Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.13.11 | Even before the terms “media literacy” and “digital literacy” were coined, teachers believed students should understand the skills, knowledge, and maybe most importantly, the implicit value judgments (what does it mean to spend three-quarters of your broadcast on weather and sports?) that go into making the news.

And what better way to do that than to put the students into journalists’ shoes? A long-time staple of any media-savvy middle and high school curriculum has been to have students craft a television news broadcast.

If you want students to experience and understand how news is made in 2011, though, what should a teacher do? Making a video of students reading the news seem so ... last century. 

Consider how the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership (MoJo), which is sponsoring a competition to “invent the future of news,” envisions what news can be:

News should be universally accessible across phones, tablets, and computers. It should be multilingual. It should be rich with audio, video, and elegant data visualization. It should enlighten, inform, and entertain people, and it should make them part of the story. All of that work will be open source, and available for others to use and build upon.

Luckily, while the complexity of this new news world can be overwhelming, many journalists and journalism educators are building resources to sort it all out and to help the public, including teachers and students, play their part.

The MoJo competition asked designers, developers and “news hackers” around the world to submit ideas that would be innovative but doable responses to the following “future of news” questions:

• How would you involve the public in the newsmaking, editing or sharing process?
• The best discussions around the web can be pretty isolated. And in many comment threads, the loudest voices drown out everyone else. How do we improve the signal-to-noise ratio in public news commentary? 
• Video is a central part of many people’s daily news experience. But most online video is still stuck in a boring embedded box, like “TV on a web page.” How do we make web video more like the web?

The 2011 submission cycle is now closed, but the crowd evaluation process is underway through June 16, as the public looks over the ideas and brings the most promising ones to the forefront. At stake is a free trip to a Berlin hackfest where MoJo will “help take your idea from napkin sketch to prototype” and then a year-long fellowship in the BBC newsroom.

Some of the most promising ideas—many of which are just in a vague idea form at this point—involve integrating the news and digital learning. PenPalNews, for example, uses news as the starting point to connect students across cultures and foster global citizenship. And a variety of ideas attempt to integrate gaming, comics and cartoons as ways to engage a younger audience. What student wouldn’t follow the news if it was shaped like a Choose Your Own Adventure story?

Other ideas, while not directly education-related, would nevertheless have a profound impact on learning. Students, for example, would no longer need the resources of a classroom to create a video news report if the idea for a web-based video reporting platform comes to fruition.

While competitions like this are exciting, sorting through all the past, present and future projects that are redefining journalism is not easy. Fortunately, journalism educators and critics are attempting to aggregate the innovative approaches to news that are out there—so that the field becomes clearer and any future work can learn from the past and present.

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University has just launched Encyclo, “an encyclopedia of the future of news” that aims “to tell you about the most important drivers of journalism’s evolution.” Joel Gunter at journalism.co.uk sums it up:

The Lab’s editor Joshua Benton wrote on its blog today that there is “great value in a resource that steps back a bit from the daily updates and focuses on background and context”.

“What is it about Voice of San Diego that people find interesting? How has The New York Times been innovating? What model is Politico trying to achieve? Those kinds of questions are why we decided to build Encyclo.”

Each Encyclo entry contains: a narrative section that explains what the organisation does and why it is important; a list of peers, allies and competitors; an archive of the Lab’s own coverage; a collection of links curated by the Lab’s staff; and a list of recent stories from around the web powered by Mediagazer.

Users cannot directly edit the encyclopaedia’s pages in the style of Wikipedia, but they are encouraged to “make Encyclo better” by submitting suggestions.

Late last year, The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) launched the News Frontier Database, “a searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country.” While more traditional and less collaborative in its approach than Encyclo, it already has hundreds of authoritative entries. Read more about how sites are submitted and selected for the database.

Of course, as we have discussed before, journalism students are also envisioning the future of news. Check out our post on FastForwardNews.org, a video story project from students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Finally, for yet another look at the future of traditional media, Tom Rosentiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, outlines five myths about the future of journalism.