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Could journalists clear new Labor Department reporting roadblock by filing in html?

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The Poynter Institute reports that the US Labor Department is imposing new rules on reporting on new employment data that could make it harder for reporters to file timely stories that are so critical to the financial markets. All credentialed news organizations will be forced to try to file their stories at the same time on department of labor computers only equipped with IE 9 and MS Word. In the past, the news organizations could bring their own equipment. The Labor Department says they are instituting the rules because in the past, some news organizations have violated their embargo – a requirement that the a news item be withheld until a certain time.

First, with everyone trying to file their stories at the same time, you know there will be more network congestion than you’d find in the arteries of a quintuple-bypass candidate. Second, some news orgs are complaining that the Word docs will require substantial reformatting to work with their content management systems. According to the Poynter story, the DOL officials were committed to implementing the new rules, despite the journalists’ expressed concerns.

Now I am wondering whether there would be an advantage for reporters who can insert the simple html formatting in the story and save the word document as plain text? If so, that’s another argument for why journalists need at least html and css. Nah, it can’t be that simple.

(h/t to M. Edward Borasky, whose Computational and Data Journalism curation site led me to the Poynter.org story.)

On the Grid: Teaching and Research in the Digital Age

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Archived U-Stream live feed:


Video streaming by Ustream

Video streaming by Ustream

Fellow Panelists: Alison Clarke, Simone Browne, Howard Ramsby. Moderator: Thomas DeFrantz.

I love, Thomas’ poetic articulations of issues, the more I listen to them. I think I will spend much time watching videos of his performances. I so appreciate Alison Clark’s practical wisdom. I will be sitting at her feet, you can be sure. Howard Ramsby’s description of childen’s excitement at receiving physical letters and his linking of social media profiles to the tradition of persona poems. Simone’s linking of contemporary biometric technologies to historical traditions of slave branding was one of many insights that has my wheels turning.

How to bring it all together, how to mine this and all of the wisdom in the service of my various roles – developing an inclusive pedagogy for journalism/IMM, functioning as an African American Studies Department Chair, participating in the public sphere? Much to continue to contemplate here. So grateful to my fellow panelists, all the panelists, Mark Anthony Neal, all of the folks and the John Hope Franklin Center.

 

“Discourse” from WTSR-FM: A conversation about ACTA and Internet freedom

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On April 4, I was interviewed by TCNJ students Melissa Radzimski and Amanda Reddington, hosts of the WTSR-FM radio show, “Discourse” on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and other issues related to Internet freedom and intellectual property rights. It was a wide-ranging conversation that included tome discussion of the history of the Internet. I appreciated the host’s invitation and enjoyed the conversation. We’d all love to hear your thoughts.

Teaching HTML and CSS via translation

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One of my major teaching responsibilities at The College of New Jersey is a course called, Writing for Interactive Multimedia. For the last 15 years, we have been using that course as a way to introduce our journalism students to basic coding in html and, more recently, css. Initially a course for the journalism and professional writing major, it has also been required for Interactive Multimedia majors since 2003. There are dual challenges in this arrangement, as well as opportunities. One of the challenges is that students come to the class with varied levels of interest in, and affinity for coding. On the other hand, having students with different levels of proficiency creates opportunities for peer mentoring and collaboration in the classroom.

Also, I posit that a systematic and disciplined approach to studying html and css can be helpful for students who might have gaps in their understanding because they are largely self-taught. Finally, because coding is in a constant state of evolution, it is important to establish a culture of continual learning and experimentation – something that might be familiar to students of computing and interactive media, but which tends to be novel for journalism majors.

These are lofty ideals, but are often challenging in practice. In the past, I have taught html through demonstration, having students follow me and practice their initial coding in the class. I have tried a number of online tutorials and physical textbooks. I have spent lots of time assisting students in labs as they practiced coding, and have had more experienced students work with novice students. Currently, I’m using Virginial DeBolt’s Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS.) This approach works well enough to get students to learn some rudimentary skills, but it has not created the kind of cultural change or deep understanding that I was trying to establish.

This semester, I tried something new – I am focusing on html and css as languages that can be translated into English, and vice-versa. Here are some exercises I have created to teach and reinforce fundamental concepts. This is a work in progress, but students tell me that they enjoy these exercises and find them helpful.

1. A conversation in English and HTML

After my students had been introduced to html through readings and class discussion, I suggested to them that we have an oral conversation in which I posed as a web browser and they were the web designer. I told them to initiate a web page. One of the students said, “html.”

I said, ” I am being asked to display a webpage. I expect I will get some information about it soon.”

A student said, “head.”

I said, “This is the header. I will know learn the special rules I need to know to display this page.”

A student said, “title…”

We went on like this until we had described a page with links, text and images. There was a lot of laughter in the process. Then we practiced scripting pages.

2. Translating English to HTML and CSS

I wrote the following sentences on the board and asked the students to pair up to turn the sentences into HTML and CSS:

  1. This is the beginning of my webpage.
  2. The title of my page is “My resume.”
  3. In my page, the headlines will be in the font Verdana.
  4. In my page, the body type will be in the font Georgia.
  5. The background color of my page will be 255 255  204
  6. The content that will be displayed on my page begins here.
  7. This page is linked to my homepage.
  8. The content to be displayed ends here.
  9. This is the end of my web page.

After working on this for 10-15 minutes, I called volunteers up to ask them to write the  appropriate lines of html and css.

3. Commenting out HTML and CSS

A conversation with my computer science colleagues Miroslav Martinovic and Monisha Pulimood led me to the idea of having students use commenting on their webpages. Essentially, I am beginning to tell them to write out what  they are trying to do each line of HTML and CSS as they script. The purpose of this is similar to the purpose of commenting on code generally – so that students can have a record for themselves or other coders of what they were trying to do. I anticipate that this will help me and peer tutors or collaborators be more effective in helping them as well.

I am working on some other exercises, including kinesthetic approaches to teaching about concepts such as relative and absolute links. I have also approached a colleaguein our World Languages and Cultures department about ways in which this might be developed into a more formal system of instruction. If anyone knows of others who are teaching this way, I’m interested in their results.

Sidebar: The making of young entrepreneurs: Li’l Tech Pro and Baby Billionaire

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Here’s an experience you might remember from your childhood or that of someone you know: you’re five, maybe six years old, and you see a clock on a kitchen table. Or in my case, I’m 10 and it’s the transistor AM/FM radio my parents gave me for Christmas. You are just itching to know how it works, so you figure that you’ll take it apart and see what’s inside, and then you’ll put it back together. And so you pry off the back and you start taking out the components, one by one, and it seems pretty simple until

…you see all of the pieces on the table and they seem to have multiplied and you hear footsteps and you are trying to put it all back but you can’t remember how it goes and it looks like there are too many parts or not enough and then a parent’s voice says, what are you doing?? And you look up in fear because you know that you are in trouble.

Or at least you would be in trouble, unless you happened to have Malachi Munroe’s dad. Malachi, who is 12 and hails from Miami Florida, said that when his father, a computer store owner, found his six-year-old son dismantling cell phones, he taught him how to put them back together correctly. That led Malachi to establish an electronics repair business, a public speaking career and a new booklet offering tips and advice to iPhone users. He says it’s the first in a series of publications that will include similar advice for Android and Blackberry owners. During the interview, he put his skills to work by digging in and fixing a problem I’d been having with my phone.

I met Malachi and his Aunt, Ionnie McNeil,  at a Philadelphia hotel August 5 during the National Association of Black Journalists Convention. Aunt Ionnie, 21, is pretty interesting in her own right – she started investing at age 9 and now runs The Baby Billionaire, which seeks to educate young people about investing. In the interview that follows, I wanted to understand how they became motivated to pursue technology and investing at such a young age. Their answers are revealing.

These young people demonstrate precocious knowledge, maturity and focus.  I look forward to hearing your reactions.
Other interviews: