You want to know how I can spot a student who is above and beyond excellent? Usually they write emails like the following, an actual email from a student I got over the break:

Have you heard of Quora? It’s a social media site where users work together to ask and answer questions. I signed up for it and tried it after classes were over. It’s really interesting! I think it could be something news organizations can use to work with readers on creating knowledge databases in their communities.

E-mails like this always make me smile. I always know when I’ve broken through the “mere facts” barrier with students when they send me things like this. I probably get one of these a week, wherein a student has learned about a concept in my multimedia or Media & Society class, then saw an example of it demonstrated in we didn’t talk about in that class and e-mails me about it. We’re way past requirements here; they’re thinking about the concepts and applying it to new things. In this case, I haven’t said a thing about Quora in my classes even though I am blathering on about social media all the time.

In grad school we talk about concepts in researchy ways. Concepts are the building blocks of theory; we define a concept such as “motivation” and then attach it to other concepts such as “media use” or “user needs” to create theories such as uses-and-gratifications, which is a theory that in the case of the Media Choice Model attempts to predict and explain media use.

Concepts in the classroom take different forms. 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

Behold, the iPad (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ndevil/ / CC BY 2.0)

My dad has this habit of printing out e-mail. Occasionally he’ll get something that captures his interest or makes him think or makes him laugh, but his first reaction sometimes centers on this urge to print the thing out and pass it around. When I go home to visit my parents these days, it’s almost a guarantee that at some point dad’s going to break out the paper e-mail to share a joke or something that he read about.

Needless to say, I think this is weird. It’s not how I use e-mail and feels like one of those Stuff Old People Do kinds of things. If I wanted to share it, that’s what the “forward” button is for. But even as I shake my head at the notion of my dad clear-cutting whole forests to share that latest e-mail joke going around the Intertubes, I realize that there is something there. We live in a networked world, and we like to share our media. It’s just that he likes to physically hand his e-mail to me.

And I do my fair share of, well, sharing. One of the things my wife and I have had to work out as fairly newish married folk is the use of laptops in the living room. We both have work to do at nights at times but it seems nicer if we’re at least spending time together in the same room, even if we have our heads down and are staring at our laptop screens. And while we might be exchanging information back-and-forth in that Only In The 2000s kind of way, there can be some sense of human disconnection even as we collaborate.

Even tougher, sharing something on my screen is more difficult if all I’m doing is playing. You can’t just pass a laptop to someone so they can quickly read an email, see a photo, or watch a video, and so I’m stuck with either e-mailing it to her or sitting next to her and trying to orient the crazy thing so she can watch it while still being able to access the controls. The former is just another impersonal manifestation of our highly wired society, whereas the latter is just clunky.

And this is why I want an iPad. I haven’t even held one in my hands and am stuck with presentations and commercials, but I want one.

This is a post about the iPad, but not from an insider who was lucky enough to touch one yesterday. This is about me, the consumer looking at all of this stuff and deciding whether it’s worth being an early adopter. For the first time in a while, this is an Apple product I’m actually excited enough about to think about getting at initial release. Read more

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

So we all survived the first week, and by that I mean all of us. This week was all about basics of working the camera, simple work with video files, and getting them uploaded to .

The lab assignment was pretty simple: interview another person in class with the camera by asking three questions, download the file to the computer, create a movie with the clip using the video-editing software, then upload to YouTube. The second half of the assignment was to edit that longer clip so there is only one question, create a movie out of that, and upload it. The goal was to just give them a feel for how to work the camera and work the software, plus a very basic editing technique involving simple video cuts.

The sense I got from the students is that they were surprised by how easy it was. The Kodak Zi8 cameras we’re using were chosen just for for that reason, that it’s literally a push-button form of video shooting that is accessible to newbies. There were some questions about the video editing and pressing the wrong buttons there, of course, but overall it was pretty smooth. Read more

I finally selected my books to adopt for Multimedia Reporting (J198). I have known from the start that I didn’t want to have a textbook or a book heavy on online philosophy or culture, as I figure they’ve gotten some of that in their other courses. God knows the poor saps in my Media & Society course have been inundated with it.

Online culture: it’s what I do.

So, rather than turn next term into a giant World of Warcraft game, I wanted to make sure that book adoptions were based around a text that is practical. My ideal vision has been to pick a book that they would not want to sell back, something that would serve as a practical field manual for doing media across multiple platforms. Read more