Category: Journalism education

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ICYMI:The pedagogy of the PSL

PSLgrab

I’m spending the final week of 2015 taking stock of the last year, a task that sounds rather lofty but actually involves wrestling with spreadsheets. I did, however, notice that I never shared around here one of the highlights of my fall: a short explainer on how my UNH journalism students mapped fall-flavored treats to learn about non-linear storytelling.

The piece I wrote appeared on Storybench, a must-read project of Northeastern University’s Media Innovation Program. The map my students made was published by The Sound, a fantastic weekly publication covering the New Hampshire Seacoast.

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Teaching without a net

When it comes to class planning, I’m rather obsessive. I have white boards in my office, a couple of spreadsheets on my hard drive and a notebook for each course I teach. I write detailed memos to my students and myself, and I spend a few days at the beginning of every semester wrestling Blackboard’s grade book into something that resembles order.

But, sometimes, it’s fun to toss all of that aside and just riff. That’s what I did today with a dozen of my journalism students here at UNH. My inspiration was Storybench.org, a new collaboration between Northeastern University’s Media Innovation program and Esquire Magazine. (Disclosure: I received my MA from Northeastern last year. More disclosure: I remain a UNH hockey fan.)

Storybench is as useful as it is gorgeous, jam packed with techniques culled from the front lines of digital creation. Headline generation! Google Maps! Charts and graphs galore! The site formally launched yesterday, and I knew I had to use it in class right away.

Even without a plan.

We’re near the end of the semester up here, and I’d promised my students something a little fun and little different from the usual rhythm of our writing workshop. I talked about the why and when of telling stories with data and showed them a few examples. While they worked on projects in Infogr.am (which I’ve used for more than a year), I announced I would race them to build something similar using Storybench’s instructions for Charted.co – a new tool I’d never touched before today.

We focused on data about where Americans purchase their Christmas trees. They pasted it into Infogr.am and, before long, were adding pictures and adjusting color palettes.

data

I spent 20 minutes wresting with Google Drive before giving up and putting the .csv file in DropBox. By the time class ended, this half-baked graph was all I had to show:

chart

But the point of activities like this isn’t necessarily a finished project. What matters is introducing young journalists to the concept of real-time experimentation, showing them that it’s okay to dive into something new without knowing exactly where it will lead.

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The last few weeks, writ small

Someday (and I do hope it’s soon), I’ll figure out how to juggle teaching, freelancing and blogging. Until then, we’ll all just have to live with somewhat sporadic posting. Here’s a recap of what’s been going on in my world:

  • Dan Kennedy called me “smart.”  Kennedy is one of several brilliant journalists who guided my graduate studies at Northeastern University.  Earlier this fall, he interviewed me for this video about the future of local news.
  • One of this year’s most interesting Congressional races is unfolding in my backyard. The contest for New Hampshire’s CD2 is, in many ways, a microcosm of the narratives about race, gender and generational identity swirling around this election season. Here’s my story in the Boston Globe.
  • I got some student journalists hooked on politics. (#sorrynotsorry.) UNH co-hosted a debate between U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Scott Brown earlier this month, and a group of journalism students got an up-close look at what it takes to organize that kind of event. Here are a few of the students leaving the debate hall to interview the supporters outside:
UNH journalism student Tom Spencer leads his classmates through the crowd outside the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH on Oct. 21, 2014. Photo/Meg Heckman
UNH journalism student Tom Spencer leads his classmates through the crowd outside the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH on Oct. 21, 2014. Photo/Meg Heckman

As of this writing, roughly 36 hours remain in the 2014 midterm elections. Here’s hoping for a more regular blogging schedule after that.