Locative journalism: recommendations for journalism schools
Friday, June 27th, 2008 Write a comment
By Hilary Powell
Our team of journalism master’s students has had an exciting and thought-provoking experience exploring “locative storytelling” in the New Media Publishing Project class at the Medill School of Journalism. In previous posts (and our downloadable report) we have provided findings and recommendations for journalists and media companies. Here are some recommendations for journalism schools:
1) Encourage students to experience audio tours. They should participate in audio tours outside the classroom to better understand how locative storytelling works.
2) Start geotagging stories in student newsrooms. If your school publishes content online, include geotags so they can be indexed and displayed through map-based (or, in the future, GPS-based) interfaces.
3) Emphasize audio skills early. Provide techniques classes and professional equipment. Encourage students to create audio-based stories as an alternative story requirement or complement to print stories.
4) Build up mobile offerings in student newsrooms. On sites displaying student-published work, offer mobile alerts that people can subscribe to. This can eventually progress to GPS-triggered storytelling.
5) Encourage students to create geography-based stories with an interface other than Google Maps. One example is the MapsAlive authoring platform that lets users make any map interactive.
6) Use Twitter or other mobile social networking/microblogging sites to keep student reporters communicating with each other. If students use Twitter or similar services in their daily lives, they may be more inclined to think of new ways to tell stories using mobile or location-based technologies.
7) Increase emphasis on photojournalism. On portable devices, photographs can complement audio effectively when video will not.
8) Offer classes in which students innovate and create new forms of journalism, media products and storytelling. In other words, classes like the one we have just completed.
9) Explore partnerships with new location-based services such as Loopt and JotYou.
10) Explore partnerships with other schools, such as digital media arts school FlashPoint Academy, to teach media production tools. Students need more hands-on instruction in these tools but this kind of instruction is not necessarily best provided by journalism faculty.
11) Seek opportunities for students to interact with people in the industry, such as skills workshops led by media professionals.
12) Create continuing education classes for faculty to learn the technological tools and ideas behind innovative, multimedia storytelling.
MIT students dial up ways to make mobile phones specialized
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 Write a CommentBy Hilary Powell
How would you like your phone to buzz about a sale at that store you just passed?
For creating an innovative application with Google Inc.’s upcoming free and open mobile operating system, Android, four MIT students recently won a prize in the Google-sponsored Android Developer Challenge to create software that tests the power of open phone systems.
Yahoo! news featured an article Monday about a class project 20 students were given to design a software program for cell phones that uses Google Inc.’s upcoming Android mobile operating system. According to the article, the students tested ways to make cell phones act differently according to location. In a way, they tried to endow cell phones with a kind of conscience:
“One project named GeoLife gives users a way to set to-do lists and get reminders on their phones. Walk by the market, and the device might buzz with a message that you’re supposed to pick up milk. Then there was Locale, which lets users configure their phones to automatically adjust their settings when the devices detect themselves in certain zones. So you might set your phone to automatically go into vibrate mode in the office and silent mode at the movie theater, and ring everywhere else.”
Other applications that made it into the top 50 include a program that discovers pricing and other data for any product with a barcode by scanning the code with a cell phone camera, a tool that allows users to navigate and record a route using images instead of maps and a niche innovation that gives golfers real-time, location-specific information, such as the weather and game statistics.
