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
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.
The National Academies Report on a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking sounds dry, but its implications will be fascinating to watch. The monograph is a write-up of a 2009 gathering of computing experts that considered the emerging understanding of computational thinking and its implications for education. A follow-up workshop this month will consider the challenges of teaching computational thinking in more detail. I’m pleased to say that my colleague Ursula Wolz is one of the discussants. Ursula is the PI on our Broadening Participation in Computing project, the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers. Her leadership on the IJIMS project has been creative and visionary, and it’s exciting to see it have an impact on the direction that computing education and practice will take in the future.
Let’s face it — I’m an old-school dog who has spent the last 14 years trying to learn new-school tricks. I suck at writing SEO-friendly heads. I keep wanting to go old-school.
Now understand, I’m a magazine writer, not a newspaperwoman, so the only real newspaper-style hed-writing I’ve had to do is from my time at the Bell Labs News in the 1980s. I’m talking about where my brain goes when it comes time to write a headline.
I love heds with puns. I love those old Wall Street Journal-style multi-deck heds. (I love to write “heds.”) I love the way good headline writers create a voice for their papers that shouts from the newstand. You would never confuse a New York Daily News hed with a Wall Street Journal hed.
I remember great heds the way people remember great movie lines. Here’s one I learned about when I was in journalism school. It’s from the New York Daily News. It concerns the story of a young woman from Denmark who came to the US on a tourist visa to marry her American fiance. Tragically, he died just before the wedding. She wanted to remain in the US, but the immigration authorities were not sympathetic. The Daily News front page screamed:
It’s crass, I know, but you’ve got to admit, it’s funny, and it’s informative, if you’re reading it as a human. It’s what you expect from the Daily News. But it’s not terribly SEO-friendly, is it? No solid keywords to match the bots’ metadata -” immigration”, perhaps, or maybe “wedding tragedy.” Bots aren’t very punny. (Then again, Copyblogger says that the SEO crowd goes about that whole keyword thing the wrong way, anyway.
On the other hand, that hed is short enough to be twitter-friendly. But it’s not the kind of hed I’m prone to writing. As much as I appreciate the craft that goes into writing heds for a good tab, I’m a broadsheet kind of girl. I’d rather read a sonnet than a limerick.
Oh, and another thing — I love the kicker. If I ever get around to writing my own WordPress theme, it will be a newspaper theme with a kicker for each hed.
What’s a kicker? It’s a clever short hed that goes over the main headline. Here’s a good example:
That’s craft, right there. “Scarlet Fever” is a nice double entendre. It gives you a sense of the intensity of fans’ enthusiasm for the movie. (That enthusiasm is lost on me, I confess, since I consider that book and film to be a soft-core piece of racist propaganda, but I digress.) The main hed tells you exactly what the newspeg is. It’s like haiku, but more purposeful.
Then again, maybe I’m just being old and whiny, and I need to just put on my eyeshade and get back to being disciplined about writing twitter-friendly heds that sing.