michael.cervieri.com » education

Manga Makes Us Smarter

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:19:01 +0000

MSNBC’s comics blog has a story about San Francisco-based No Starch Press and its release of a line of math and science manga comic books.

The books are translations of Japanese originals.

Via MSNBC:

The plot lines may sound sappy to grown-ups. Usually they involve a cute schoolgirl or schoolboy who’s challenged by an equally cute teacher to master a seemingly impenetrable subject. But Bill Pollock, the founder and president of No Starch Press, says the books get the job done, especially for students who are at a crucial age for math and science education…

…Japanese researchers have reported that manga books can deliver information in a shorter time and make a stronger impression than conventional textbooks. “Manga’s textual hybridity is utilized to promote the readers’ effective learning, as verbal and iconographic tests place multiple layers of information in context and project a focused content,” Satsuki Murakami and Mio Bryce wrote in the International Journal of the Humanities.

Image: The Manga Guide to Relativity via No Starch Press.

1+1 = more!

Michael Cervieri — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:40:00 +0000

Circa 2005.

A $35 Tablet?

Michael Cervieri — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:49:20 +0000

Via the BBC:

India has launched what it says is the world’s cheapest touch-screen tablet computer, priced at just $35 (£23).

Costing a fraction of Apple’s iPad, the subsidised Aakash is aimed at students.

It supports web browsing and video conferencing, has a three-hour battery life and two USB ports, but questions remain over how it will perform.

Officials hope the computer will give digital access to students in small towns and villages across India, which lags behind its rivals in connectivity.

At the launch in the Indian capital, Delhi, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal handed out 500 Aakash (meaning sky) tablets to students who will trial them.

He said the government planned to buy 100,000 of the tablets. It hopes to distribute 10 million of the devices to students over the next few years.

“The rich have access to the digital world, the poor and ordinary have been excluded. Aakash will end that digital divide,” Mr Sibal said.

Sounds good. Almost too good.

As the article goes on to note, similar efforts to bring low-priced computers to the poor have failed because the products have either been shoddy, or mass production never actually materialized.

Princeton Pushes Open Access Policy

Michael Cervieri — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:16:05 +0000

Via The Conversation:

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.

The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Advice for Young Journalists? Do It

Michael Cervieri — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:38:19 +0000

My advice? Do journalism now. Get a blog. Chase stories. Curate on Storify. Pitch. Don’t do minimum to get by. Do more. —@karlhodge

Journalism.co.uk queried the Internet for “Ten things every journalism student should know.”

Pictured above is number one. Click through for two through ten.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Free Online Class Shakes Up Photo Education

Michael Cervieri — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:18:00 +0000

If you’re an aspiring photographer or just want to brush up on your skills, take a look at the free online classes Jonathan Worth is conducting through England’s Coventry University.

Via Wired:

The breadth of content and openness of the class is enough to make any online education junkie salivate. The class’s RSS feeds host audio-recorded lectures, class assignments and special discussions. Worth’s Fall course attracted over 10,000 visitors to its website from 1,632 cities in 107 countries and the Winter course is available as an iPhone App. Lectures from the course have been downloaded thousands of times on iTunes…

…Worth’s two experimental classes Photography and Narrative (#PHONAR) and Picturing the Body (#PICBOD) are free, online undergraduate curricula and they’re entirely open. Both courses directly address the radical transformations in the media economy. For example, the course catalog reads: The role of photographer (mode of information) as supplier to old media (mode of distribution) no longer exists – that link has been broken. We recognise [sic] instead the need to redefine the role of the contemporary photographer as publisher.

Photography and Narrative begins this fall.

Picturing the Body begins this winter.

You can start your learnings now though, both sites offer plenty of material from past semesters.

Looking for other topics? Try MIT’s OpenCourseware, a site holding lectures, articles and other sources across multiple disciplines.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Things Journo Grads Should Do

Michael Cervieri — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:51:00 +0000

Earlier this week Mark S. Luckie from 10,000 Words gave advice to graduating journalism students and suggested 30 things they could do this summer.

The list started like this:

Start a blog and post at least twice a week
If you already have a blog, write a post that gets retweeted 20 times
Shoot 100 amazing photos and post them on Flickr
Friend at least 50 journalists on Twitter who in turn follow you back
Become a part of a crowdsourcing project

and ran up to number 30.

I liked his suggestions — a few are ones I’ve told my journalism students to pursue — and shared his post with one of the journalism listservs I’m on.

“You can quibble with the details,” I wrote, “but I generally think this is spot on and will pass it along to my students.”

The first response was positive:

That is spot on and some points we should probably all learn! Thanks for the to-do list!

The next response, not so much.

Before I get into it though I think I can safely say that our mainstream brethren aren’t quite the shining stars we might hope them to be. Off the top of my head I can think of today’s Washington Post pay to play snafu (Charles Kaiser sums up its repercussions nicely); NPR’s banning the word “torture” from its coverage of Bush era interrogations; and Fox’s Glenn Beck continued journey to looneyville when he apparently agreed with a guest that “the only chance we have as a country right now is” for bin Laden to “detonate a major weapon” in the US.

Really?

So, yes, I agree with Luckie that our graduating journalists have some independent training to do. Hopefully they’ll apply it to new, independent news operations that start to show what real journalism can look like.

Slate’s Jack Schafer is right when he writes that digital disruption will improve journalism. We — and our graduates — just need to practice and take advantage of what this technology is providing.

Without further ado, here’s the back and forth.

Wow. Is this what journalism has sunk to? “Start a blog and post at least twice a week.” Is the author taking it on faith that all these new journalism grads just automatically have something to say that is so pressing and relevant they have to broadcast their thoughts twice a week?

Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t. I know a 2008 grad that got his current “mainstream” gig because he did have something to say, and said it well. Without the blog, the hiring editor never would have come across him.

However, think of a blog simply as a platform. It doesn’t necessarily have to include opinion or “thoughts” as you imply above. I’ve told my students in the past, if you graduate and want to cover City Hall but haven’t been hired to do so, start a blog and start reporting. Get your ass down to City Hall and break news.

You don’t have to wait until Newsday comes calling. Better, do it with a partner and report as fiercely as you can so you make a name for yourself. You’ll eventually get noticed.

That’s what i think of when someone says, start a blog. The blog, as a public platform, lets us pursue what truly interests us if we haven’t been fortunate enough to be hired for the beat we really want. Use it.

And that they’re all such skilled photographers that every one of them can post “100 amazing photos” that other people besides their friends will actually care about?

If you’re not skilled enough to begin with the only way you’re going to get there is to practice. So i tweak the “take a 100 photographs directive” and say, take thousands, but you can only have 100 up on Flickr/your site at any one time. That way, you learn to edit yourself. You learn to develop and eye, you learn a variety of skills, including editorial judgment, that will come in handy.

Or is he/she assuming that it’s OK to produce content for the sake of producing content?

Well, is it not ok? Athletes practice. So too artists and musicians. Should journalists not lift a finger and perfect their writing, shooting, editing, etc. unless they have an actual, honest to goodness signed, sealed and delivered assignment from an editorial desk? I’d rather have that budding journalist do it publicly where he or she can get actual feedback from those who see, hear or read their work.

How else do you propose people get better?

Nowhere in this post is there any mention of actually, say, reporting. Why not instruct new grads to spend time in underrepresented communities and find the stories that mainstream media is missing?

Well, I agree with you there and hopefully my tweaking shows that reporting is part of the process in the recommendations. And yes, go take those pictures and write pieces that aren’t covered in the mainstream media.

We don’t need thousands of new journalists who know how to use Photoshop and Twitter. Any child can do that. We need journalists who actually know how to report and write, and who pay attention.

We do need journalists who know how to report and write, and who pay attention. And we need them to be able to produce that content in and for a medium that most people are now using to get their news. That’s the web. Photoshopping required. Which, apologies to any of my former students on this list, is not something any child can do.

Final thought. The author who posted the original list recommends following 50 journalists on Twitter. I disagree.

Leave the echo chamber and follow 50 people in the beat and subject matter you want to report in and on. Immerse yourselves in the links and knowledge they’re sharing. It will do you well.

Now, she did conclude her rant with, “We need journalists who actually know how to report and write, and who pay attention.”

And this, of course, is absolutely true.