Adding online skills to journalism curriculum
A minimalistic PowerPoint outlines the basics, in modular pieces:
- View on Slideshare
- Download PDF (57 KB)
I gave this presentation today at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Related resources are linked on this page, which I prepared for five days of journalist training in Vietnam earlier this summer.
My aim in this presentation (to visual communication educators) was to lay out a framework for introducing basic multimedia skills for journalists. There are four to six modules, depending how you choose to slice them up. The total instruction time could be as little as 15 hours. Certainly your students won’t be experts after only 15 hours, but they can begin producing the type of work that news organizations are looking for. Whether the students produce work of sufficient quality depends on what kind of assignments you require them to do — and how much effort they invest in the work, of course.
We online evangelists in journalism education are often accused of advocating a lot of technology training — “vocational skills,” some would say. I recommend that a lot of journalism — both real-world examples and practical assignments — accompany the skills instruction. If the lessons come out to about 75 percent journalism and 25 percent technology, I would suggest that you can’t get that from the computer skills class at the community college.
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August 18, 2008 at 3:07 pm