Learning & Teaching What my students can learn about placement reports from ‘Steve Jobs’ That’s Steve Jobs not Steve Jobs, and actually it’s about what they can learn for all evaluation and reflection, not just what they can learn about their placement reports. I’m currently working with students on drafts of a piece of personal evaluation and reflection based on industry placements the
events Hyperlocal, hegemony, and closure — notes from the What Next for Community Media? (#cj15) conference Yesterday (9th September 2015) I went over to Cardiff for a one day conference called What next for community media? Whether by accident or design, the event presented its answer straight off the bat: hyperlocal media — that’s what’s next for community media. And because of the day’s format, which w
acts of daily journalism The Contributoria Tapes: Burn your house to the ground: why you need to kill your darlings to maintain your independence. This piece was originally published on Contributoria — find out what that means and why it is posted here by reading this note. Article background This was the first of three* collaborative articles that I worked on for Contributoria under the pseudonym of Howard Wilkinson. And boy did we get in tro
acts of daily journalism The Contributoria Tapes: Tell your own story This piece was originally published on Contributoria — find out what that means and why it is posted here by reading this note. Article background My third pass through the Contributoria process was during the July pitch / August writing window, where the theme was “Independence”. Independent and al
acts of daily journalism The Contributoria Tapes: A great fresh tax for your local coffee making indy? This piece was originally published on Contributoria — find out what that means and why it is posted here by reading this note. Article background For my second Contributoria piece I ignored the editorial theme about the future because I don’t do futurology (though I might, in the future, you can’t
acts of daily journalism The Contributoria Tapes: Can you really live on ‘social capital’? This piece was originally published on Contributoria — find out what that means and why it is posted here by reading this note. Article background This was my first piece for Contributoria — a response to that month’s suggested editorial theme “The Future of Money”. It was a gentle troll, as quite a
The sudden but not unexpected death of Contributoria The journalism project Contributoria has announced that it has published its last issue this month. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the site would close, but the pace of the closure did catch me off guard. I’ve written for the site several times as I was interested in the mechanics of its crowdfundi
what I have been listening to The Returned mets Serial: welcome to Limetown I came to the podcast Serial midway through its run—just in time to still be a bit of a tastemaker, but way behind the real cool kids—based on recommendations but without any real knowledge of what I was getting into. Now I don’t mean I didn’t know what it was about, I mean I didn’t actually… Contin
higher education Virtually deserted — uni campuses on Second Life In The Last of Us a large section of the action focuses on getting to, and then exploring, the abandoned (fictional) University of East Colorado. For someone who spends a lot of time in similar settings it’s pretty haunting to walk with Ellie and Joel through classrooms, quads and student halls all
Learning & Teaching “Support tickets” in production classrooms I’m just doing my annual module review forms for 2014-15 and so I’m being asked, by the form, to note any examples of “good practice” in the way I’m delivering the material. Now obviously I’d hope all of my teaching practice was good, but I take the question to actually mean “what do you do… Continu
PhD Space is hard I’ve been writing up the methodology section of my PhD, and in what is becoming a recurring theme in writing things up it’s caused me to go back over some things I read ages ago and get a fresh perspective on them. Today that fresh perspective is about what everybody else has been doing in… Continue
PhD Who are the hyperlocal producers? I’ve previously touched on some of the different profiles of people who make hyperlocal media in a post I wrote a long time ago. I’ve since been off doing other things that have brought me full circle back to the question of who is making hyperlocal media. In my PhD project my theoretical framework
Learning & Teaching Collaborative Learning in Media Education What seems like a very long time ago now indeed Paul Bradshaw, Jennifer Jones, and I ran a project we called Stories and Streams — an attempt to address a number of problems we were finding in the way that our students “consumed” their learning. In the project we sought to engage students in the des
fandom Fan, Fiction, and Twitter I happened to find this piece today buried deep in my archives: it’s a case study that was included in the textbook we use with undergraduates at the Birmingham School of Media — Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context — and it summarises the work I did with Inger-Lise Bore on the Twitter activiti
