News Mangled

My students may have had some success, but not I. At least not in terms of figuring out all this blasted tech stuff.

Yeah, yeah--I know I was all gungho last week. But that was then. I've since tried to register for a free Web hosting site (Webng), only to have the registration muck up. I've joined divshare--neat little built-in audio player they've got there, only it wouldn't play my mp3s.

I've posted a Soundslides piece I put together to this blog, only to discover that--since the publish to web folder is hosted by my campus server--all my readers need my campus password to make the thing work.

And did I say readers, plural? Turns out my one reader already has my password. . .

Success!

So, here is the greater, rather than lesser success: My students broke some news online last week. I was really proud of them, as they got into teams to report this late-breaking story and post it on their web site.

Of course, it wasn't something tragic, such as what happened at Contra Costa College last week. The Advocate's news staff did truly excellent work in breaking their story online.

Still, my students pulled together, compiled several sources, and wrote a balanced, informative story. They also collected video of student responses, as well as an interview with our vice president of instruction. Here's the link, at least for the news story:
Skyline experiences a Veteran's Day mishap - NEWS

Game On!

I'm pretty proud of myself. Yesterday, after getting my two blogs and my wiki spot up, I also subscribed (not sure if that's the right word though!) to an rss reader and discovered new things like Twitter. I also created a Soundslides slide show of my girls at the pumpkin patch, though I'm still not totally sure how to post it, beyond using my college web host (again, not sure if my terms are right).

So I've got a lot to learn, along with my students. . .that's okay, because, as I put at the top of my wiki site--we're all in this together.

It's a New Day for Skyline Journalism

It's a new day here at the Skyline College Journalism Program. After four semesters of encouraging, with greater and lesser success, my students to experiment more with the online version of their newspaper--thanks to the inspiration of fellow JACC members Robert Mercer and Rich Cameron, among others--I've decided to jump in there myself.

So, I got me a wiki site and a blog (two, if you count the Wordpress site I'm going to use for next semester's new Advanced Writing and Reporting for the Media course). . .heck, I even signed up for Gmail, despite the fact that they'll electronically comb through my email to adjust their ads to match my interests.

Actually, I should be at the Rethinking Journalism Education 2.0: Preparing Journalists for the 21st Century at SFSU today, but since my 3-year-old staged a vomit-in all last night, I'm holding my own rethinking journalism education summit right from my home by signing up for all these "news-fangled" convergence options.

And I guess that's kind of the point, isn't it? I can jump in the game, and so can my students. We all can. After all, convergence and Web 2.0 journalism--news-fangled media, if you will--is, as my colleague Robert puts it on his wiki site, "a newsroom without a door or webaddress."

Or without even a left-hand, if you consider I'm doing this single-handedly while my daughter sleeps on me.