e-Taalim

More than 40 participants took the Digital Journalism course at the P2PU, a leading initiative in peer to peer learning. The course is the first one to gather e-learners from all over the world and students taking the course physically at the host school in Japan, the Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University. This report deals with the overall experience from different perspectives including pedagogy, technology, logistics, networking, …etc.

The course organizer was Joi ITO, a Senior Visiting Researcher at Japan based Keio University and CEO of creative commons. Joi also acts as board member of several organizations including Mozilla foundation. Facilitators and administrators were helping Joi during the course and guest speakers were also present in almost every lecture.

Presentation of the course

The course called Digital Journalism covered the topics from new media for journalism, business models for online journalism, using the Web 2.0 tools for reporting and much more. Guest lecturers came from all over the word, journalists (New York Times, Al Jazeera, Boing Boing), university scholars, writers and even the CTO of Science and Technology Policy office at the White House.

Mashing up the real and the virtual; participants are following the lecture online via UStream and physically at KEIO University.

The course was constructed out of lectures, office hours, weekly assignments, and projects. It took place mostly on the p2pu.org platform, with the use of forums and the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) tool. The other part of the course, face-to-face lectures, took place at Keio. University and were accessible through live streaming and video conferencing and remained accessible later as video material. Much like in a traditional course, the lectures were held every week and assignments were organized according to the topic of each week. The untraditional part of the course was, of course, the use of multiple information and communication technologies (ICT), web tools for content management, and the combination of the physical and virtual environments.

Prerequisites

The beauty of open learning is that there are no prerequisites in terms of prior formal education. The course was open for everyone, with minor preconditions of basic understanding of the internet and knowledge of English. It later turned out that following the course was much easier with prior knowledge of social media, like Twitter, instant chat like IRC, and the use of blogs. However, if one was not comfortable with the use of these technologies before the course, one of the beneficial outputs of the course was the get-to-know all these different technologies.

The Digital Journalism course guidelines for the online portion of participants at p2pu.org learning platform

Objectives

The objectives of this course were described as follows:

• Learn about how the Internet and new social media is impacting journalism,
• Learn to use tools for researching, participating in and creating news and stories online,
• Create a published story as a team using the Web 2.0 tools and publish it to the world and present it to the class.

Within this report, we conducted an online survey and we would like to share with you our findings.

Motivations for participation

Pedagogy: Social and open learning

Interview with JOI

Technology

Logistics

KEIO University student’s opinion on the course

Drawbacks/ Things to improve

Time zones: The tricky thing about having class participants from all around the world is the time coordination. The lectures held at the KEIO University in Japan were set to start at 9a.m., but for some of the virtual students that was the middle of the night. This time zone problem was partially solved with recordings of lectures, and with the asynchronous communication on the forums.

Communication: “Communication seems to be the main challenge. And a lot of the appeal is that the seminars are recorded and so give flexibility. But at the same time, I’ve only really worked properly with Rick during the course. Most importantly though, I would say, is setting up some sort of failsafe system for communication between admin/teachers and the students.” said Richard SMART

Participants also mentioned technology overload, since there were so many means of communication used. For less tech-savvy students, this was confusing in the beginning.

Participants also mentioned that the design needs to be less confusing and that carrying out the course in different languages would be welcome. Attrition is another problem when it comes to online learning, meaning that only a small percentage of people who start the course actually finish it. This course had also encountered the same problem, but luckily, there were enough participants to carry out the course until the end.

Conclusion: Work in progress

Finally, we should mention that the p2pu type of learning and the online platform structure is “work in progress” in the early development phase. Such open projects will grow with community support and volunteer involvement through time.

Overall, participants were pleased with the course and some expressed that they will take more courses on p2pu when a topic strikes their fancy. “I hope that someone will run this course again and keep building on the foundation that Joi has created.  This is really great content, especially the interviews with contemporary journalists.”

Sources: 

• http://p2pu.org/journalism
• http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kmd-p2pu-digital-journalism
• http://richardjsmart.blogspot.com/2010/07/shinjuku-protest-against-us-forces-in.html
• Clicking on photos in this article will take you to the source of where the photos were taken. All content is under CC-BY-SA.

By: Lena HOFMAN & Nadhir DOUMA