvin’s coverage of the Arab Spring at NPR.

How could I get students to do this? By rewriting the class entirely.

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