17 September 11:30   Room D105

The Global News Relay: Connecting Journalism Students Worldwide Panel

  • Kym Fox School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Texas State University
  • Sarah Jones Associate Head of Media, Coventry University
  • Carlie Porterfield School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Texas State University
  • Judy Oskam School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Texas State University

Description

In 2015, journalism students from around the globe participated in the Global News Relay, an annual newscast coordinated by the University of Salford, UK. This online project provided a learning laboratory for students and faculty to engage in an applied learning experience. Global News Relay linked up students from universities across the globe to produce more than 2 hours of continuous broadcast news. Poverty around the world, #GlobalNewsPoverty, was this year’s chosen broadcast topic. The newscast included 15-minute segments from six universities in the U.S. and universities and colleges in India, Australia, Dubai and the U.K. Faculty and students - from Texas to the UK - will discuss the planning and resources involved in creating this collaborative project.

Interaction

Q&A, We can show a clip of the broadcast if possible

Takeaway

Strategies for coordinating with global partners to produce a digital product. A model for using themes or topics to focus student work.

Outcomes

Information from the session will further support a digital first journalism strategy. Information from the conference will be posted on university blogs and publications.

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The Minutely Massive Open Online Course

  • Jonathan Kearney University of the Arts London

Since 2004 at Camberwell College of Arts, part of the University of the Arts London, we have delivered a small but highly effective fine art practice based masters course with half the students physically based in London and half fully online living anywhere in the world. Drawing on this experience of fine art blended learning this paper will explore the social learning context and whether scale is possible, desired, relevant or necessary.

Rather than exploring from the position of certainty, this paper will speculate and raise several questions using a collection of different lenses. Is scale encouraged by Dunbar’s (1992) suggestion that 150 is the theoretical cognitive limit to social relationships, or connectivism (Siemens 2004) and transactive memory (Wegner 1985) which both promote the idea of socially distributed knowledge and learning? Or is the idea of massive scale simply a digital ideology that is too easily accepted? Do communities of practice (Wenger 2002) and our own extensive experience of small group synchronous online chat sessions, along with students using blogs as a vital tool for reflection, suggest that lower numbers are a more effective way for artists to learn and develop their practice? Or does the concept of the personal learning network (or environment) hold within it both the minute scale of the individual and the massive potential of the rhizomic network?

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