My latest post for PBS Mediashift looks at how participatory media tools such as CoveritLive can be used in the classroom. One of the challenges, particularly in large undergraduate classes, is turning the traditional academic lecture into more of a conversation. Rather than simply being empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, I wanted to try out new ways for students to collaborate on distilling and creating knowledge. The aim

Over at Journalism 2.0, Mark Briggs poses a question that has been bugging me for weeks – what do we call this new form of journalism and media? As Mark points out: The news industry calls it “new media” or “interactive media,” but that’s just differentiating it from legacy forms of publishing. Pretty much everything online is “interactive” and it’s not really “new” anymore. Much as I don’t like the

For my latest post for PBS Mediashift, I’ve written about a new undergraduate course I am teaching at UBC: The young men and women entering university today are digital natives who have grown up in a world of Microsoft, Google and Apple. They have lived through a time when the Internet went from being a highly specialized system used by scientists to a ubiquitous utility that defines how they engage

My J-school students take on blogging this week. It is one of the assignments in our core multiplatform journalism course, so they don’t really have a choice but to blog, at least for a few weeks. Some students are enthusiastic about being freed from the constraints of the traditional news pyramid. Others see it as another assignment and some, well, they don’t use blogs. This isn’t about teaching students how