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 role in rethinking how academia fits into news and information flows today.

Some journalism schools already are filling in gaps left by shrinking media. Our journalism students at the University of British Columbia do this, from covering local stories in Vancouver to producing in-depth, investigative work on international issues.

J-schools can go further than producing stories. After all, we are living in a time when the barriers to producing journalism are non-existent. In a participatory media culture, anyone can do an act of journalism.

As a result, what we consider journalism and who is producing it is evolving. Universities, and j-schools in particular, can make a critical contribution to enabling students to be informed citizens with the ability to apply a critical eye to the world around them.

The first step is helping students understand how the world of media is shifting and providing them with the theoretical framework and practical tools to be informed consumers of news and information.

This is just the start. The classroom provides a space to teach students how to be able to create media by applying some of the rigours of journalistic practice.

We need to recognise that journalism has gone beyond something that just happens in newsrooms. At universities, a broad array of people, from academics to students, are doing what could be called journalism.

There is, then, an opportunity for journalism schools to rethink their place within the university environment, approaching journalism as a space to be shared, rather than a profession to be defended.

NowPublic's Michael Tippett was a guest speaker

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 was a new media twist on the notion of community-centered education, where students are expected to participate as they take responsibility for their own learning.

From the Mediashift post:

For the experiment, I set up a class discussion page using CoveritLive. The page was projected onto a screen in the lecture hall so that students could see the conversation unfold. Michael Tippett’s presentation was projected on a second screen.

As he addressed the students, they were able to submit comments and ask questions via CoveritLive — these comments then appeared on screen. I did some comment moderation, but I tried to give students as much freedom as possible to ask or say anything. Although we asked students to use their names in the comments, some still preferred the anonymity of the “guest” handle.

The result was a mix of the insightful, the impish and the inane — from “who has the right to call himself a journalist?” to “this almost feels like telepathy! lol” to “stop blowing ur nose it’s annoying.”

I’m looking forward to trying this again in other classes and learn from the experience.

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, produced by students and happening outside of the lecture hall.

My friend and colleague, Andrew Riseman, explains why he has incorporated podcasting in his course:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.946041&w=425&h=350&fv=]

(Shot on a Nokia N95)

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