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Selected Presentations

 

§ Breaking the Code: Re-“Mediating” the Political Prospects of Black Women.  Westchester Black Women’s Political Caucus Women’s History Month program. March 26, 2011, White Plains, NY

with U Wolz,  M.Pulimood, M. Stone; M. Switzer. “Computational Journalism in the Middle School.” Scholastic Division, 2010 Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, Denver, Colo. Aug. 4-7, 2010

§ Wolz, U., Stone, M., Pulimood, S. M., and Pearson, K. 2010. Computational thinking via interactive journalism in middle school. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, March 10 – 13, 2010). SIGCSE ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 239-243.

§“Scratching Across the Curriculum: A Tool for Fostering Varied Literacies” Culturally Responsive Teaching, Learning, and Counseling Symposium, University of Colorado, Colorado-Springs January 24, 2009.

§(with M. Pulimood, M. Stone, M.Switzer and U. Wolz.) Broadening Participation in Computing via Community Journalism, New Media Consortium Summer Conference, June 11-14, 2008

§(with M. Pulimood, D. Shaw) “Content Management Systems for Journalism,” New Media Consortium Summer Conference, June June 11-14, 2008

§(with M. Pulimood, M. Stone, M.Switzer and U. Wolz.) “Scratch in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle School.” Scratch@MIT conference. MIT Media Lab July 25, 2008

§“Journalism Across the Curriculum: Build Skills and Empower Learners as Citizens.” Culturally Responsive Teaching and Counseling Symposium. University ofColorado, Colorado Springs, January 26, 2008

§“Weblogs, Podcasts and Virtual Worlds,” WSTU Professional Development Day, Millersville State University, Jan. 11, 2007

§Ault, C., Nakra, T., Pearson, K., Sanders, P., Wolz, U., “Collaborative Learning via 3-D Game Development” SIGGRAPH Educators Panel, Aug. 2, 2006,

§Ault, C. Pearson, K., Sanders, P. Wolz, U., “Videogame Design as a Vehicle for Multidisciplinary Collaboration,” New Media Consortium 2006 Summer Conference, June 7, 2006.

§”Blogging While Black In Africana Studies.” Best Practices in Digital Pedagogy Panel. Association for the Study of African American Life and History annual convention. October 7, 2005

§”Small Murders: Rethinking the Coverage of Hate Crimes Against GLBT People,” News and Sexuality: Media Portraits of Diversity. Editors: Laura Castea da and Shannon Campbell. NY: Sage Publishers, 2005. pp. 159 -88

“When and Where I Enter: Toward a Black Feminist Epistemology of Journalism” Fourth Biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, 2003. The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. October 23-25, 2003

Before 2006

A Post-#Ferguson Reflection

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This is the morning after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9, 2014 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. I watched St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s announcement, said a prayer for Brown’s family, the people of Ferguson and the protestors who filled the streets outside the police station there, as well as in cities around the country. I said a prayer for my friends in St. Louis County, some in the media, some who are educators, some in government. I said a prayer for all of the black men I know, and for all of us who love them. And then I went to bed, because I knew that the morning would come, and there would still be serious work to do.

The details of what is happening in Ferguson matter, but the response must take into account the reality that, as New Yorker writer and University of Connecticut history professor Jelani Cobb has written, “Ferguson is America.” full of fears and frustrations that, often misdirected and misplaced, circumscribe the lives of black men daily. Cobb writes:

I was once a linebacker-sized eighteen-year-old, too. What I knew then, what black people have been required to know, is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger. I’m embarrassed to recall that my adolescent love of words doubled as a strategy to assuage those fears; it was both a pitiable desire for acceptance and a practical necessity for survival.  I know, to this day, the element of inadvertent intimidation that colors the most innocuous interactions, particularly with white people. There are protocols for this. I sometimes let slip that I’m a professor or that I’m scarcely even familiar with the rules of football, minor biographical facts that stand in for a broader, unspoken statement of reassurance: there is no danger here. And the result is civil small talk and feeble smiles and a sense of having compromised. Other times, in an elevator or crossing a darkened parking lot, when I am six feet away but the world remains between us, I remain silent and simply let whatever miasma of stereotype or fear might be there fill the void.

I was 24 years old and in graduate school. I had decided to surprise my parents by popping in for a weekend, unannounced. It must have been autumn, because it was dark when I arrived, and it was still early evening.  I came in the front door and found out they weren’t home. I put my bags upstairs, turned on the kitchen light, and I saw their car pulling into the back driveway. I went downstairs to open the back door for them, reaching up with my right hand to flip a light switch, and pulling the door back with my left.. On the back lawn, I made out the figure of a young white police officer pointing his gun at me. I think he said something like, “Hands up! Police!” but I no longer remember. From the right, I heard my father’s voice, and I saw him rounding the back of the car with his arms outstretched.

“Don’t shoot! That’s my daughter!”

The officer paused. I think he turned his head to look at my father and back to me. I stood still. My father stood still, where the officer could see him. He holstered his gun. He confirmed that everything was okay and he left. The crisis had passed. Later, we learned that a neighbor had seen the light go on in the kitchen and panicked, knowing that my parents’ car was not in the driveway and I was away at school. There had been some robberies in the neighborhood. It was a simple misunderstanding, easily rectified.

Fortunately, the officer did not feel threatened. Fortunately, he was able to hear my father. Fortunately, he was not like the panicky rookie cop in Brooklyn who recently shot an unarmed man to death in a stairwell.

Of course, I was reminded of the Richard Pryor joke about one of his own encounters with the police, where he loudly intoned, “I am reaching into my wallet, to get my driver’s license,” because, he said, “I don’t to be no (bleeping) accident!”  Years later,  I told my Race, Gender and News students about the encounter as we discussed how one should cover the acquittal of four police officers in the shooting death of unarmed 22-year-old Amadou Diallo in the doorway of his apartment building. He was, it turned out, reaching for his identification when the heavily-armed police officers fired on him.

What if I had been male?

What if something had been in my hand?

What if my father had not shown up?

My experience was not that of Mike Brown, Amadou Diallo, or John Crawford, the 22-year-old who was shot to death (graphic video warning) in an Ohio Walmart while talking on the phone and holding a toy gun in an open-carry state.  It was, however, frightening enough that I cried writing this, 33 years later. My encounter happened before the height of the crack epidemic, mass incarceration and mass marketing of the hypermasculinity and lunatic madness of corporate-sponsored gangster rap. (See Byron Hurt’s “HipHop Beyond Beats and Rhymes.”)

As the fires are doused in Ferguson, there is pain and anger in the streets. People who put their faith in peaceful protest feel betrayed. Civil libertarians worry about the militarization of police. Certainly these are important issues. TheUS Justice department may impose reforms on the Ferguson Police Department in light of this and other charges of the use of racial profiling and excessive force over a period of years.

Indeed, as former police commissioner Anthony Bouza has argued, police-community tensions reflect a larger societal failure to confront disparities of poverty and race.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has set up a commission to examine the root causes of and potential remedies for the region’s racial and economic divides. When Pres. Lyndon Johnson appointed a similar commission nearly 50 years ago, one of the common understandings to emerge was the need for everyone to feel as if they had a stake in the system. Author Michelle Alexander put it this way:

[T]rue justice will come only when our criminal injustice system is radically transformed: when we no longer have militarized police forces, wars on our communities, a school-to-prison pipeline, and police departments that shoot first and ask questions later. True justice will be rendered not when when a single “guilty” verdict is rendered in one man’s case, but when the system as a whole has been found guilty and we, as a nation, have committed ourselves to repairing, as best we can, the immeasurable harm that has been done.

I’ve asked friends who know the Ferguson area what young people there have to look forward to. They struggle for an answer. Jobs are scarce. Normandy, Missouri, the school system where Michael Brown earned his diploma is so poor, it lost its accreditation in 2013.  In Education Week this past September, Normandy teacher Inga Schaenen argued,

Nearly every student I teach has lived through encounters with the police that nobody should ever have to experience. (I know this from their journal entries written the first week of school.) And we know from research conducted by Gloria Ladson-Billings,Alfred Tatum, and many others regarding African-American students that best practices call for teachers to actively, critically, and morally engage students’ real lives and communities. When we do so, our students will achieve academically. Pedagogically speaking, designing community-responsive, standards-based activities and lessons is a moral imperative in Normandy.

One friend to whom I posed this question directed me to St. Louis Community College’s Bridge to STEM program, which provides intensive tutoring and mentoring to prepare students with a diploma or G.E.D. for study in the life sciences. The school also offers accelerated workforce training in a range of technical fields, in partnership with local industry. Certainly, this is part of the puzzle.

But it leaves unanswered the question that Du Bois posed more than a century ago: “Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white? Especially since, it must be acknowledged,  most poor Americans are not black, and pessimism about future economic opportunities is pervasive in the US and other advanced economies.

Here, again, the work begins anew. I am a journalist and educator, not a civil rights attorney or policy maker.  There is a lot to be said about how the press has covered all of this, and I will leave that to others. I want to help people find a reason for hope.

My own effort, although it may seem unrelated, is to think about how we can use media to support those who people together across lines of difference to work on common community problems. That’s part of my personal stake in projects such as SOAP, an interdisciplinary collaboration to provide New Jersey residents with accessible, comprehensive and current information about polluted properties in their neighborhoods. (If you follow the link, you won’t see much now, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes, that we hope to make public in coming months.) Our hope is that SOAP will help agencies such as Habitat for Humanity in siting affordable housing. We also hope it will be useful to Isles, a Trenton non-profit working to promote environmental and economic sustainability, in finding safe property for the dozens of community gardens its volunteers build to combat hunger. Community gardens not only help combat hunger – they may make communities safer.

This is one of several projects, and it is only a beginning. Ultimately, I think the media’s part of the solution will also have to include a shift toward what I’m calling culturally responsive journalism – a journalism that covers community responses to problems in ways that emphasize that humanity and enlarge the capacity of the community to take action to solve problems. We saw elements of that approach in the coverage of Ferguson – Michel Martin’s #Beyond Ferguson forum, for example. I still believe alternate reality games can be useful in this area. But that is another post.

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Also of interest: Sheila Seuss Kennedy calls for a new GI Bill that includes a one year program of civic service and participation.

The Future of the News: A work in progress

The Future of the News is a  TCNJ journalism class that I first taught in the late-1990s, just as the news industry was beginning to openly grapple with the seismic shifts in the news industry wrought by computer science and globalization. I am reviving it for the Spring, 2014. It seems like a good time to check on the predictions in this famous video from the mid-aughts.


This page is intended to give prospective students an idea of my plans for the class. It’s not the full syllabus, but it does convey what the major themes, readings and assignments will be.
Here is the course description in the TCNJ catalog:

An exploration of the impact of technological change, economic conditions and cultural upheavals on the reporting, dissemination and reception of the news.

The class will be organized around four areas where the traditional notions of journalism and journalists are being upended:

1. January: What is the future purpose of the news?

 

January
 21  Reading:
Journalism That Matters: An Expanded Purpose for Journalism; David TZ Mindich: The Collapse of Big Media. The Young and the Restless.		 Assignment: Between now and next class, keep a diary of the news sources you consume. Be prepared to share.
24 JTM: What do we need from journalism? In which Peggy Holman argues:

If the purpose of journalism is to support us in making sense of our world, providing the news and information we need to be free and self-governing, what does that tell us about stories that help us find our way in times of change? It calls for an expanded purpose: journalism that not only informs, but also engages, inspires, and activates us to be free and self-governing.

Also read: Adrian Holovaty: “A Fundamental Way Newspaper Sites Need to Change and
Andrew Cline on Media/Political Bias.
Additional readings and lectures will draw on the works of Mitchell Stephens (History of News), Jane McGonigal (“Reality is Broken), and Eric Gordon, among others.

 

 Holovaty’s blog post inspired the creation of Politifact. Check out the site. In a two-three page response essay explain:1. How does the design of Politifact reflect Holovaty’s ideas about news as structured data?

2. How is Politifact similar to or different from another fact-checking site, Fact-check.org? (It might be useful to compare the two sites’ coverage of the same story. Here’s an example: whether people can keep their current insurance under the Affordable Care Act. (Factcheck, Politifact))Due: January 28

31 – Collaborative class meeting.

2. February: Who is a journalist? What does a journalist do?

 

February
 1  “Discussion: Is Objectivity Obsolete? What’s the proper journalism mindset?
Read: New York Times: Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of the News?Assignment: In class debate on Keller v. Greenwald. Is it better for journalists to be advocates, or should one strive to be nonpartisan? How do we maintain a clear distinction between advocacy journalism and propaganda?		 Assignment:Reading: Poynter: Study attempts to define journalists – should we define acts of journalism instead?Read:2008 British employers Journalism Skillset Survey and Alfred Hermida’s 2009 essay, Revamped Journalists’ Role More About Mindset Than Multimedia Tricks” and Jonathan Stray: Designing Journalism to Be Used :

Journalism, capital J, is supposed to be about ideals such as “democracy” and “the public interest.” It’s probably important to be an informed voter, but this is a very shallow theory of why journalism is desirable. Most of what we see around us isn’t built on votes. It’s built on people imagining that some part of the world should be some other way, and then doing what it takes to accomplish that. Democracy is fine, but a real civic culture is far more participatory and empowering than elections. This requires not just information, but information tools. Newspaper stories online and streaming video on a tablet are not those tools.
4 Introduction to the SOAP project – our sandbox for journalism innovation Read:Maite Fernandez: Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism aims to give students a start-up mindsetPro-publica:Creating games for journalism.Assignment: Build a level of #TrendingTrenton, the SOAP-related alternate reality game on affordable housing in Trenton.  (Work on this project will continue through the end of the month.)
8 Picture the impossible alternate reality game;
 February 13 – Collaborative meeting with Software engineering class. Form teams.

March: 3. What is the best way to exploit the power of computational technology in the service of journalism?

  1. Read introduction to Storytelling for User Experience, Brooks and Quesenberry
  2. Play with Google Media Tools
  3. “Ushahidi (Assignment: Create a multimedia profile of a polluted or remediated site for the “TCNJSOAP Crowdmap
  4. Overview – visual document mining tool for journalists.
  5. An introduction to Sensor journalism – explore feasibility of integrating sensor technology into SOAP
  6. Critique software engineering students’ design proposals. Due  

April: 4. The revenue models for journalism

  1. Sustainable Business Models for Journalism – A report on 69 startups in Europe, USA and Japan
  2. Cultivating the Landscape of Innovation in Computational Journalism Nik Diapolous
  3. The rise of sites such as AxisPhilly and the agonizing decline of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
  4. Assignment: Propose your own media enterprise
  5. 4/25 System testing for final demos

The Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers and the Quest for Computing Diversity

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The Re-education of Me Table of Contents

  1. What we investigate is linked to who we are
  2. The Me nobody knew then
  3. Mrs. Jefferson’s “Sympathetic Touch” meets Mrs. Masterman’s Philanthropy
  4. Discovering Masterman, discovering myself
  5. The electronic music lab at Masterman School
  6. The Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers and the quest for computing diversity

(Disclaimer: while the opinions expressed here are rooted in research that I did with others, these views are my own.)

If Seymour Papert and his colleagues had been able to work their will in the 1980s, an entire generation of school children would have learned to program in LOGO as part of their normal school curriculum. Although LOGO was adopted in some schools, its use never became routine . Instead, the introduction of Microsoft Office and other software applications led most school districts who had computing resources to focus on teaching children to be sophisticated technology consumers, as opposed to technology innovators.

In Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race and Computing, a 2008 case study of the Los Angeles Unified School District education, UCLA education researcher Jane Margolis documented the fact that even where school districts invested in bringing computers to classrooms, unequal access to computing education persists. According to Margolis, lack of resources, beliefs that only a few talented individuals can learn computer science and pressure to teach what will be on standardized tests result in a situation where computing education for students in poorer schools is likely to  be limited to basic computing literacy and vocational skills. In addition to raising questions about social equity, this trend exacerbates the longstanding problem of finding enough students to fill the pipeline for current and future computing professionals.

The National Science Foundation, industry leaders and educators have undertaken a variety of initiatives to address this problem. One of those initiatives, the Broadening Participation in Computing program, funded a variety of demonstration projects and larger-scale alliances designed to engage students from underrepresented backgrounds in computing.  The student participants in the BPC program ranged from middle school through college, and hailed from communities across the country. In 2007, I became a co-Principal Investigator in a BPC project led by Ursula Wolz, an Associate Professor of Computing at The College of New Jersey.The goal of our project, the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers, is to use community journalism as a hook for exposing middle school students and their teachers with computing. (Award number CNS 0739173)

 

 

 

That was the formal hypothesis, and our data validated it, as our formal and informal presentations, papers and interviews amply document. [A bibliography is supplied at the end of this post that lists that work in detail. This poster, which was presented at the 2010 convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, offers an overview of the project from a journalism education perspective.] Participants reported that they understood the similarities between the editorial process and the the process of developing software. They identified programming and something that could be creative and fun. A number of participants have identified specific computing careers that they plan to enter, and are can convey an understanding of the courses they have to take to attain those careers.

The IJIMS project was implemented in collaboration with the faculty and staff of Gilmore J. Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey, and  with the support of the Superintendent of the Ewing public schools. The Fisher teachers now own the program and are continuing to develop it as a school-year program. In this essay, I am writing about the project as it was originally designed and as it was implemented from the summer of 2008 through June, 2010.

The project consisted of four components:

  • A one-week summer institute for participating teachers. The teachers ran through the summer institute that we had planned for the students, and helped us debug it. The week’s activities included brief introductions to news reporting, writing and editing;  shooting and editing video; and creating animations in the Scratch programming language.
  • A one week summer day camp for middle school students, who worked in beat reporting teams led by their teachers and supported by undergraduate research assistants/counselors.
  • An online magazine consisting of the results of the team reporting projects and powered by a custom built content management system, CAFE (Collaboration and Facilitation Environment). Our undergrads built our own CMS under the direction of co-PI Monisha Pulimood, in an effort to accommodate the need for a simple interface, flexible group collaboration, multiple security levels, and the ability to upload Scratch programs. CAFE also has a built-in sourcebook and production calendar. The 2008-9 issue of the magazine is called FISH (Fisher’s Interesting Stories Here); the 2009-10 issue is NEWS (New Ewing Web Stories)
  • An after-school program, initially available only to participants in the summer program, and then gradually made available to students throughout the school as interest spread.

In addition to these core features, students participated in “off-beat” activities after lunch designed both to let them blow off steam and to reinforce concepts related to journalism or computer science. These activities included established games such as Set, and original activities designed by our undergrads, sometimes in partnership with our teachers. Prime examples included Scott Kieffer’s Source Hunt, which taught students how to evaluate the credibility of news sources. Kieffer described the game in this essay for Poynter.org, excerpted below:

The ‘source hunts,’ as I came to call them, seemed simple enough. We organized the students into teams of reporters. Each team got a list of five questions. Then they sought out their potential sources, who were scattered throughout the building. The ‘sources’ were really just members of the IJIMS team portraying various characters. Student reporters introduced themselves to each source, ask the source’s name and qualifications, and then ask the questions on their list. But there was a catch: Although every source would answer every question, those answers weren’t always correct.”

In 2009, undergraduate researcher Michael Milazzo (now a professional learning designer) taught a swing dancing class as a way of introducing computing concepts. If that seems strange, consider that dance steps use an 8-count (as do bits and bytes), and dance routines consist of steps (or subroutines) that have set beginnings, transition points and endings (control structures), and so forth.

Lessons from Middle School Outreach Projects

In this 2010 interview with participating teacher Laura Fay describes how  IJIMS’ scholastic journalism model  has affected her language arts teaching. She speaks of  the steps she has taken to bring the spirit of collaboration that characterized the IJIMS newsroom into her classroom.

Raymond Broach, who was the superintendent of the Ewing public schools at the inception of the IJIMS project, explained that the IJIMS model changed the district’s view of professional development for teachers in this 2009 interview. Broach said that IJIMS was an unusual professional development opportunity for the Fisher teachers because it augmented their existing skills in a way that allowed them to introduce something completely new to the students.

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Beyond IJIMS

Beyond these observations and the positive self-reports of project participants, additional lessons emerge when the IJIMS program is considered in the context of other efforts to attract young people to computing.

  1. Teachers outside of the STEM disciplines can learn how to infuse computing in their classes.
  2. You have to get IT on your side. IT policies within schools and school districts can create significant barriers to progress, even when there is adequate equipment with the school. Firewalls and computing access policies created challenges in customizing our content management system for the school. For example, the web browser installed on the school’s computers was an antique version of Internet Explorer that didn’t work well with modern content management systems. These policies vary from one school district to another, though, even within the same county.
  3. Young people who become interested in computing in middle school need academic and co-curricular paths to computing study in college. Jan Cuny, the program officer at the National Science Foundation who originated the BPC program, notes that fewer than half of the high schools in the United States have AP computer science classes. Part of the reason for this is that there aren’t enough teachers qualified to teach computer science at the high school level. Part of the problem is that computing is consistently incorporated into curriculum standards in K-12 schools across the country. Cuny and her colleagues are attacking this problem with a new initiative, called CE21, or Computing Education for the 21st Century. Central to this, Cuny argues, is the goal of producing 10,000 well-trained computer science high school teachers by 2015. As Cuny argues in this 2010 article (.pdf) for the Computer Science Teacher’s Association newsletter:

    [E]ngagement programs for younger students will be ineffective if students have no further opportunities to explore computing in high school, nor the chance to discover the exciting opportunities computing careers offer. Likewise, revitalized college computing programs will not have a significant impact on degree production if there are too few students showing up at their doors.

  4. As a corollary, they also need support for their social development as future computing professionals in high school through college. That means that computer science and math educators need to continue to develop and disseminate teaching strategies and tools that respond to the diverse ways in which children learn. Successful BPC projects engage their participants creatively and kinesthetically. A kid who gets excited about programming because she has designed games in Scratch or  Alice (another popular entry-level language) might easily get turned off by the traditional approaches to teaching CS. Computer science educators, therefore should be advocates for the arts and physical activities in the schools, and there need to be more cross-curricular collaborations around the connections between those disciplines and computing.
  5. Language arts, art and social studies are ideal areas in the secondary school  curriculum for infusing computing by way of journalism education.

Conclusion

The IJIMS experiment, and the BPC program generally, corroborate my personal middle school experience that learning activities emphasizing games and creative expression can engage children in ways of thinking and problem solving that are foundational to success in computing and related professions. Composing electronic music got me interested enough in electronics that I would take apart my transistor radio, memorize the names of the parts and put it back together. A basic programming class in 7th grade further ignited my interest. However, just as Jan Cuny lamented, my high school did not have programming classes. At the same time, the experience of working on my fourth grade camp newsletter was followed by similar experiences in high school and college. My parents, teachers and counselors reinforced my understanding of how these activities could lead to a writing career. But as technology storyteller Kevin Michael Brooks has argued,  it is a mistake to think that a capacity for creative fields such as writing and fields such computer science are mutually exclusive. In fact, they can be mutually reinforcing if taught in a way that allows students to explore those connections for themselves.

Diversifying the computing pipeline is essential to meeting the current and future needs of media industries. Therefore journalism industry leaders and educators should be active participants in the discussion about broadening participation in computing. Leaders and educators in the computing industry, similarly, should go beyond the traditional focus on recruiting students who have demonstrated facility with math and science as primary candidates for computer science. That pool is too small. Rather, they should recognize and cultivate the latent computing talents in the writers, artist and athletes in their midst. In the next post, I will look at the way in which interactive journalism programs can help the news industry achieve its elusive diversity goals – and respond to its innovation crisis at the same time.

References and endnotes

Articles, papers and presentations on the IJIMS project

U Wolz, M. Pulimood, K. Pearson, M. Stone, M. Switzer, “Computational thinking and expository writing in the middle school.”  ACM Transactions in Computing Education, forthcoming.

with U Wolz,  M.Pulimood, M. Stone; M. Switzer. “Computational Journalism in the Middle School.” Scholastic Division, 2010 Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, Denver, Colo. Aug. 4-7, 2010

§ Wolz, U., Stone, M., Pulimood, S. M., and Pearson, K. 2010. Computational thinking via interactive journalism in middle school. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, March 10 – 13, 2010). SIGCSE ’10. ACM, New York, NY, 239-243.

§ U. Wolz, K. Pearson, M. Pulimood, M. Stone, and M. Switzer) Broadening Participation in Computing via Community Journalism, New Media Consortium Summer Conference, June 11-14, 2008

§  M. Pulimood, D. Shaw, K. Pearson) “Content Management Systems for Journalism,” New Media Consortium Summer Conference,  June 11-14, 2008

§ (with M. Pulimood, M. Stone, M. Switzer and U. Wolz.) “Scratch in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle School.” Scratch@MIT conference. MIT Media Lab July 25, 2008

Related links

 

 

The New Wave in Journalism Education

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Georgia Tech’s work in computational journalism has yielded a textbook on designing games for news, along with a blog. As Martha Stewart would say, “This is a good thing.”

Update, April 30: I’ve since read the book and I recommend it. It’s not a design manual, rather, it’s a book that seeks to define news games as an expressive form. It situates news games in relation to journalism history and gaming history. In so doing, it offers valuable insights and provocative observations about the esthetics, ethics and social impact of games of this type.