And it don’t get much more personal than this.

I just sent out a Twitter question to ask if anyone was having problems with the Zemanta blogging plugin – and got this in reply.

Twitter message from @andraz about my zemanta question

How cool is that, and just before his Christmas do too!

Alison, who blogs over at Headlines and Deadlines, has taken a look at the cycle from gathering to publication and follow-up and comparing web 1.0 to web 2.0.

I had no idea when I started doing this how thin the ‘old’ opportunities for investigating stories would look compared to the tools at our disposal now; it’s quite stark really. It drives home just how important mastering these tools is for journalists as our industry continues to develop and change.

Headlines and Deadlines

This is a quote you will see all over the place (Paul Bradshaw switched me on to this via his Twitter stream and he used this quote in his blog post) – because it is very astute. The Web 2.0 services Alison talks about are important tools that are vital to all sorts of people – you’ll see the same things being talked about in edupunk, eduwomble, PLE, loosely-coupled teaching.

Alison’s point is major – things have changed in a major way and educators need to understand we are getting the point. I’m in the middle of putting together resources on Web 2.0 for my students, so this has been a great little fillip for me.

If you don’t get why WEb 2.0 is such a big deal here’s a a video by Digital Ethnographer Dr. Michael Wesch.

Wordle – Create, originally uploaded by egrommet.

A rather funky visualisation of the links in my del.icio.us account via Wordle

There were Tweets flying back and forth, people discussing and joining in via the back channel as well as questions being transmitted to the floor.

What did I get out of it? Detail about what the Guardian and the BBC are looking at in terms of social media, some new Twitter buddies and a lunch with my colleague David Harrison this very day.

I’ll leave David, who I stumbled into during the live blogging,  to tell you the story. But it kind of shows  how social media often has knock on effects that people often do not anticapte. In my case that would be pizza, an interesting chat and the opportunity to explore some new tools and ideas that might just provide a very interesting spin on some of the projects I’m currently looking at.

And that’s a good start from any blog posting in my humble opinion.

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

Picked this up Wired article earlier on today via blog trawls – and I apologise, as I can’t find the article I got it from – about the way US sex workers have been using Web 2.0 to track the media in light of the Gov Spitzer case.

The article breaks down how the activists were able to communicate with each other and find people who were willing to be public faces for the different kinds of media.

Truly organisation in a web 2.0 styley.

Sex Drive: IPhones, Twitter Let Sex Workers Spread Their Gospel:

But the whirlwind didn’t catch sex workers and activists lying down. They organized a media blitz through blogs, Tumblr, Twitter and shared Google Docs. They kept tabs on which reporters approached the topic with respect and which didn’t.

And perhaps for the first time, they made their voices heard in mainstream venues like Fox News and CNN — organizations that cannot be dismissed as fringe or adults-only media.

Using mobile gadgets and Web 2.0 apps, sex workers mounted an internet-enabled campaign to spin the story. Smartphones, RSS feeds and mobile social networks enabled them to pounce on stories as soon as they appeared in the mainstream media, posting comments on news websites and blogging the good, the bad and the even worse coverage as it appeared.

But one fun one I’ve been testing is qik (prounced quick as you’d expect in a web 2.0-styley, it’s a site and app that lets you stream live video from a smartphone – I’m playing with the N95 at the moment.

Had a fun one tonight, been trying to get a couple of friends to comment on it because (drum roll please) you can see their comments on the phone while it is streaming.

I’m afraid I’ve deleted the first couple as I look like a complete bufoon – need some in front of camera training to get this right (very painfully self-concious so ideas about using this kind of thing for broadcast might take some work).

As you’ve guessed I’m egrommet there – but as of 21.50 on March 5 there’s nothing there. Stay tuned for an embarrassed looking Gromm yacking total nonsense at you.

We were looking at theories including push/pull in learning and teaching and how this applies to elearning (we’re doing some old-school reading of books and were discussing E-Learning Strategies: How to Get Implementation and Delivery Right First Time by Morrison.)

At one point we got chatting about how/whether pull learning (where you get what you want when you need it, rather than having it pushed at you by an employer or teacher) could lead to the end of a set and formalised syllabus for some courses.

One of the things we were wondering was how this could work and, indeed, if it should even work.

Would we need a VLE, or would a collection of Web2.0 technologies be more appropriate?

Just doing some blog reading and found this by the OU’s Martin Weller – who blogs as The Ed Techie.

The OU are working on how to use web 2.0 and social learning in what is a very rapidly changing world.

Here’s Martin’s slideshow

| View | Upload your own

But do please go and have a look at Martin’s own site.

Oh and he ‘dared’ to say that a Prof’s views could be as valid as a blogger out in the wilds of t’internet somewhere. Got to be the blogger, surely

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Tags: PLE, social learning, Open University

Anyway, enough of the fanboy nonsense – just been catching up on his blog and found an article about yahoo Live,

Basically it allows you to rig your webcam and stream to an audience – the audience can text chat back.

Sounds like an interesting tool to use for an online lecture, rather than any kind of  two-way video interaction.

Looks fun and might eventually get round to testing it for teaching purposes – suppose if I’m away for a reason (like ill but not lurgied) I could use this to blast back to my students in the Mac lab that we use for our teaching room.

Time will tell, stay tuned…

(but not too hard, got a lot on at the moment!)

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Tags: video, broadcasting, virtual lecture, cybersoc, guru