RConversation

Teaching Journalism with Blogs, Wikis, and other Web2.0 tools

The following blog post is a presentation I am giving this afternoon at a Hong Kong University symposium called Transforming Learning through Technology.

In January 2007 when I came to the Journalism & Media Studies Centre, the first thing I did was to enlist the help of web architect Boris Anthony (of Global Voices fame) to set up a blogging platform for our faculty and staff.

The JMSC blogging platform utilizes Wordpress Multiuser. This variation of the open source blogging software Wordpress enables the creation of an unlimited number of blogs on our JMSC server - but only requires that we install the software once. After receiving a user account, anybody on the JMSC faculty or staff can set up as many blogs as they want with minimum technical knowhow.

Over the past three semesters, blogs have been used by seven faculty and staff to teach fourteen different undergraduate and graduate courses at the JMSC. These courses range from Documentary Film to Media Law and Ethics to Reporting Public Health.  My New Media Workshop course is also centered around a blog along with other Web2.0 tools - which I will go into later.

Most of our instructors use blogs to disseminate course information to their students, and to create a repository of resources and assignments that can be easily reviewed.

Doreen Weisenhaus has used blogs for four of her courses. She has been using the Internet as a teaching tool for eight years now, since first using an intranet chatroom to conduct classes online during the SARS crisis when classes were cancelled for a couple of weeks. She writes: "Later I used HKU's WebCT but did not like it at all. It was not user friendly. These Wordpress course blogs have worked the best of the three systems I've used."  (See Media Law, Legal Reporting, Journalism Traditions, and Media Law and Ethics) Weisenhaus says that her course blogs facilitate communication with students, keep them up to date, and keep her organized. "They come to expect it. I couldn't imagine teaching without it."

She also had students posting to a separate blog in her legal reporting course. Three of the seven faculty members have also required students to write on their own blogs or contribute to a group blog as part of their assigned work.

When we created our blogging system we decided that we would not open it up for students to set up their own blogs. There are many good reasons why we would want to host course and faculty blogs at the JMSC's web address.  But we felt that hosting student-controlled blogs on a public publishing platform would be an administrative nightmare over the long run, and too much for our small tech support staff to handle. Instead, students are asked to do their blogging assignments at Edublogs, a large Wordpress-Multiuser-based educational blogging platform hosted in Australia.

Last semester Thomas Abraham had his International News students posting stories on an Edublogs site. Since we are teaching journalism, which requires that students get used to writing stories for the general public, Abraham finds great value in this user-friendly public publishing platform. He writes: "The primary use of the blog has been for students to post stories. I think by and large the students have found it useful, and have enjoyed being able to post stories which the rest of the class ( and outsiders as well) can comment on. I think the fact that people from anywhere can read and comment on what they write, brings home to the students that their posts are more than just part of a course, but are part of a global dialogue."

My New Media Workshop course, as taught in Spring 2008, combined several elements:

• A central course blog housing the syllabus, weekly class notes, assignment information, resources, reference materials and some "how to" guides.
• Individual student blogs (see examples here and here) on which students posted most of their individual assignments.  Since all blogs automatically generate an RSS Feed, I can aggregate all of the students' individual blogs into a single feed, then publish that feed to the web via Google Reader. This enables students to follow each others' work, and also makes it easy for me to follow their assignments via my own RSS reader (I use Google Reader).
• A class wiki which we used both inside and outside of class to brainstorm our final project ideas and to organize deadline schedules.
• A Google e-mail group for disseminating urgent announcements and for discussion of questions or problems the students would prefer not to air publicly.
• The Hong Kong Stories website on which we published the students' final reporting projects.

Previous iterations of the course also had students sharing information via the JMSCHKU tag in the del.icio.us social bookmarking system, though we did not get into it this past semester as I had decided to spend more time on other things.

Having been a practitioner before coming to the JMSC I have never taught without these tools - and can't imagine teaching without them (or running a project without them for that matter) - so it's difficult for me to say how they have altered the journalism teaching and learning experience. Ease of use aside, for the teaching staff at our Journalism and Media Studies Centre it makes a lot of sense to teach and assign work where appropriate on a widely-used public blogging platform rather than an internal system like WebCT. It's important for students to become comfortable with web tools and systems that they encounter frequently on the public web and which they will wind up using in real life - either as reporters working for news organizations, or as freelancers promoting their expertise via their own websites, or as founders of internet media startups which are easier to launch than ever - thanks to new user-friendly, open source publishing platforms like those we are using in our classes.

HK District Council Elections: Will pro-China parties gain seats as predicted?

The international and local media are all reporting that Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp will likely lose seats in today's district council election.

Will that indeed happen? My students are on the case today and tonight. Watch our Hong Kong Stories website for the latest developments plus in-depth analysis and feature stories about how the district councils work, voter concerns, campaign tactics and hot races. Not sure what the district councils do and what the elections are about? See our FAQ. I have also started a blog page to monitor what other media and blogs are staying.  Balloting started at 7:30am this morning and ends at 10:30. We're expecting preliminary results around 2am.

Naturally there is a lot more blow-by-blow coverage on Chinese-language news sites such as the Ming Pao and the Oriental Daily than in the Standard (free) and SCMP (paid subscription only, boo hiss!).

Today he posted the translation of a very interesting blog post by Jasper Tsang Yok-sing titled: Democracy In Need of Emergency Help. Tsang slams the democratic camp for their failure to gain greater popular support, accusing them of false democracy:

In 2003, the DAB was defeated badly but they never  criticized the citizens.  In 2000, the Democratic Party lost many votes  in the Legislative Council and publicly blamed the voters.  So who are  the real "democrats" here?

"Democracy needs emergency help"?  This is a risible slogan.  In an open, fair and just election, it is a victory for democracy no matter who wins.  It is a basic concept in the believe of the people and democracy.  The people who need emergency cannot be democrats, for they can only be those people who wave the flag of "democracy" but are unwilling to do the practical work to gain the support of the voters.

Check out the full translation in English  as well as Tsang's original in Chinese. 

I am reminded of the U.S. presidential elections in 2004, when many Republicans were accusing John Kerry and the Democrats of being "limousine liberals," out of touch with the American heartland. It appears that Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp has managed to open itself up to the same accusation, with the pro-China camp having arguably done a better job at forging relationships with ordinary low-income people around Hong Kong.

Quite a number of my students' stories have quoted pro-democratic candidates complaining that the pro-China camp has better resources to reach out to the grassroots, while pro-China candidates have questioned who is more "democratic" than whom...

Come teach "new media" at Hong Kong U!

As I near the end of my first year teaching new media at Hong Kong University, admittedly I'm pretty exhausted. For a journalism school to have only one person on the faculty teaching anything related to online journalism (or anything related to the Internet for that matter) is a bit of a joke in this day and age. Being that person has been, to put it politely, rough. In addition I've been trying to do academic research and writing related to Chinese online discourse and free expression issues (the University here expects faculty to spend half our time on research), remain active in the process to develop corporate standards for privacy and free expression, spearhead the effort to bring Creative Commons to Hong Kong, continue overseeing Global Voices, etc. It's too much for one human being.

I'm looking forward to life improving in 2008. We're bringing in Jerry Foo to teach an advanced web skills class, the fabulous Ben Cheng will join us full-time. We also hope to hire an adjunct instructor who will work with me to teach our required New Media Workshop class in a way that makes more sense for both instructors and students. Click here for the job posting. Here's the text of the ad:

The JMSC seeks an adjunct instructor to teach introductory web skills in a graduate-level required course, "New Media Workshop," for the Spring semester 2008. Language of instruction: English. Commitment: 3-hour course every Monday night (6:30-9:30) for 12 weeks beginning January 14 and ending April 21 (due to intervening holidays and reading week); plus time required for preparation and help with grading student work.

The successful candidate will form the technical half of a 2-person instruction team. The course's aim is to teach journalism students with little technical background how to create works of online journalism. Ideally candidates should have a demonstrated ability to teach such skills as: basic digital photography, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, basic audio editing and publishing, Soundslides, FTP, basic principles of website construction, elementary HTML, use of different content publishing platforms such as basic CMS, weblogs, wikis, use of RSS and aggregation, etc.

The successful candidate may be considered for other future adjunct and/or full-time teaching opportunities at the JMSC in online and convergent media for the 2008-09 academic year and beyond.

A highly competitive honorarium commensurate with qualifications and experience will be offered.  A covering letter with full resumé should be sent to the Director, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong or email to clchoi@hku.hkThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Interested or know somebody in Hong Kong who might be? Please pass this on.

Hong Kong District Council Elections: Check out our student coverage!

(Photo by Andy Ho)

  My students are posting stories in the run-up to Hong Kong's District Council Elections on Sunday. They'll be covering events on election day and day after as well. Check it out at Hong Kong Stories.

Please give them your feedback in the comments section if you'd like.

World Journalism Educator Confab: A Rookie's Thoughts

As the only person at my little journalism center teaching anything related to the Internet, life can get lonely and it's easy to feel isolated since my colleagues (who are wonderful people otherwise) have little exposure to most of what I'm trying to teach and there is nobody else on campus to ask for advice on what works and what doesn't in the context of a hands-on online journalism skills class. Plus there is no standard curriculum or agreement about how to teach online journalism anyway, because the field is still very new and technology changes so fast. For this reason, I found attending the First World Journalism Education Congress especially useful, if not therapeutic. (Although I'm sorry, somebody has got to help them do a better website next time...)

Despite the conference's 1990's-style web presence which did not bode well, I was able to network with some of the more respected and innovative teachers in the field of online journalism, like Guy Berger of South Africa (a former political prisoner, journalist, and more recently the force behind Highway Africa), Rosental Alves of UT Austin (a transplanted Brazilian and force behind the International Symposium of Online Journalism), Jonathan Hewett of London's City University, Pascal Guenee of l'Institut Pratique de Journalisme, Elen Hume, founder of the innovative New England Ethnic Newswire, and many others. We exchanged some really interesting ideas which will help me a lot in future semesters. Talking to them also helped me come to terms with the fact that experimentation and uncertainty are simply going to be a fact of life for any online journalism instructor who is trying to prepare students for the future of journalism instead of what journalism used to be back in our various heydays - or even last year.

In a small group session to discuss reforming the curriculum for the digital age, and later on his blog, Guy pointed out the main problem we face: "What many j-teachers don’t realise is that their current work amounts in effect to imparting media history."

The main thing that many journalism schools have problems dealing with is that technology has caused professionals to lose control over the means of media production. The public at large can now participate in journalism. People who are not professional journalists working full-time for news organizations will continue to produce media and commit acts of journalism in growing numbers no matter what "we" think of the quality or reliability of their work, and no matter whether "we" think that what "they" are doing is a "good thing" or not. Amateurs are competing with professionals for attention. That doesn't mean there won't be a role and a value for professionals. Recent surveys discussed at the World Editors Forum indicate that the public will probably continue to value many things about professional journalism (as long as we don't disintegrate into completely valuless pablum about pseudo-starlets, which is also possible). But no matter what, non-professional journalism is going to be a fact of life in the media ecosystem from now on and we'd better get used to it.

I've always been pretty open about the fact that I came to my teaching position with a history of strong skepticism about the utility of j-schools in the first place.  I came away from the WJEC believing that journalism education actually can have a useful role to play, but we need to re-configure our mandate to be more consistent with today's realities.

First, I assume we agree that the ultimate point of journalism is to serve and inform the public discourse so that citizens can make informed decisions about how to live their lives, to spend their money, and to determine who can be trusted to represent their interests.
(If you think the purpose of journalism is to keep a government in power or maximize profit for shareholders, you won't agree with anything I have to say. Don't waste your time. Bye!)

If we agree with the above purpose of journalism, we should also assume that the goal of journalism education should be to help improve the skills, knowledge, and ethical standards of all people who are participating in the journalistic process and working to inform the public discourse. In fact, the conference issued a Declaration of Principles of Journalism Education, in which the preamble states:

"Journalism should serve the public in many important ways, but it can only do so if its practitioners have mastered an increasingly complex body of knowledge and specialized skills. Above all, to be a responsible journalist must involve an informed ethical commitment to the public.  This commitment must include an understanding of and deep appreciation for the role that journalism plays in the formation, enhancement and perpetuation of an informed society."

What neither the declaration nor the conference fully acknowledged was the extent to which,  in this day and age, "practitioners" of journalism are not only professional journalists but potentially all other members of the public.

The principles take a step in this direction with item number five: "Journalism educators have an important outreach mission to promote media literacy among the public generally and within their academic institutions specifically." But that does not go far enough in embracing public media literacy as what I believe should be an absolutely core mission.  Without broadening our mandate to include all people who may potentially create media and commit journalism, we can continue to generate jobs for ourselves and (fingers crossed) an acceptable number of students. But I don't see how we will continue to serve the public interest very well. We will be neglecting an important opportunity to help strengthen and improve our democracies - rather than watch them be eroded away (or in some countries, denied us entirely) thanks to apathy, infotainment, propaganda, herd mentalities, and spin.

As Jay Rosen wrote back in 2005, journalism is no longer just a "profession;" it has also become a "practice" in which we all participate. Blog-father Dave Winer has argued that we should stop trying to teach journalism as a specialized trade at all, and instead teach it as a required course for everybody. "It's too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode," he wrote. "Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate."

Dave and I differ about whether professional journalists have a future at all - I think they still do as long as they're willing to evolve and adapt -  but I agree with him that basic journalism concepts, skills, and media literacy need to be a core competency for all educated citizens.

I would also argue that introducing these skills and concepts at the college level is way too late - given that many kids now are blogging from the middle of primary school onwards. Media literacy and basic concepts of journalism - along with the rights and responsibilities (like do no harm) that go along with media creation - really need to start being introduced in grade school. Journalism schools could play a major role in helping to shape a new media literacy curriculum - and in teaching primary and high school teachers about journalism and how to teach it themselves.

If J-schools were looking for a good raison d'etre, that seems like a real one to me. But it requires a lot of work - well outside everybody's present comfort zones.

Are we up for it? Do we have the cojones? Or are we really just in this for the tenure track, regular schedules and long summer holidays?

Blogs and China Correspondence: in which I finally present the paper I wrote in December

I'm at the World Journalism Education Conference this week, where I had my first experience of presenting an academic paper.

To be honest, I am still on the fence as to whether I'm really cut out for academia over the long term.  I just started my three-year contract at Hong Kong U, and I'll certainly stick with that commitment, but beyond that I'm not sure. I may or may not have the patience for it. There are some things about academia - having space and time to think about issues that truly interest and concern me, for instance - which I really value. Other aspects of academia (not specific to any one institution necessarily) are mind-numbing, frustrating, and to put it bluntly hypocritical. But then I guess we can say that about most if not all professions, can't we? I'll write more about my impressions of this conference - and the journalism education profession more generally - in a later post. (Meanwhile read Guy Berger's excellent blogging of many sessions here.) But my main headline is that while nobody here will quite admit it, journalism education is in an even greater crisis of purpose than the journalism profession generally. Why? Because academic institutions are several magnitudes less flexible than news organizations when it comes to change.

Presenting a paper at an academic conference is the polar opposite of blogging - or journalism for that matter. We had to submit our finished papers in early January in order to have them considered for presentation this week. We were required to submit papers that had not been previously published elsewhere - so now that I've presented it perhaps the thing may get published in some academic journal by next year. By which time the entire thing will be completely out of date.

My paper, titled "Blogs and China Correspondence: How Foreign Correspondents Covering China Use Blogs," summarized the results of a survey I conducted last Fall of foreign correspondents who cover China. The responses I got back showed that blogs have become an important part of the media diet for foreign correspondents who cover China. For further details, see this December blog post in which I previewed many of the key results. A PDF of the whole thing can be downloaded here.   (511.0K)

Many people here at the conference found it surprising that blogs are already having such a substantial impact on foreign journalists' China coverage. Another finding that surprised people was that a  lot of working journalists (unlike most people who study or write about journalism) find it useless to ask whether blogs in general are more or less "reliable" or "credible" than some other medium. Journalists evaluate each blog according to its individual merits, depending on what is known about the blogger’s background and track record. This is the same way a journalist evaluates any source - whether it's a person or a local newspaper in the city where they work, or whatever.

At the end of the paper, based on feedback from journalists and the kinds of blogs they claimed to read regularly, I offered some conclusions about what kinds of blogs are of greatest value to China correspondents (and likely all journalists). They tend to be blogs that go beyond personal opinion and essay-writing in reaction to news events reported by mainstream media. They tend to contain at least one of the following:

• original information not readily available elsewhere;
• in-depth perspective based on specialized knowledge;
• information or insight on places and people the journalist cannot easily access;
• links to original documents and resources;
• translated items from the original language on subjects that the international media tends to be interested in – or which they might be convinced to pay attention to if the material is interesting enough.

Finally, I asked: "To what extent can we extrapolate from the relationship between blogs and China correspondence to a more global relationship between blogs and foreign correspondence? Are Israeli and Palestinian bloggers as important to international correspondents covering Israel-Palestine, for example?"  I hope people will start surveying larger groups of correspondents covering different countries and regions so that we can find out.

My own hypothesis is that the relationship between blogs and foreign correspondence varies widely from place to place. Just based on my own observations and conversations with journalists I know, blogs are probably more important to China correspondents than to journalists covering a story such as the Israel-Palestine conflict for several reasons:   

• The China story in the international media is not dominated by military conflict or any one obvious single storyline;
• The China story is not generally a “breaking story,” but rather a “process story” about how this complex and geopolitically important country is changing, and what that change means for the rest of the world;
• There is strong demand for specialist insight, information and analysis on a range of subjects;
• Official controls on professional media and public speech in China are strong;
• Many sources are fearful of consequences of speaking directly with foreign journalists;
• Access to on-the-ground or reliable information outside of major cities is often difficult;
• China’s Internet population is sufficiently large and the material available on the Chinese Internet is sufficiently interesting in comparison with Chinese mainstream media sources.

In a breaking-news, conflict-oriented region where the local media is lively, diverse, relatively free, and non-Internet sources from all sides abound, I would guess that blogs are unlikely to be as important a source for foreign correspondents as they are in China.  But this is just a theory. What we really need is a comparative survey of international correspondents covering a range of countries, so that we can get a more global picture of how blogs fit into the overall ecosystem of international news. 

Of course, another thing that has yet to be done is a thorough study and analysis of the relationship between Chinese blogs and the Chinese news media. Michael Anti talked a bit about that relationship at Hong Kong U in April. That's a much bigger project, but is probably key if we want to understand China's rapidly evolving media ecosystem.

The future of newspapers depends on journalism, but not just on paper.

Finally, I've handed in my grades for the semester and have time to write up my notes from last week's World Editors Forum in Capetown!

If you think the World Association of Newspapers was bemoaning the death of newspapers, you're wrong.

Instead, the focus was on rebirth and reincarnation. Based on the conversations and panels I sat through over the course of three days (see detailed summaries and see videos on the Editors' Weblog), it was pretty clear that  newspaper companies aren't on the verge of death. The world's leading newspapers, at least, have already gone quite a long way to re-create themselves as mulimedia platforms, with the paper product being only a part of their business. Many are connecting with or generating online communities, many are starting to find ways to bring the public into the newsgathering process, and they're going mobile.

But whatever the format, people recognized that ultimately, newspapers' survival will depend on journalism. Credible, accurate, and relevant journalism.

The job of a newspaper journalist is changing fast. Newspaper journalists are increasingly expected to tell their stories in many places: on paper, online, and on various devices (mobile phones, ipods, pda's etc.). They will do so not just with words, but with pictures, sounds, and video. What's more, they will collaborate with their audiences and their communities in the news-gathering and story research process. They will also enable and facilitate conversations with the public about the newspaper's journalism.

This vision of the future of newspapers is not new - people like Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor have been advocating for various aspects of it for the past several years. What's exciting to see is how mainstream that vision has now become. There was no question about whether to create an integrated newsroom that produce multimedia online news in addition to newspaper stories. The only question was how, and how fast.

Conference participants received two very useful publications. One is a 160 page booklet titled "Trends In Newsrooms," and the other was the 70 page Innovations in Newspapers 2007 World Report.  Neither is available free online but you can download a PDF of the results of a very interesting multi-nation public poll here.

The authors of the first report write: "Clearly, print editors see the internet and its new journalism components as the next wave of their own business and are preparing for this wave, instead of opting to fight it." Jeff Jarvis, who contributed a section of the report, thinks newspaper companies still haven't gone far enough, however.  "Print will not die, but print is not our future," he says. "Now it is time to go the next step, to stop defining ourselves by our medium, paper, and to start defining ourselves by our service: journalism."

The big headline from the Harris/Innovation News Readership Survey (PDF) was that the public really wants good journalism. Before showing the detailed survey results, the survey's authors present the following conclusions they have taken from the data in a page titled "Winners and Losers:"

• ONLINE NEWS AND INFORMATION: up significantly in all geographies
• TV NETWORK: news down significantly in all geographies
• Combined NEWSPAPERS down modestly to significantly in all geographies
• RADIO remains relevant, modestly down
• CABLE NETWORK NEWS increases modestly in most markets
• MAGAZINES are entertainment focused, not news and information

Further conclusions based on the survey results (emphasis added):

• Newspapers must remove their bias to improve their credibility/image [They want journalism! Not just opinion!]
• While local will always matter to a reader, there appears to be a new and urgent need for worldwide news [This would seem to indicate that the epidemic downsizing of international correspondence is a bad business idea.]
• Online news and information will replace TV network news as the leading source, but newspapers remain a vital source by themselves and dominant if they can further integrate  online into their identity
• Newspapers can significantly upgrade their existing product with more objectivity, more in-depth reporting and analysis, more personal relevance, better and more visual design, and better writing/stories 
• All media compete for the reader’s time: you cannot create more time, only increase its value
• We are increasingly affected by national  and world events. Newspapers have an opportunity to help us better understand global issues and their impact [Again, another argument against reducing the international news hole!]
• Newspapers as ‘watch-dogs.’ Create a  context for what matters, see the issues, and hold others accountable
• Relevancy matters:provide news and information that is interesting to know and that you can use in daily life
• We don’t necessarily expect newspapers to ‘change the world’, but certainly to help us better ‘see the world’ 

 

Numerous speakers throughout the conference reiterated versions of this statement in the "Trends in Newsrooms" report: "the next generation of journalists are going to survive on multi-tasking in multimedia."  As a teacher of journalism and new media, I learned a lot about where news organizations are headed globally, the challenges they face, and the kinds of skills and qualities editors are now looking for in hiring entry-level journalists. I hope that these lessons will help me and my colleagues in Hong Kong prepare our students to become successful - and employable - journalists of the future.

At the end of an excellent session on newspaper transformation, Jennifer Carroll, Vice-President/New Media Content at Gannett Co. (USA) was asked by a journalism professor what we should be teaching the journalists of the future. Her answer was that while technical skills are useful and give entry-level journalists an edge, the most important qualities she and other Gannett editors look for are strong journalism skills and instincts: "It helps to have understanding of all the multimedia skills," she said, "But most important is having people who are curious and smart and able to communicate well." (See the video of that session here. Also see the session on integrated newsrooms here.)

The essence of journalism is eternal and changes little no matter what medium you're working in. 

I was on a panel with the unfortunate title of "user generated content" which is what many news companies call blogs and other citizen media. I did my usual spiel about Global Voices. The most interesting speaker I thought was Didier Pillet of France-Ouest, who talked about how his news organization is cultivating "village reporters:"  citizens who help the paper cover local events, with direction and editing from newspaper staff. A summary of what he said is included here. At the end of the session all of us on the panel were asked to give some predictions about what the World Editors' Forum will be discussing next year. Here's the video:

Hong Kong Stories: Check out my students!

I have several good excuses for not blogging much lately, but my favorite excuse is the work I've been doing with my New Media Workshop students.   Web reporting projects by my 60 undergraduate and masters' students are now rolling out at Hong Kong Stories.   Check them out!

The stories examine different ways that Hong Kong has changed over the past ten years since the handover from British to Chinese rule.

The site is fully Web2.0-enabled so you can subscribe to the rss feed, post comments, leave trackback and bookmark things that you find interesting.

My students are roughly one third Hong Kong Chinese, one third mainland Chinese, and one third from various other countries. I think the site paints a fascinating picture of how this group of people views Hong Kong.

Here's what Hong Kong Stories can teach you:

• You think everybody in Hong Kong is rich? Think again.
• Mainland Chinese culture in Hong Kong is growing stronger,  with more Mandarin everywhere - let us know your views whether that's good or bad here.
• The influx of mainlanders into Hong Kong is also impacting tourism, education, the arts, marriage and childbirth patterns, and medical practices.
• Hong Kong is also changing the growing numbers of mainland Chinese people who come here to study and work.
• Not all Hong Kongers are ethnic Chinese. There's a large and long-standing South Asian community.
• Buddhism isn't just thriving, it's growing in Hong Kong.
• Did you know there are refugees living in Chunking Mansions?

(Photo by Nick Westra)

...and more to come later this week and into the beginning of next week. We've got some very interesting stories coming up over the next several days in the Politics and Environment sections, many more stories for the Social Issues section, as well as explorations of Education and Hong Kong's Identity.

So please subscribe to the RSS feed and keep checking back. The pieces are peer edited by fellow students and have not undergone professional editing. We'd love to have your feedback about what you found interesting, what you agree with or disagree with, whether you'd like to suggest corrections, and whether you have any further information to add.

This was a required course. For many students at the JMSC it is the one class they're getting that deals with the intersection of Internet and journalism. So I packed a lot of stuff in. We learned the basics of how to tell journalistic stories online, how best to use the web in the newsgathering process (and when you have to go offline, go real places and talk to real people), how to blog, how to work with RSS, tagging, wikis, and other Web2.0 tools.

We talked a lot about how the web enables journalists to conduct a conversation with the public rather than lecture them. We covered copyright and Creative Commons in the context of online journalism. It also goes without saying that we examined the Hong Kong and Chinese context for all of these things.

Nobody who knows me will be surprised to hear I've worked them all pretty hard and challenged them to think in new ways.  Hopefully they'll find what they learned worthwhile as they embark into a profession that is changing so fast, it's giving many veteran journalists whiplash.

Joi visits my class

My Friday morning New Media Workshop class got a real treat this week when my friend Joi Ito came and spoke. As I mentioned in class, Joi was one of the people I met when I was working in Tokyo who influenced me to move away from my "mainstream" journalism career and to start taking the web's new opportunities serioiusly.

A lot of media innovation on the web has been coming from people like him, and not from news companies. Why is that? Watch and listen.

A few of the sites that he showed were: his blog, his company Neoteny, and Creative Commons. He showed several specific blog posts, including this one about a nuclear power whistleblower and this one about Chinese-Japanese dialogue.

Naturally Joi has posted a camphone photo from the class to Flickr. It's also worth noting that today Joi has a post speaking out against rampant racism in Japan, going where many Japanese journalists dare not tread.

Thanks to Du Ting for shooting the video!

On becoming an "Edublogger"

Last Friday I was fortunate to sit in on a seminar given by a fellow University of Hong Kong professor Daniel Churchill. He is in the Faculty of Education's Division of I&T Studies and his work focuses specifically on the use of new technologies in education.

Daniel was nominated for an EduBlog Best Teacher Blog award, primarily for his class blog, Interactive Representations of Information and Knowledge.  He said that the student work in that particular class was of unusually high quality. He also said that the same class brought him the best student evaluations in his teaching career at HKU. While it's hard to claim definitive cause and effect with just one class, he's pretty sure there's a strong connection. A class devoted to creating online objects certainly seems compatible with blogging, which also helps. It's possible that some kinds of courses lend themselves to blogging better than others. He said he thought that the fact that students were posting their work publicly and sharing it with each other  easily online probably motivated them to work  harder on their projects. He also pointed out that blogging  helped to generate extra ideas and learning experiences that weren't necessarily planned from the outset, but which greatly enhanced the class. A further description of his presentation and his powerpoint slides - including results of a student survey about the blogging experience - can be downloaded  here. 

An educator in the room asked Daniel about the impact that blogging has had on his own workload. Daniel made an important point: it's not realistic to approach blogging as an add-on on top of all the other things you normally do in your class. Blogging should be part of a complete re-think in terms of how you organize your own work and that of your students. (I was thinking as he replied that we might have a similar response to a question about blogging's impact on the workload of a professional journalist...)

The lecture gave me a lot of good ideas for my own class, New Media Workshop, which naturally has a blog - and for which my students will be blogging among other things. I gave my first lecture this morning and am looking forward to working interactively with some very bright and engaged young people. My class blog is on a Wordpress multiuser "blogfarm" set up for faculty and staff at our Journalism & Media Studies Center, courtesy of Boris Anthony, the Global Voices web guru (thanks Boris!).  Several other faculty are planning to use blogs in their classes as well. We'll all be using them differently, as we're all teaching different things and have very different kinds of assignments. It's going to be fun to see how things evolve, and how the use of blogs impacts the experience of our journalism students.

Oh and by the way, if you think you might be interested in joining our faculty, click here. And if you're interested in applying for our Masters in Journalism program, click here. Deadlines for both are approaching!