This post follows on from a good piece that I saw written by Robert Niles in this weeks 'Knight digital media center' newsletter.
I am slightly paraphrasing the content piece written here but the piece was titled 'How can we manage to better teach journalism students to manage reader driven content communities, and I felt the points made were very valid and worth restating again in my own understanding.
1-The most difficult part of journalism currently for students now is to understand how to capture and use the collective power of its followers and online tribe or community as a reporting source for content.
2-The basic ideas such as moderating discussion forums, listening, following up with and interacting to readers blog comments, structuring crowd sourcing projects and getting guest post contributors are all handy. But the the current courses in colleges for journalism are still taught and leaves less room for feedback and practical community building.
3-The limits within current journalism in the educational system are based around handing in class project to the lecturer as the editor for the deadline period. Later the student moves into the real work world as in broadcasting or a newsroom in some area. They get feedback from their editor and learn to produce work for public consumption.
4-The problem is that the university curriculum is not designed for longer periods needed to build up an online community around a publishers website or blog page. The semester is from Sept to May with exams completing the term and reinforcing the knowledge crammed in over intensive study. This is not enough time to build up a useful portfolio of user generated content (UGC).
5-The class scenario may be to ask contacts and friends to be the audience for the journalists work. The problem is that often spend too much time offline talking to their friends about these projects.
6-One possible solution to this problem may be recruiting other journalism students on other campuses. If one class can hook up with other class instructor and set of teams on other campuses, then there is a larger pool to draw on for feedback when managing UGC. Not all core modules would involve distance remote learning via interactive virtual software programs, although that is one possible option in the future.
With regard to UGC, some of the journalism students goals may include;
-Students having a better understanding of UGC before moving onto core areas of the internet and digital media tools.
-Students should be able to describe, compare and contrast the various forms of online UGC, including blogs, discussion forums, commenting, polling, wikis and crowdsourcing.
- Students should demonstrate the ability to question an online audience in ways that will elicit responses revealing the audience's collective areas of experience and knowledge.
- Students should be able to determine how that audience knowledge can best be applied to the reporting of relevant news stories.
-Students should create an online community environment that encourages reader participation in the reporting of the news. This requires the selection of the most appropriate form or forms of UGC, installation and maintenance of those publishing tools and the development of rules of engagement for the community.
- Students should demonstrate how to encourage and reward useful contributions from their online communities.
-Students should demonstrate how to discourage, deter and delete illegal, misleading and distracting contributions from their online communities.
- Students should show how to grow an online community through the recruitment of additional, useful voices to the community.
Journalism instructors would need to work with colleagues on the same calender period, while school teachers/lecturers would need to work with the online journalists who are teaching locally or at different in the same semester.
From there, each student will need to decide on what topic and in which form they will pursue their UGC project. They can choose to work in pairs or teams, so long as no more than one student from each campus is involved. But they will need to choose a topic and forum in which a large number of students will participate. (And I leave the specific definition of "large" to the instructors.)
Individual projects will be developed outside the Ning network, through students may choose to develop their own Ning networks if they choose that the most appropriate medium for their projects.
Students should be graded on both the quality of information that they elicit from their communities and the tone of that conversation, as well as the quality and content of information that they provide to other communities within the classes. Instructors should provide feedback to their students, one-on-one and in person, on these points every couple of weeks throughout the project.
Some interesting students areas to consider may be;
-a pure UGC site with a mix of original UGC with student related content.
-A final participation policy version for UGC for the site.
-A written analysis on why methods used on the site were chosen as well as other UGC content that was available.
The structure of the students projects would be allowed independently. if needed the lecturer can show the class how to use online UGC publishing systems, these can be fitted in when is suited.
This new hybrid model approach needs to be taken seriously by journalism colleges in their curriculum and also internships using UGC platforms. This concept could be taken to a college or else taught locally as a private course for aspiring journalists as an 'open source' concept.
This choice may be the only one given the job market at the moment for journalism grads, and through carving a niche in this area, the journalism student can compete against highly qualified traditional reporters for jobs.
