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

A few months ago I blogged about Foursquare and its journalism implications. The post was pretty well received and it created a tremendous conversation online, but I wanted to post an update on our first foray into location-based offerings here at Lehigh.

When I was at SXSW last month I got my first look at Gowalla, which is similar to Foursquare in that it uses location services, check-ins, and little incentives for keeping you in the game. I like Foursquare’s interface a bit better and find their badge system more appealing, but Gowalla has a couple things it does better.

First, you can create trips. What this means is a user can go to the Gowalla site and create a themed trip (“top places to eat downtown” for example) that a user’s Gowalla friends can then participate in by following the trip by going to the places listed and checking in on their smart phone. I like this because it means you can have people participate in social mapping, but in a journalistic sense it also lets us put geolocation layers on stories and let the audience experience key locations in a story themselves. And Gowalla has done a great job integrating the Google map function into the application so that getting walking directions is easy. Read more

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