I’m slowly returning to sea level after my second South By Southwest Interactive festival, but I didn’t want to let it get away without doing a wrapup post about the experience.

I learned a lot from last year and went with a plan, as I noted in my first post. I went looking to learn more from others about community engagement, activism, and stories. I learned so much from those sessions, and this is an attempt to start putting it together. This is not, of course, the end of the process. I have a lot of thinking to do.

The interesting thing about my SXSW experience is that the final panel I attended was a perfect way to tie together everything I had learned. The panel was “Better Crowdsourcing: Lessons Learned From the3six5 Project” and featured folks from the 3six5 project and sixitemsorless. These two projects use user contributions to help tell a larger metastory (you can read more about the latter project in this piece by Heidi Hackemer, who was on the panel at the SXSW session).

I am really blown away by these two projects. Read more

Last month I reached out to my current and former students on Twitter for a little bit of help. Part of the academic process for me at this stage requires I submit a portfolio that accounts for my teaching, research, and service as a professor at Lehigh. I’m going through my two-year reappointment now, the first of two before I go up for tenure.

The teaching part of this portfolio is many things, but one of those is a statement on teaching that articulates my particular philosophy when it comes to teaching and then assesses how well I am doing in implementing that approach.

For whatever reason, I wanted was to model my own philosophy in a document that talks about my philosophy. I’m very much in the show-don’t-tell crowd. So I asked the students to weigh in. I came with my own ideas; I wanted to know if that matched their experience. Call it a road test.

The results were pretty interesting, and I ended up adding another point because it came through so often. So I learned from the audience and also saw that some of my methods were apparent to them. Win-win, I say, and I’m not sure I want to do it the normal way from now on.

The link I just gave you is the culmination of that effort, and I was really pleased with the results after wrestling with the actual writing part forever.

I don’t know if anyone has ever crowdsourced a teaching philosophy, which means it’s brilliant and forward-thinking or splendidly idiotic. A teaching philosophy is supposed to be a personal document that is yours and personal in nature, and I know of many academics who hold that pretty tightly. Me? Not so much. I’m wired to do things in community at this point.

Anyhow, the results were a lot of fun. Give it a read, and thanks to all who participated. Also, special credit to my wife for the kicksave on editing this thing, because it was rougher than the Mos Eisley cantina on first edit.

And a warning: it’s a document produced for academics, which means two sucky things: there are no hyperlinks, and it’s longer than it should be. The meat of what this post is about is in the first section. Aren’t I helpful?

My short version would have simply read: “Just come to class. It’s magic.”

My two-year review is coming up this semester. Technically I’ve only been here 1.5 years, but whatever.

Anyhow, as part of this process I have to turn in a whole packet of stuff that represents my work. My CV, publications, conference presentations, lectures, service, etc. Part of that packet includes separate statements on research, service and teaching philosophy.

I wrote my teaching philosophy for the first time as a first-year doctoral student as part of Lee Wilkins’ doctoral seminar course at the University of Missouri. It was a good exercise, a chance to really hammer out what my approach is. I revised it when I went out on the job market in 2008, and I revised it again last year.

This year, I’m doing an overhaul. I’ve learned so much about teaching since coming to Lehigh, including what works and what doesn’t for me. One of those things that works is something I wrote about last week, that I believe in modeling. Other things that are big in my approach include community and transparency.

So I got the idea: Why not model my philosophy within my teaching philosophy itself? So I’ve to help me write my philosophy. In 140 characters, I want them to tell ME what they think my approach to education is. This won’t comprise the whole of my final statement that I submit because I still will have a narrative part to it, but it will play a central role.

There are a few reasons I’m doing this.

1. It’s pushing the envelope a bit and I don’t like doing the usual. I like to make these things uniquely mine and own them, and that means doing it differently than everyone else.
2. It reflects almost entirely my approach to education, because I believe in interactive media and a community approach to sharing and exchanging knowledge. Just by doing this I am modeling my philosophy for the committee that reads this.
3. It’s a gut-check. I know what my philosophy is in my own head, but the students on the other end of that message are a mirror on my approach – do they see it the same way, and is it working? In open collaboratories, I can’t be afraid of the truth or of a different point of view.

So, if you’ve had a class with me (not taken one with me, Bob Britten!), I want to hear your feedback. What do you think my approach is to teaching in terms of things like the principles that guide me and the goals I set in classes? What can you glean about what I believe the role of the teacher is based on my approach? Go on Twitter and just me. Or just leave it in the comments. You only get 140 characters!

Depending on how many I get, they’ll either run in full or grouped into conceptual areas. I want as many as possible, so please consider helping out here. I should stress that I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before; usually these teaching philosophy things are really personal statements by professors themselves, but by now you should know I’m about community.

And if this works, it might lead to my dream idea: Let my students actually write it for me, in wiki form. Might have to get tenure before I try something that crazy.

Final note here is that I will stay true to form on transparency. I want all the feedback public, but I will indeed post my final version of the teaching philosophy on this site.

Welcome back. Most of us in education are finally digging ourselves out of the rubble that comes with the first couple weeks of school. Administrative duties, forms to sign, students to corral, and all the other stuff that comes with a new term. For some reason I felt busier this time than I did last fall.

Mostly I’m settling into a role here at Lehigh that has been evolving here for the past year. I was brought in to help bring some direction to multimedia efforts here in the Department of Journalism and Communication, but that job hasn’t been so hard in part because all of my other colleagues are interested in this stuff. I have, of course, been working on curriculum changes and such that we need, but there has been no fight here.

JOUR 198 (Multimedia Reporting) is starting to encompass my other unofficial job as head cheerleader on new media. Nobody has told me this is my job, but it’s one I’ve kind of adopted. I have an excitable personality at times so this is a natural, but I see my role here as being the person to constantly extol the virtues of technology in our field in hopes that our students will catch the vision and embrace it.

Mostly I think there is the job of selling this new direction for us. I believe students need to see my passion and excitement for teaching them how to do these new things, and see my firm believe that journalism is by no means dead. The reason is that some of the tools I teach, such as social media, are new and weird for many and even to some who are educators in my profession. They aren’t making a lot of PhDs like me right now, although I believe that will not be the case for long. So there is still the issue that I am a bit unique in my own field and I have to sell people on why the things I do and think about are important. Read more

This semester we took our first leap into multimedia reporting here at Lehigh University. I had an amazing class of 11 students who really embraced the material with a vigor and made this a successful semester. I am having them all blog about the course and evaluate where they are with these skills, and I told them I’d do the same for myself. Again, it’s hard to teach this unless you model it.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

• Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
• Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
• South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
• Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling. Read more

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

New semester starts tomorrow here at Lehigh. Courses for this semester are COMM 100 Media & Society, the second semester in a row for this course, and JOUR 198 Multimedia Reporting.

It’s the latter course that has me excited as well as a little nervous. I’ve been planning and thinking through this course for a few months, but as I’ve been tweaking the syllabus the past few weeks I’ve had to come to grips with what I don’t know. Specifically, the baseline skill levels of the students entering the course, because it really affects what direction all of this takes.

I go back and forth on on whether I’m being too ambitious or not pushing them enough. In the end, I just don’t know. I have to get my hands in the dirt with this group and figure it out, and that work starts tomorrow. I know they can tell stories because they’ve been doing that. But there are always differing levels of ease in understanding the common threads in telling stories in narrative writing versus multimedia platforms. There’s always that light bulb moment in their head. The central question as it relates to any new platform we’ll be learning (audio, video, photo) is how fast we can turn that bulb on. And, of course, most of them have never held a video camera in their hand.

This will be a real learning semester for me. I’ve taught something like this course before, so I know it’s doable, but what I need to learn is where Lehigh students are and listen to them. One thing I do know is they’re good students and fast learners. I continue to be impressed with the high achievement level I observe in Lehigh students.

My syllabus has a built in note that the class is subject to revision. I have had classes like that due to their experimental nature, and I hate that. I’m a planner. As a student I needed to build my schedule and tasks around what was expected of me. So I’m sensitive that too much in-semester change would be a big problem; some revisions I might wait to make until J198 2.0, some I might adopt in term.

And then there are the millions of brainstorms that always seem to hit right as we’re entering the fray, such as a great conversation I had with fellow new mediaphiles Bob Britten and Jen Reeves on Facebook about journalistic uses of Foursquare, which I’ve been messing around with the past couple weeks. Together we did a mini-crowdsource discussion of ways to use Foursquare in the classroom, which is a blog post in itself that I’ll get to this week.

In truth it’s probably too much to squeeze stuff like Foursquare journalism into this term, if for no other reason than I don’t even know how many of my students have a smartphone. But the problem is that once I get these ideas churning in my brain I can’t help but wonder if I’m not giving the students my best if I don’t at least make it an option to tap into the scary world that is my brain on new media.

But, anyhow, we set sail tomorrow. I’ll be blogging it out and posting links to things as we go so people can follow the progress on Twitter and such.

Next term I have a grad student sitting in on my Media & Society course and doing parallel readings. We don’t have a grad program in our department here at Lehigh, but because of the liberal arts setup we have here in the College of Arts & Sciences that has given me contact with all kinds of grad students. The student I’m working with next term is interested in Web 2.0, social networks, a little bit of marketing, etc.

The setup we devised was that the student would sit in on the class and do the readings from the textbook and Dan Gillmor’s just like the undergrads. But they’ll also do some primary source readings over the course of the term and we’ll meet every couple weeks to discuss them over coffee, with the end result being a term paper. This will offer a much deeper layer of the course; we talk about thinkers such Lippmann and Milton in COMM 100, but the grad student will actually be reading them.

The course deals with media’s role and impact on society, so lots of media and culture readings are a must. Here’s the list I came up with: Read more

I taught my last Media & Society (COMM 100) course of the fall semester today. I can’t believe how fast my first semester here at Lehigh flew by, and it feels like I’ve been running from Day 1 here as I adjust to a new job and a new life. Still, it has gone more smoothly than I could have hoped. I love my department and think the world of the active minds I see in my classroom.

This was a semester of agility in M&S. The course deals with the intersection of media and culture, but really has a focus on making students aware of the media environment in which they literally live. It’s a really broad subject, and as I planned the course this past summer it felt like I was wrestling with too much.

My vision for the course changed over the term somewhat. The initial plan was to talk about media platforms, then apply that to media theories and areas of ethics/law, then finish with Dan Gillmor’s We The Media and talk about the converage of media into a diverse ecosystem.

The plan stayed intact, partly out of necessity. But something really cool happened along the way. Read more

The Brown & White student newspaper did an article today about a project I’ve been working on a little bit during my first semester here at Lehigh. For about a month now a group of students have been using to raise awareness both about the conflict in Darfur and the United Nations’ role in helping us find a way through it.

The article’s great and really shows the thought and preparation (not to mention the current hard work) put into this project. It’s off to a nice start, with students tweeting a few times a day, building an audience, and also following others for the purpose of retweeting (follow them at @).

I won’t overstate my role in this, as really I’ve just been the Twitter adviser here to help shape students’ understanding of what this thing is and offer advice on how to make it work. They’ve done a great job both creating content and listening to their audiences. Twitter is one of those forms of media you have to use a little before you really have a handle on what it is. I’ve noticed a marked growth in the quality in the short time the students have had to get more comfortable.

This project is what I loved about Lehigh as I was getting to know the place while on the job market. Opportunity abounds here. The project started because someone at the U.N. contacted Bill Hunter here at Lehigh (we are a U.N. partner campus). Something that simple is the catalyst for something interesting.

Of course we are having to look hard at how to define success. Followers were scant early on, but they’ve picked up steam as we’ve gotten more of an audience. This is in part due to retweeting, I’d bet, but also because the students have shown interest in others by following like-minded folks on Twitter simply by searching the live feed for “Darfur” posts. I’ve been tracking followers by the day and it has been an interesting case study in building a social media brand from the ground up.

What’s most interesting to me is that these aren’t trained journalists. Most of them aren’t even studying journalism or communication here. It is a powerful reminder to me of what I already know, that the heart of what we do in media is still about telling stories and that is something people can identify with both as consumers and producers on the Web. Most of us are storytellers at heart in our own little way, and different media platforms are merely channels for our stories be it a blog, Twitter, or Facebook. Stories are the building blocks of social change and action, though, and so this is a field experiment at work.

I gave them a little bit of guidance by telling them to “find your voice” on Twitter, be it straight reporting, opinion, analysis, or a mixture. We aren’t editing or approving anything they write, and so I’ve really been testing out this notion of a light hand of direction that we learned with MyMissourian. We aren’t editing for style or grammar. It runs back to the basic questions: Is it true? Is it fair?

We ordered more Zi8 cameras for J198. Each of the four groups is going to have at least one of these things for use in the field, but we’re also getting a few for the Brown & White for next semester. We’re also going to give each group a kit that includes a mini-tripod. We’re still testing it against others, but we need to know whether adopting this thing widely works for us.

I really think these cameras are going to be a hit. I showed the Kodak to another student who has signed up for the course and she showed some excitement about the camera just upon seeing it. Buzz is a good thing. I can’t teach buzz.

Also on order is one of the Flip Ultra models, which will give us a good comparison point for cameras in this range. So while I’m still pushing the Zi8 to see how far it can take us, I’d like to see what other possibilities are out there.

This is going to be an interesting test of Web video vs. TV video. We’ll learn ‘em a little bit of TV-style storytelling, but it’s going to be just another tool in the toolkit along other forms of video work.

The Kodak Zi8 is about the same size as an iPod, but a bit lighter. Also, no Lightsaber app. Boo.

One of the cool parts of my job here at Lehigh is I get to play with toys. It’s a guy/eternal kid thing. If I had room for a couch in my office, you damn well better believe there’d be a fort made out of cushions. Throw in a dash of academia nerdiness and you can imagine how much fun it can be for me to do what I do.

The latest toy-playing has been trying out equipment for J198 Multimedia Reporting (I’m blogging my journey as I build this course, which you can access as a tag because that’s how I roll). Right now we’re playing with digital cameras in an attempt to choose the core devices for the course.

The class will have four groups of three people, and so we’re thinking of giving each group one or two finalist devices and using the course to assess the equipment. There’s a good reason for this, as what we end up using long-term will also potentially be adopted by The Brown & White student newspaper for general use (with perhaps a couple nicer devices as well).

My department chair Wally Trimble has been working with me to think through this after I have been passing on recommendations from my own research. There were a few things we felt like we had to have in a video device. The main one is we wanted something that would be a paradigm-shifter. We haven’t had multimedia here at Lehigh as part of coursework, so there is a potential problem with handing students a device that looks like something they’ve seen. Giving them something that looks like a digital camera would make them think still images. Handing them something that looks like a TV camera might make them think television news. We want them to think Web, and so it was important for us to have a device that looked like a Web tool first. Read more

Next semester will be my first foray into teaching multimedia journalism here at Lehigh. Planning for this course has been hard and exhilarating at the same time, because while I’ve enjoyed all the freedom I’ve had to plan this course it also is unnerving for a new PhD to know you’re doing something within a program that hasn’t yet been tried.

Thus, as with any venture like this, there are moments where I worry this airplane isn’t gonna fly. But that’s why I came to Lehigh. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I do really well when I’m handed challenges and given the freedom to come up with a solution. I’m OK even if I don’t have freedom or support (I did work at the Daily News, after all), but I find the result more gratifying when I feel like I’m given the tools to make it great.

The good news is that Lehigh has blown away even my high expectations. The students here are sharp and the faculty are top notch in terms of scholarship, interest, and support for new folks. Not a day goes by where I don’t feel blessed to have landed here.

Anyhow, back to J198 “Multimedia Reporting,” which we’ll offer next spring. It’s got two main components: weekly work and a semester-long team reporting project. Read more

I’m almost through my first week here at Lehigh. The office is still unpacked, the syllabus needs more tweaking, and I’m still lost all over campus. But, I’m getting the hang of it.

The thing that jumps out right now is how utterly calm I feel about this transition. New starts almost always make me nervous, but not this one. I feel very much at home here. Maybe it’s the incredible people I continue to meet on campus or the level of support I’m getting in so many unexpected areas, or maybe it’s just the culture. Whatever it is (and I’ll figure it out as time goes along, hopefully so I can be part of continuing that), every day I’m here is only confirmation that I’m in the right place and that we made the right choice to come here.

And the great thing is that it’s not just happening with me. When I see stories like I saw today about 325 student volunteers basically moving the new freshmen in, and see a picture of our new Provost helping out as well, it makes me smile. People volunteer and pitch in to make sure this place is special. I can’t wait to roll up my sleeves and be part of it all. Read more

I cleared a big hurdle on the dissertation today after defending my proposal. This clears me to begin collecting data and gives me some light at the end of the tunnel.

I have to finish by the time we move to Pennsylvania this summer. Lehigh doesn’t require it, but there are a lot of incentives to finish by the time I get there (not the least of which is my own sanity).

It might seem that I’m cutting it close, but I feel pretty good about where I’m at and am confident I’ll have no trouble finishing before we move. The reason for this is I did a lot of work on the front end of my dissertation proposal, to the point that it’s nearly 70 pages. I spent a lot of time consulting with my committee members as well to make sure I addressed concerns and issues with my methodology before I sent them the final draft. Read more