A recent blog post by Vadim Lavrusik called upon journalism educators to make social media and online community engagement a stronger part of their curricula:

“[T]here are three components I think that are still largely missing from most journalism curricula today that could help in user engagement: learning the social media tools available for journalists to engage the audience, an understanding of what it means to cultivate community, and lastly a negative stigma to the use of data and analytics.”

The post elicited several favorable comments from journalism students, instructors and practitioners associated with institutions around the country, including a link to this thoughtful advice about how journalism education needs to change. Amen to all of it, I say. Journalists need to know how, when and whether to blog, twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, tag, make and use widgets, link strategically, build and use wikis, craft SEO-friendly content and understand analytics. (Just to be clear, references to Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook have more to do with the need for facility with sites that function in this way, not with fealty to those particular brands.)

However, we need to be more systematic in thinking about how we approach this subject as a matter of teaching, research and practice.  One can learn the basics of using particular blogging and social media tools in a workshop. A college-level exploration of the design, disseminating and evaluation of social media content should not only be about practices, but also about principles. Journalism curricula need to reflect upon and synthesize emerging insights from a range of disciplines that can inform social media practices and standards for communications professionals.

To help that conversation along, here are some thoughts on specific aspects of social media and community engagement that are ripe for college-level curriculum development and research. My effort here is more speculative than prescriptive.

Composing for recomposition

This 2009 paper, Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery from Jim Ridolfo and Danielle Nicole De Voss does a great job of helping content creators and educators understand the changed meaning of publishing in a social media culture. Ridolfo and De Voss’s concepts of rhetorical velocity and delivery offer a way of understanding how traditional publishing models are redefined by social media.

Ridolfo and DeVoss’s model can help us think about what we are trying to achieve in creating social media content, and how to do it most effectively. Their choice of the press release as a form for presenting a scholarly treatise is telling. As they explain in their introduction:

We chose a press release design for this article because it is distributed as analog and digital, with specific strategic use and importance associated with each of these physicalities; it also demonstrates an implicit consideration and structure for its recomposition. Certainly, a press release is not the flashiest or most compelling example of rhetorical velocity in digital spaces, but we think this genre is a useful place to begin thinking about the strategic appropriation of compositions. This genre, though constrained by rigid formatting conventions, offers a useful starting point for thinking about how such strategizing may predate and also change shape with the widespread adaptation of digital composing literacies. Additionally, this genre—with its disposition to alphabetic text—offers quick, easily locatable research examples for discussion and comparison (see the Defense Department example we’ve included elsewhere in this webtext). This genre scaffolds well into classroom conversations, and challenges students and researchers to find, argue for, and discuss other instances and mediums where ideas change shape, gather speed, and are elsewhere delivered.

Much of  what’s being said here about press releases could also be said of the inverted pyramid news story, or of traditional conventions for headline writing. All three forms are highly structured. The rules for word choice, phrase or sentence structure, paragraph structure and format are well defined. So too, are the rules for when and how each genre should be employed. This makes them well suited to digital distribution and content management.

Implications for journalists

But the authors identify two concepts that are important beyond their implications for content creation: rhetorical velocity and amplification effect.

Rhetorical veolocity concerns the likely path and speed of movement of a piece of content in internet or social media space. Composing with rhetorical velocity in mind extends and old idea. It’s not a stretch to think about how the packaging and anticipated shelf life of a particular story changes as one moves from breaking print or news broadcast, to a second day story, to the wires, magazines, books or documentaries. When the concept is applied to computational media, it has ramifications for  everything from SEO optimization to cross-cultural communications to the potential for collaborative problem solving. Composing for rhetorical velocity is at the heart of composing for social media.

The amplification effect is important in understanding how recomposition affects the authority, credibility and sourcing of content. The authors argue that content creators who compose with recomposition in mind are more likely to see their ideas disambiguated, repackaged and circulated in ways that give their messages more power and traction. They cite a study of the way that Iraqi insurgents used the internet to spread their message as an example. The more recent use of Twitter by protesters in Iran and Moldova is also illustrative.

The amplification effect complicates the routine journalistic task of separating grassroots movements from astroturf campaigns and outright propaganda. How might our vetting techniques need to change? Could be an interesting researchable question for both communications scholars and computational journalists.

Ridolfo and DeVoss conclude with some interesting practical exercises that can help students understand the practical implications of composing for recompostion. These exercises can be readily adapted to newswriting classes. Learning to write SEO and twitter-friendly headlines and lead grafs is an example of creating content with rhetorical velocity in mind. Using widgets and embeddable media is another.

This is one area where  analytic data can be employed usefully without engendering concerns that actual news content will be corrupted. Analytic data can help content creators understand which platforms, storytelling techniques, commenting practices and tools are likely to affect rhetorical velocity in desired ways.

That brings me to another concept that I’ve been wrestling with for some time for some time- the ethical implications of what Douglass Rushkoff calls “viral media,” which Henry Jenkins and his colleagues have recast as “spreadable media.”  I’ll tease this one out in the next post.

Greg Linch’s April 30, 2010 post at the Publish2 blog improves upon my May 2009 post on computational thinking in journalism by placing it in the context of the larger conversation about the skills and habits of mind that journalists now need. He also offers helpful suggestions about specific computer science concepts that journalists ought to understand. Linch lists abstraction, debugging, defining variables, and commenting code as examples of computer science concepts that parallel traditional journalism skills and functions.

Linch’s taxonomy is of interest not only because of its relevance to the practice of professional journalism but also because of its implications for both the journalism and computer science professions. While journalism faces a crisis because of the collapse and transformation of its business and technology models in recent years, computer science has suffered for decades from an anemic pipeline for future computing professionals.

For the last three years, I have been a co-PI on a National Science Foundation-funded demonstration project designed to test the hypothesis that middle school students could be attracted to computing via interactive journalism.  We focus on what my colleague, PI Ursula Wolz, refers to as the “isomorphism” between journalism and computing, especially: information access and dissemination, process description and decision-making for results presentation.

Our results have been heartening: students report positive attitudes about both journalism and computing, and teachers report feeling empowered in their efforts to impart skills and knowledge to their charges that will be essential to their future success. It is notable that four of our seven participating educators are language arts teachers. Even more significantly,  the teachers have taken ownership of the IJIMS after-school program, and they have brought several of the tools and techniques from the project into their classrooms. It is also worth noting that the students with whom we have been working are largely from demographic groups underrepresented in both the journalism and computing fields.

As a result of this research and her decades of experience in computer science education, Wolz has participated in two meetings at the National Academies on the subject of computational thinking. At the February, 2009 meeting, a portion of the conversation among leaders in the computer science concerned the relationship between computer science and journalism. The entire report, which is available online, is worth reading, but this excerpt suffices.

From p. 22-23:

“Wolz argued that journalism mirrors many of the processes involved in working with computers, especially programming. ‘In journalism, one must pitch a story, research it,  interview, collect data, shoot video, write, edit, send it to the editor, re-write, add sidebars, resubmit, fact-check, debug the story, and loop until the editor signs off on it. If one assumes that the computer acts as editor, then one can take note of a very familiar series of activities involved in computational thinking.”

By the way, other participants in the workshop likened journalistic processes to software engineering. Certainly,  project management skills and the ability to function in self-managed teams are essential to both fields.

So far, we’ve established that there are parallels between journalism and computing, that journalists benefit from an understanding of computational thinking and that journalism can be a vehicle for introducing computer science concepts at the middle school level. There is however, another area for potential discussion and collaboration: scholastic journalism education can serve as a useful platform from which to build a model of developmental education for computational thinking in the K-12 curriculum.

Jeannette Wing, the originator of the concept of computational thinking, has noted that just as we need to identify a progressive series of concepts that children must master throughout the K-12 years in order to become fluent computational thinkers, just as we do in reading, math and science. For example, a child ideally learns what numbers are in kindergarten, arithmetic in the primary grades, and introductory geometry and algebra by middle school as a preparation for more complex math in high school. In language arts, we can identify a similar progression from learning letters to writing the five-paragraph essay, imitating common forms of poetry and fiction, and the term paper.

In the K-12 context, scholastic journalism is practiced in the classroom and as an extracurricular activity. In the classroom, it is most frequently articulated within the language arts and social studies curriculum, but it can be successfully employed as a teaching strategy in inquiry-based science and math classes, as well as in the context of a strong writing across the curriculum program. At the elementary level, teachers often have students do reports on current events, or create “magazines” and class “newspapers”  without identifying those activities as journalistic in nature.

Computational thinking can be infused in these curricula with relatively minor enhancements. Tools such as MIT’s scratch programming language, as well as the emergence of such software platforms for K-12 collaboration as Pbworks.com, Ning, Teen Second Life, afford teachers a plethora of tools for creating learning activities centered upon journalism and civic media. Activity guides such as CS unplugged offer ways of teaching computer science  concepts relevant to journalism that appeal to multiple learning styles. If we combine the traditional journalism-like class activities with some of these available and emerging tools, interesting possibilities emerge.

Appendix:

Earlier this year, I raised the question of what a journalist should know of philosophy, I received thoughtful advice from two good friends who are professional philosophers. One asked me to think about the ethics of publicity. The other told me that students shouldn’t take a “philosophy of journalism” course; they should take literary criticism instead.

I have followed up on their reading recommendations, and I still intend to respond to them, but I decided to start with the more basic question: What is journalism? Is it a practice? An artifact? Can we categorize and subdivide its essential properties? In order to decide whether a thing is worth doing, or is being done ethically, mustn’t we first say what it is?

That was the starting point for the Committee of Concerned Journalists’ inquiry into the state of journalism in the late 1990s. They were motivated by the embarrassment of watching first-tier news teams chase tabloid headlines and internet rumors during the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, as well as the rise of media personalities such as Oprah Winfrey who were perceived as journalists by the public, but not by people in the profession. Their inquiry led to the book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and What the Public Should Expect

Since that time, the practice of journalism has changed even more radically than the PEJ envision. One fundamental aspect of that change is the fact that computer science has become central to the creation and sustaining of a journalistic enterprise. Computational journalism requires the ability to classify and journalistic practices and products clearly in order to create software and hardware that supports newsgathering and presentation. Therefore, an ontology of journalism would support the growth and effectiveness of computational journalism work.

Similar work is going on in computer science, owing in no small part to the proliferation of knowledge domains for which computing has become an essential element. My collaborator on the CPATH project, Lillian Cassel, has been spearheading an effort to develop just such an ontology for the computer science.

So, in my spare time, I’ll be playing with a concept map similar that moves toward an ontology of journalism to see whether it leads to anything useful. (Thanks to Va a suggestion from a very wise friend.) Your thoughts are welcome, as always.