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How should journalism educators teach and study social media?

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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.

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Scholastic Journalism Education as a Tool for Teaching Computational Thinking

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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.

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We Just Wanna Be Successful: The Shrinking of the Black American Dream

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Consider two songs from two generations. One, Drake’s  “Successful, ” was one of the most popular songs of 2009, making an international rap star out of the unsigned Canadian former child actor. The other, “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” was a signature hit for the songwriting producing duo of McFadden and Whitehead. Both employ narratives of aspiration and determination in the face of obstacles. But Drake’s song, produced in collaboration with singer Trey Songz is fraught with ambivalence and alienation, while McFadden and Whitehead’s anthem brims with optimism.

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Jane McGonigal:”Let the World-Changing Games Begin”

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Jane McGonigal thinks that we can solve real-world problems by engaging people in large-scale, collaborative games.  Her argument makes perfect sense the more you realize that many of our most creative, innovative people are hands-on learners – the very people that schools fail, but who thrive in virtual worlds.

This interview expounds on McGonigal’s vision with her new game, EVOKE

An Ontology of Journalism

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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.