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.
I tried to leave a comment on a story (http://jmsc.hku.hk/hkstories/content/view/101/70/), but it seemed that it didn't work.
Posted by: Sonya | May 09, 2007 at 04:34 AM
Thanks for posting the comment Sonya! It's there now. The comments are moderated on that site to keep out spam and pornography.
Posted by: Rebecca MacKinnon | May 09, 2007 at 05:00 AM
I too could not comment. After submit script yields "permission denied" error, and the icon just keep spinning...
Posted by: Charles Liu | May 09, 2007 at 07:42 PM
Thanks Charles. When did you post the comment? We do have a moderation system. Sonya's comment did go through. I can check whether there is some other problem.
Posted by: Rebecca MacKinnon | May 09, 2007 at 07:59 PM
"I too could not comment. After submit script yields "permission denied" error, and the icon just keep spinning..."
Maybe your comments are being censored out...
Posted by: mahathir_fan | May 11, 2007 at 01:04 AM
MF, I know for a fact that you succeeded in posting comments.
Posted by: Rebecca MacKinnon | May 11, 2007 at 02:59 AM
MF, R's reputation is not in question here. I believe it's strictly a technical issue.
R, the site never said it accepted my comment, IE just give a script error (yellow triangle at lower left) and the spinner just keeps spinning.
Posted by: Charles Liu | May 11, 2007 at 01:12 PM
Okay R, I just tried again. The script error persists as of 5/11/2007 10:30am PST:
Line: 102
Char: 6
Error: Permission denied
Code: 0
URL: http://jmsc.hku.hk/hkstories/content/view/131.35
Posted by: Charles Liu | May 11, 2007 at 01:33 PM
thanks for letting me know. there is clearly a bug that needs some time to troubleshoot...
Posted by: Rebecca MacKinnon | May 11, 2007 at 08:53 PM
Hey Rebecca,
I find this very interesting, with Malaysia going to celebrate 50 years of nationhood this coming August 31, this entry has somehow inspired me to do something like this too!
Furthermore, I'm quite amazed by the facts found on the HKStories, especially the growing South Asian community in HK!
Keep up the good work!
Cheers,
SK
Posted by: SK | May 15, 2007 at 03:18 PM