You may have already absorbed Dianne Lynch’s article in last fall’s Nieman Reports Teaching Journalism issue, titled “Incubating Innovation at Journalism Schools.” Below is an excerpt from that piece that is a refreshing take on the challenges we face. ELW

“(W)e need to stop teaching software (except, perhaps, to each other). Our students come to us knowing it, or knowing they can learn it when they need to. We need to stop conflating the newspaper industry with journalism itself. When we see yet another study about how kids aren’t reading daily newspapers, we should worry less about the democracy and more about the insularity of our research frame: Journalism is alive and well on digg.com, YouTube, Crooksandliars.com, and The Smoking Gun.com. And when our students challenge our authority and fact check our proclamations during class, we need to stop scrambling for classroom management techniques and start addressing the widening gap between their assumptions about knowledge production and our own.”

This is the lead to a column by Dr. Sheppard that appears in the January-February issue of AAUP’s Academe.

“A third of the way through the movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the the Phoenix, the fifth installment of that hugely entertaining reworking of Arthurian myth that I refuse to analyze literarily further—it’s been done—I gasped and said to myself: “To hell with this ‘epic battle of the mythical forces of good and evil’ stuff people think this movie is about. This is a movie about academic freedom.”  Full column.

Friends and Colleagues:

Please share your thoughts about the GENERAL advantages / disadvantages of using textbooks in writing for mass media, reporting, photography, graphic design and other skills courses. I emphasize “general” because I’m not necessarily asking for reviews of specific texts or authors. I’m more interested in your philosophy, if you will, of using texts in skills-based classes, understanding we might differ on the definition of “skills-based.”

Most often I use published collections of outstanding work as “texts” in my reporting and magazine writing classes rather than texts that are prescriptive. Are there comparable collections for broadcast or multi-media journalism?

ELW

Friends and Colleagues:

I wanted to alert those who are unfamiliar that every day the “Interactive Museum of News” displays the front pages of more than 500 daily papers in 50 countries.  What a valuable resource for classroom instruction! Here is the URL: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp

elw

Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut wrote a fascinating piece for today’s The New York Times. An excerpt is below. Lessons here for our young charges?

“The failure of the New Hampshire pre-election surveys to mirror the outcome of the Democratic race is one of the most significant miscues in modern polling history. All the published polls, including those that surveyed through Monday, had Sen. Barack Obama comfortably ahead with an average margin of more than 8 percent. These same polls showed no signs that Sen. Hillary Clinton might close that gap, let alone win.

While it will take time for those who conducted the New Hampshire tracking polls to undertake rigorous analyses of their surveys, a number of things are immediately apparent. First, the problem was not a general failure of polling methodology. Second, the inaccuracies don’t seem related to the subtleties of polling methods. Third, the mistakes were not the result of a last-minute trend going Mrs. Clinton’s way. Fourth, some have argued that the unusually high turnout may have caused a problem for the pollsters. It’s possible, but unlikely. To my mind all these factors deserve further study. But another possible explanation cannot be ignored — the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor.”

This is excerpted from the article by Todd Gilman, “The Four Habits of Highly Effective Librarians,” which ran in the May 23, 2007, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I see parallels here with our continuing discussions about the future of traditional journalism. ELW

“Academic libraries today are witnessing a drastic decrease in the number of in-depth reference questions asked at traditional reference desks — whether in person, by phone, through e-mail messages, or via virtual reference systems. It’s a striking trend, and even frightening to some librarians, because we do not know the cause, what we should be doing about it, or how it may affect staffing in the not-so-distant future.

Are reference librarians becoming obsolete? Surely not in this age of ever-more-complicated searching for information in ever-growing cadres of largely idiosyncratic databases. But are reference desks becoming obsolete? Apparently so, at least as they are currently conceived.

So central has that question become that Columbia University ‘s 2007 Reference Services Symposium in March devoted a substantial portion of the day’s proceedings to a debate between two senior library administrators over whether the academic library reference desk will still exist five years from now (“Be it resolved: There will be no reference desks in large academic libraries in 2012″).

Based on a show of hands, the majority of listeners agreed that the reference desk would still exist — even after hearing all the evidence that gave the remaining listeners pause. Or perhaps the majority defended the reference desk’s future precisely because of the evidence they heard.

Did all of those people believe what they voted, or were they, in part, hoping against hope — trying to revive a dying loved one by wishing her back to life?

Indeed, it is telling that the two debaters themselves chose to focus exclusively on the value of the reference desk, a philosophical question, rather than on the topic as it was given to them: the viability of the reference desk, a practical question of supply and demand.”