Recent posts for Journalism.net
Cell phones in school? For news?
Over the holidays, the BBC reported that London middle school students are taking part in a BBC project that brings journalism into the classroom. The 8th graders researched local news in daily newspapers and websites, collected interview information with their cell phones’ mp3 recording capabilities, and took photographs with camera phones. Once they had gathered all of their source material, they used technology available in their classrooms to write broadcast reports on deadline and record audio/video the files (mpeg4) for placement on a BBC-affiliated website, School Report.
Wisconsin Science Journal
The Wisconsin Science Journal game – a pre-cursor to the Journalism.net games – was played twice by Madison-area middle school students during the spring and summer of 2004. While playing this series of two 12-hour games, players researched topics of their own choice, interviewed friends or neighbors to learn about their opinions, and wrote two feature stories for one of three desks: Environment, Health, or Technology.
In the WSJ games, we investigated whether the practices of professional journalists could provide a framework for middle and high school students to develop scientific and technological literacies. These games also provided pilot data that helped us build a better 45-hour science journalism game: Science.net.
Neighborhood Net
The Neighborhood.net epistemic game – a civics-based Journalism.net game similar to South Madison Times – will take place in 2007 within the curriculum of an urban charter school. Players who participate will become local reporters, learning the craft of journalism from newspaper editors and reporters – and along the way, they will learn about their neighborhood’s history, values, and issues by interviewing citizens and neighborhood leaders.
Media literacy and the future of the web
Lately, there has been significant discussion over the future of the world wide web. From talk of governments who censor information that they deem culturally dangerous to net neutrality, it is unclear what form the internet of the future might take or who might be exerting control over it. In addition, the growth and change of the internet is not (yet) well understood, something the BBC discusses in this article about a new research collaboration between MIT and the University of Southampton, UK – the Web Science Research Initiative:
“The Web Science Research Initiative will chart out a research agenda aimed at understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web.
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Science.net
Nanotechnology. Blue-green algae. Stem cell research. These are just a few of the important science topics studied by researchers at UW-Madison and written about by student reporters in the epistemic game Science.net, in which middle school students role play as science reporters working for an online science newspaper.
Combining the excitement of scientific discovery with the thrill of publishing their own work to inform the public, young people in science.net work as reporters publishing a weekly online science newspaper. During the game, they work with professional journalists, learning skills like interviewing and copyediting. And they use these skills right away, working on and publishing stories about breaking scientific issues that matter to themselves and to their community.
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