Teaching Online Journalism

Your syllabus as a blog: How to do it

Mindy McAdams — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:58:21 +0000

For about three years, I have been using WordPress.com (a free blogging site) to create a syllabus for each one of my courses. I first tried it in 2007, and now I’m totally sold on the practice. (See two examples: graduate course; undergrad course.)

One of the best features for students: If you choose a WordPress theme that is mobile-ready, your students can very easily check their deadlines, assignments, etc., on their smartphones, from anywhere.

You can also update your syllabus from your smartphone. There’s an app for that: IOS and Android.

So how should you start? First, set up a free WordPress.com account. Everything you need to know is here: WordPress Basics.

You can always delete a WordPress.com blog — you can create and maintain multiple WordPress.com blogs under one single username. Your first blog can be a little testbed for you to get to know WordPress as a blogging platform, if you aren’t using it already. Then after you feel up to speed, launch a new blog and make that one your syllabus.

If you are using WordPress, there’s no reason to wait. Just launch a new blog before your next course begins, and set it up as the syllabus!

What to put on the ‘Pages’

Most WordPress themes make it easy for you to show the titles of “Pages” as big navigation buttons on every page of the blog. I’ve settled on a standard short list of Pages, based on some standard sections of a traditional syllabus.

About This Course: Key details at the top, such as the room number, meeting times, and contact info for the instructor. Those are followed by an informal description of the course (longer than the university catalog description) and reasons why a student might want to take it.

Course Schedule: This is the page that students will be checking all the time during the semester. It includes the day and dates for all class meetings, all deadlines, assigned readings, etc. However (and I feel this is very important), it does not include details about any of the work. It has an outline format and large headings for each week, making it very easy for students to use.

Required Work: For me, this is a really important part of the package, because it bridges between the skeletal Course Schedule page and the full-fledged descriptions of assignments, which will be posted on a weekly basis after the course gets under way. The Required Work page lays out the percentages or points for all assignments and provides a rationale for each type of assignment (e.g., blog posts, presentations).

Syllabus: Standard boilerplate items that do not change much, or at all, from year to year, such as the course description, attendance policies, honor code and accommodations for students with disabilities.

I’m sure for various kinds of courses, the instructor might want to add or subtract pages from this list. The way you organize it is quite important — you’ve got to be thinking about how students use documents and text. Not many of them are going to read everything!

What to put in the sidebar(s)

The Search box should be at the very top — typically on the far right side. Find it in the WordPress Widgets list, in the Dashboard list under “Appearance.”

A “subscribe by email” link is very helpful to some students (although not all will use it). Also in the Widgets list — “Follow Blog.” I always put this immediately below the Search box.

Sidebar links in WordPress default to one category: “Blogroll.” But you can change that (Dashboard > Links > Link Categories). I like to provide separate categories for links that are:

Specific to this particular course
Recommended, or generally useful for students who would take this course
Specific to our department, college and/or university

For a class in which students keep their own individual blogs, I use RSS (see Widgets) to display each student’s most recent post in the sidebar.

What to put in the footer

Most students will not look at the footer, so don’t put anything vital there.

How to post assignments

Most students like a predictable structure in their courses, so I make it clear to them which day of the week they can expect to see a new post on the course blog. Usually I say Monday, but I post on Sunday night. If I post anything on another day, it should be optional.

Most posts are specifically related to one single assignment. If there are a lot of details, I use subheadings and bullet lists. WordPress makes it easy to post links to resources, and I also like that students can ask questions directly on the assignment post, by leaving a comment. If students are creating something that can be linked to, you can require them to post their link in a comment on the assignment post.

With careful use of WordPress categories, you can make it easy for students to promptly find the latest assignment even if you are adding other kinds of posts as well.

How to use categories effectively

The categories for “Posts” are different from the categories for “Links.” You can easily set up a few key categories (Dashboard > Posts > Categories) such as:

Assignments (my most-used category in every syllabus blog)
Recommended (or, Resources)
In the News
Events

I think it’s sensible to limit the number of categories to the minimum you can tolerate. It doesn’t help anyone to have lots of categories that each have only one or two items. You can always add unlimited tags (such as topic names) to any post.

What to print for the first class

If the class meets in a computer lab, I can condense the printed document down to one page, providing my contact information, the URL of the course blog, and a few other details. We can go over the full syllabus online during the class.

If the class meets in a regular classroom, I will hand out a four-page version on the first day, and that will include a brief version of the Course Schedule and Required Work pages. It also includes my contact information and the URL of the course.

Teaching Web video: Everything you need to know now

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:46:04 +0000

In non-TV news organizations today, we see mostly one of two choices for video (or both of these): iPhone (more than any other phone or small device) DSLR (various models) All the smaller video cams seem to have fallen out of favor. Only TV and feature-length documentary makers use high-end video cameras. What does this mean for teaching in j-schools? Some great minds in multimedia journalism education have been discussing that on the Facebook group "ONA Educators," in response to a question posted on April 25, 2013. With permission of those named, here is what they said.

Code for journalism students: Presentations

Mindy McAdams — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:15:50 +0000

In the semester now ending, I taught a course in coding for journalism students. You can see the detailed course schedule online.

Here are all the PowerPoints I showed in that class. You can view them on SlideShare or download them there.

Beginning jQuery – Part 1 – Part 2
Introduction to the DOM
JavaScript 101
Responsive Web Design
Design Concepts/Web Design
HTML5 Canvas
Python – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
Bonus: Learning Python (rationale)

The class went well. The students seem happy with what they have learned and done. They had had a basic intro to HTML and CSS in a previous course, where they built two very simple Web sites.

Journalism curriculum, and the hands-in-the-air approach

Mindy McAdams — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:49:02 +0000

It’s hard work making sure a journalism curriculum remains relevant.

Here are “four essential components to the new curriculum for teaching news and communication,” according to Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute and co-author of The Elements of Journalism (2001):

“Teaching of technical skills (how to use different platforms and technology). …”
“Journalistic responsibility (including history, values, ethics, community, material that always made journalists better). …”
“Understanding of business (how to understand audience metrics, revenue, entrepreneurship). …”
“The intellectual discipline of verification … a more conscious, disciplined and clinical approach to what we once called knowing how to report, think and write …”

I think every j-school in North America (including the one where I teach), and probably the world, falls short. We need to ask ourselves why.

One suggestion, which Rosenstiel and others have made, is to partner up with other departments in the university — such as computer science. Some j-schools have done this in one way or another, but it’s not going to work (or work well) in every college and university. Some schools don’t have a computer science department. Some computer science departments will not allow non-majors into their courses. There are computer science departments that have no courses relevant to data-driven journalism or journalism code.

When it comes to hiring new faculty, or adjuncts, to teach the skills on Rosenstiel’s list, we run into other stumbling blocks. In small college towns, the adjunct pool may be limited — and lacking in 21st century skills even more so than the tenured faculty. In colleges and universities all around this continent, budgets have been cut and teaching positions eliminated. New hires on the tenure track are increasingly required (by the top levels of the university) to have a Ph.D., which limits who may be hired.

A common response to all of this is for professors, adjuncts, deans and chairs to throw up their hands and say, “Well, what can we do?”

The clichéd deafening silence often follows the question.

Students deserve better. Regardless of what they think journalism is when they tick the box to become a journalism major (and regardless of whether they’re paying Ivy League prices or in-state tuition at a public university), they deserve to be taught skills, techniques, and ways of thinking that will carry them through the challenging times at hand and ahead. They deserve to have every teacher — tenured, adjunct or freshly pressed Ph.D. — looking at what’s new, what’s happening today, now (what happened in and around Boston last week, for example, as seen in the mainstream news and in social media) and incorporating new methods for reporting, for storytelling, and for engaging the audience into all of their classes.

Don’t forget Rosenstiel’s item No. 3. It’s not about business journalism — it’s about the business of journalism. When students are thinking about getting a salaried job at a major media organization, they’re thinking old school. Many of them need to be pushed to open their eyes and see what’s in front of us now. It’s our job — their journalism teachers’ job — to push them.

Get started with Web coding. Part 5: How to use Git and GitHub

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:22:22 +0000

What is Git? How do you get Git? How do you use Git? If you ever need to share a site or a project with other people, GitHub provides an easy way to do it. This post covers Git and GitHub for absolute beginners.

List of requirements for a digital story designer

Mindy McAdams — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:39:32 +0000

The job title given in the advertisement is “digital news developer.” These are the requirements:

College degree
Minimum of 2 years programming experience
Advanced command of HTML5, CSS, JavaScript (including jQuery)
Light Ruby or Python for data mining, Web scraping
Comfort with data analysis
Understanding of responsive design
Familiarity with Final Cut Pro and Adobe InDesign

This is a very reasonable list, in my opinion, and the ad copy is good overall. It is not the kind of “computer jesus” job description that Sean Blanda blasted in 2008. What’s the likelihood that the McClatchy Company (which publishes 30 daily newspapers) will find a perfect person to hire? I’m not sure. And will the salary be good enough? Washington, D.C., is an expensive area to live in.

Those concerns aside, what does this list say to journalism educators? And to journalism students who love design?

Is this a job for a person who has a degree in computer science? Absolutely not. You will not learn those skills in a computer science program.

I think the only regrettable thing about this intriguing job ad is the job title. A better title would be something like “storytelling architect.”

Recently I was discussing with a few colleagues the value of design courses in the journalism curriculum. One colleague noted that maybe the j-school is not really the correct place for such courses. Even though traditional design skills — such as how to use typography, color, and white space — are still hugely important in digital and print design alike, those skills are taught in the graphic design program in the College of Fine Arts. But where in the university will the student learn about responsive design and storytelling?

Look again at that skills list. This really is a journalism job. It’s not an art job. It’s not a programming job.

10 examples of bespoke article design and scrolling goodness

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 17:49:56 +0000

Have you been noticing all the pretty sliding/scrolling articles that are popping up around the Internetz? My students think they’re wonderful, and so do I. So let’s look at a roundup of some great ones.

Of course we’ll begin with Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. This New York Times multimedia feature had the world journalism community talking and tweeting like crazy as soon as it appeared online. This blog post – More than 3.5 million page views for New York Times’ “Snow Fall” feature – reproduces an internal New York Times memo about how popular the multimedia feature turned out to be. In this post at Source (a project concerning journalism code) – How We Made Snow Fall: A Q&A with the New York Times team – the graphics director, graphics editor, video journalist, and deputy director for digital design who created this feature explain how they did it.

America: Elect! (from The Guardian) is not only a fun, slidy mini-graphic novel – it’s also the subject of a short but very helpful how-to article: How we built our “America: Elect!” graphic novel interactive, by interactive developer Julian Burgess. Parallax scrolling library: skrollr (check this one out).

ESPN was ahead of the pack with The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis, a lavishly illustrated story about the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher. Plugin: curtain.js.

Pitchfork magazine used the technique as a showcase for photography, featuring Bat for Lashes singer Natasha Khan, in a cover story titled Glitter in the Dark.

Lost and Found, an NPR story about photographer Charles W. Cushman, has a beautiful horizontal scrolling audio story in the middle of the page. Look for the Play button below the heading “The Year Is 1938.” Framework: popcorn.js.

The Guardian‘s Burgess linked to a scrolling graphic story about fracking — What goes in and out of hydraulic fracturing (it appears that designer Linda Dong rolled her own scrolling code for this one) — which reminded me a little of Every Last Drop, which uses scrolling graphics to tell the story of how much water we waste every day (parallax scrolling library: skrollr). I found the fracking story to be more journalistic, especially given the sources listed at the end.

Another long-form narrative dressed up very nicely with this technique: Cycling’s Road Forward, from The Washington Post. Framework: Bootstrap. Tools include Modernizr.

Unfit for Work (from Planet Money, a program that runs on NPR) has a beautiful responsive article design. I love the big data graphics embedded throughout the article. I’ve been all over the code looking for the bit that slides the sections up and down, but all I can find is very clean CSS and HTML, great attention to responsiveness, and assorted JavaScript files that don’t reference the section element, the H3, or the wallpaper class. I’m super-impressed by the code, because it looks like it can be replicated for other articles. In other words, this design is repeatable.

Too Young to Wed (from the United Nations Population Fund) is a little harder to navigate than the others, in my opinion (it interrupts the vertical scroll with horizontal-scrolling slideshows), but the gorgeous photography and heartbreaking story make it well worth a look. jQuery plugin: ScrollTo.

There are many tutorials for parallax scrolling — here’s one.

Related: The future of the feature: Breaking out of templates to build customized reading experiences, by Kevin Nguyen, November 2012

Do you have other examples to recommend? Please share links in the comments!

Get started with Web coding. Part 4: Software and CMSs

Mindy McAdams — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:31:30 +0000

This post deals with two common assumptions: (1) You need to learn particular software programs (e.g. Dreamweaver) so you can make things for the Web. (2) Journalists work inside corporate content management systems (CMSs), so there's no need for them to know Web coding. Both of those are incorrect. Let's proceed.

Get started with Web coding. Part 3: The command line

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:43:42 +0000

My college roommate majored in computer science, and I majored in journalism. I'm not saying the journalists of the world have to become what she became -- a systems analyst. But my roommate could (and still can) write standard English correctly, grammatically. She can communicate clearly. Her writing skills helped her rise in her profession. She wouldn't know how to write a news story about a school board meeting, but in many situations in her jobs when writing was necessary, she could get that done quickly and well. It gave her an edge. It made her a better manager. It helped keep her projects on track. For journalists in 2013, code starts to look more like that. Someone has even said: "In the digital age that we all live in, you are essentially illiterate if you can’t code."