Newsless.org

My entry for the legendary David Cohn’s Carnival of Journalism. Here’s his setup:

One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.”

Okay – great recommendations. But how do we actually make it happen? What does this look like? What University programs are doing it right? What can be improved and what would be your ideal scenario? Or is this recommendation wrong to begin with? No box here to write inside of.

Get serious about self-driven learning.

We’re just at the beginning of an amazing moment for self-directed education. Dedicated auto-didacts can already sift through a lifetime of courses on everything from astrophysics to zoological medicine. For the most part, though, the world of self-guided learning still feels like the Wild West. Lectures are only spottily available; coursepacks are incomplete. Little guidance is provided for assembling a curriculum. Few mechanisms exist for students to work together, synchronously or not. And crucially, there are still very few markers of educational attainment that recognize these efforts. The self-taught astrophysics expert might have wonderful smarts, but no pathway to employment.

Schooling, at its best, isn’t about cramming our head with facts. It’s about teaching us how to learn. And increasingly, it’s about teaching us how to learn as much as we want to, at our own pace. Colleges and universities must embrace that shift, and as they begin to open up, they should begin to design learning experiences that work not just for enrolled students, but for motivated cyber-auditors. We’re far from the moment when the advantages of a classical four-year liberal arts education environment can be easily matched by an online learning experience (in most situations; we’re probably already past that moment for disciplines such as computer programming). But colleges need to start preparing for it now, and figuring out how they’re going to thrive in that world.

A few years ago, the vision behind Wikipedia looked like a pitiful impossibility, probably the way Wikiversity looks today. I absolutely would not discount the possibility that a free, crowd-powered educational experience might become a formidable competitor to an expensive degree program, and sooner than you think. I hear the derisive guffaws of a thousand assistant professors, fresh off another long night of grading their students’ work. I used to know a journalist or two who thought that way.

Teach “Your City 101.”

Most undergrads are dropped into higher-ed institutions with little appreciation for the workings of the city that houses their school. Meanwhile, every college has a surplus of longtime faculty who are gadflies in their communities, deeply immersed in local civic life. Get these two factions hitched up. Offer an elective to all students – for credit – in the history and politics of the college town. And here’s a twist: invite local non-enrolled residents to take the course for free.

Students will be able to transcend the usual town/gown divisions with a greater awareness of their effect on their city. Locals will develop a systemic understanding of the civic machinery that powers the place they call home. (You might even get a few would-be lifelong learners interested in the charms of the extension school.) All involved will get an introduction to the all-important discipline of micropolitics.

Make local news the textbook. Collaborate with a metro editor on the syllabus. Prove that city planning is just as exciting as it looks on The Wire.

Build a local wiki.

Journalism professors: the next time you get the idea to do an experimental one-off academic journalism project, consider building something that might outlive your class. Already, academic environments have been fertile incubators for some of the best local wikis. When three UC Davis students decided to create DavisWiki in 2004, they probably didn’t guess the site would live far beyond their time in Davis, CA. It’s gone on to become an indispensible resource for residents, the site of a collaborative news investigation that won attention from the likes of the NYTimes. For a while, an Omaha professor of marketing led a class of students in the construction and maintenance of a local wiki for that city.¹

Wiki software and design remains abysmal – a problem that I hope DavisWiki founder Philip Neustrom is able to crack with his Knight-funded LocalWiki project. But that hasn’t prevented several existing city wikis from becoming impressive local guides, and I suspect that what exists is only the beginning of what could be if universities truly jumped on this bandwagon. The trio of (1) better wiki interfaces, (2) the dedication of student journalists and professors, and (3) a journalistic sensibility could make a college-powered local wiki a marvel to behold.

In fact, forget the local news. Aim to make your local wiki the textbook for Your City 101.

Journalism students should blog.

This little sub-head will probably inspire everyone who attends, teaches at, or works for a journalism school to rise up with a thousand counterarguments, many of which have some merit. “But many j-school students already do blog!” “Who reads blogs?!” “How will this help our information needs?!”

First, most j-school students don’t really blog. Many contribute occasional posts to blogs. Few learn the lessons of the format. I’ll make the case that blogging is the most malleable container for journalism today. A blog post can take the form of a classical inverted pyramid story, a video broadcast, an audio podcast, a photoessay, a bulleted list, a Q&A, or any of hundreds of other story formats you could devise. So students who aspire to report in any other format can train on a blog. But they gain many other powers that I think will be essential to tomorrow’s journalism: a sustained relationship with a crowd, an understanding of the potential life of a news story, the immortal hyperlink.

Second – and here’s where I really think society could benefit – I think that journalists will increasingly find success in specialization. Blogging encourages us to find a niche, to accumulate expertise and share our deepening understanding of a subject. The last half-century of journalism produced an army of generalists skilled at storytelling and parachuting, but bereft of the subject knowledge necessary to deliver what we need most – context. I hope that journalism finds its renaissance in a new generation of truth-chasers driven to grasp the bigger picture and render it in living stories we can all follow.

J-school profs, help your industry colleagues out.

The extent to which more industry-pointed research could help satisfy the information needs of society is arguable, but it would sure help journalists. More here.

1. OmahaWiki is sadly no longer in existence. It’s been replaced by a somewhat sad-looking, thoroughly Monetized™ site called “TownCommons” that clearly harbors aspirations beyond Nebraska. [↩]