One of the key roles of the university has to foster critical thinking, graduating students who have the ability to ask the right questions and think through solutions to problems. For the revival of the Carnival of Journalism, David Cohn has asked the journalist/scholar bloggers taking part to consider the place of the university in the information ecosystem. Journalism schools are uniquely placed within the academic environment to play a leading

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

Students at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC are trying out something different. Instead of doing an essay as part of a course in agroecology, they are producing a 12 to 15 minute podcast. It follows a larger interdisciplinary project on podcasting at the university I was involved with last year, which brought together students from journalism and agroecology to create a new kind of academic podcast,