Elearning and journalism – tackling the same issues

I’ve mentioned this before briefly, but what continues to amaze me is how much my two spheres of interest are essentially colliding. Not only are the same issues being talked about in both journalism and elearning on a regular basis – how should we change the conversation, ‘push or pull’ and on-demand content – but the same tools and concepts keep cropping up too.

Both Amy Gahran and Mindy McAdams have been looking at what a journalism school needs to do to help its students equip themselves for the 21st century.

Note to e-learning types from other fields, these two bloggers are well worth reading as part of your wider blog trawls – good stuff on teaching and technological support tools here.

Amy started the ball rolling with a post about whether people should still become a journalists despite staff cuts?

Her reply to this question is

I think that developing journalism skills and experience is valuable
for many career paths — but I think that betting that you’ll spend your
career working for mainstream news orgs is a losing proposition in most
cases. I think most j-schools are setting bright students up to fail,
and that bugs me. A lot.

It’s such a shame that most j-schools still are not teaching new
journalists crucial skills they’ll need to act entrepreneurially in
media: content management systems (including blogging tools), mobile
tools and mobile media strategies, social media, business skills,
management skills, economics and business models, marketing, SEO,
community management, etc.

Ringing any bells with anyone? Lots of these skills are vital for people involved in elearning to get to grips with.

Mindy issued the challenge for people to make this measurable, rather than a general list. Something she outlines well,  and she has some interesting comments from her readers.

So Amy takes up the challenge herself and comes back with New J-skills: What to measure?

Things to learn include:

1. Content mangament and blogging tools – WordPress
2. Mobile tools and mobile strategy – Twitter etc, use of mobile phones to generate content
3. Social media.
   

   The point here is to help students learn a key tool for engaging communities, while also gaining experience with how influence works and information travels through social media.

4. Management skills – including using software including Basecamp for team coordination/project management
5. Community engagement and management -
   

   The point is to get them used to creating news as part of a conversation, rather than simply as a one-way product for publication. It’s about promoting constructive public discourse through active engagement.

These are all keys skills that I’m looking at with Terry King and her colleagues from Portsmouth University as part of the elearning masters programme I’m on.

But maybe, just maybe, they should be skills for all students in this bright new future.

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Tags: journalism, elearning, web 2.0, Amy Gahran, Mindy McAdams, Twitter, Basecamp, blogging, community