Posts tagged education
Thinking Through the Headline
We try to teach each other here at the FJP and our latest learnings look at writing headlines and titles on Tumblr.
While Tumblr specific, I hope this document can also help others who are teaching or trying to learn how to write headlines and titles more generally.
The Google doc is here. You can download the PDF here. — Michael
University of Minnesota Launches Open Textbook Catalog
With college students spending, on average, over $1,100 per year on course materials, the drive to develop and use open textbook alternatives to traditional publisher releases is growing.
One issue in their adoption though has been quality control.
Enter the University of Minnesota with a plan to provide a growing catalog of peer reviewed books. Via Inside Higher Ed:
Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books. (Faculty members elsewhere are welcome to post their own reviews, but they won’t be compensated.) Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds.
The project is meant to address two faculty critiques of open-source texts: they are hard to locate and they are of indeterminate quality. By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks…
…The goal of the Minnesota database is to curate texts in a way that empowers instead of frustrating professors. Material posted in the catalog must have an open license, be a complete book, have a print version and be adoptable outside the author’s institution. Minnesota isn’t creating any of the books, just assembling the best of what’s been published elsewhere. The catalog includes texts from Rice University, which launched a series of peer-reviewed open-source books earlier this year.
There are currently about 90 books in the catalog in subjects ranging from history to law to math and economics.
Although women now make up the majority of college graduates, the number of female computer science grads has dropped precipitously over the past 25 years—from nearly 40 percent in the mid-1980s to 18 percent in 2009. As a result, only 2 in 10 programmers are women.
Applications Open for the AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship Program
It’s early still but that doesn’t mean we can’t think ahead. And thinking ahead to the 2013-2014 academic year is what we’re going to do.
If you’re a journalism undergrad or grad student, the AP-Google Scholarship is offering six awards for $20,000 each. The deadline to apply isn’t until February 2013 but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a head start know.
This is especially true because much of the application require online portfolios and digital work so you have nine months to clean up, organize and put your best foot forward.
Via ONA:
The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship Program fosters new journalism skills in undergraduate and graduate students developing projects at the intersection of journalism and technology.
The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism. A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity, with an emphasis on rural and urban areas.
Have you created original journalistic content with computer science elements? Are you thinking up new ways to tell a story with technology? Are you a “techie” who knows how to construct a journalistic story through multimedia? We’re looking for students pursuing studies at the crossroads of journalism, computer sciences and new media. If you’re on the cutting edge of digital media beyond the classroom, this scholarship is for you!
Application materials and requirements are available at the Online News Association.
To get a sense of what they might be looking for, take a look at this year’s winners.
As Google wrote on its blog when the winners were announced:
These students have big plans that range from producing hyperlocal data-driven stories, to developing open-source apps that allow for democratic news gathering and greater collaboration, to data visualization for current events and entertainment, to producing political news games and teaching journalists how to code.
Today, Harvard joined MIT in announcing edX, an online service allowing anyone anywhere to take Harvard and MIT classes online and free of charge. The pilot course is in Computer Science and runs through early June - enroll here.
The plans, though, go beyond what we’ve seen before. Namely, they open the door to new research.
via Fast Company:
Eventually, edx will offer a full slate of courses in all disciplines, created with faculty at MIT and Harvard, using a simple format of short videos and exercises graded largely by computer; students interact on a wiki and message board, as well as on Facebook groups, with peers substituting for TAs. The research arm of the project will continue to develop new tools using machine learning, robotics and crowdsourcing that allow grading and evaluation of essays, circuit designs and other types of exercises without endless hours by professors or TAs. Although edx is nonprofit and the courses are free, Agarwal envisions bringing the project to sustainability by one day charging students for official certificates of completion.
Besides Harvard and MIT, Stanford has taken the leap into MOOCs (massively open online courses) along with Princeton, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Pennsylvania in a joint venture with Coursera. Check it out.
Data Tools, Data Challenges
Bitly Data Chief Hilary Mason explains how the company’s infrastructure is set up, what challenges she sees ahead for data science and offers a wish list of tools she hopes the community will come together to create.
Last week, we posted other segments from this interview. They include getting started with data and how to to work with data. They can be viewed here.
What’s the Future of Journalism Education?
Related to our last post, I’m sharing this message from Poynter:
Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman and CEO, in a speech at the University of North Carolina recently, told journalism students they should change their major. “If you’re going into journalism if you care, then you’re going into the wrong profession … I usually ask (journalists) if they want to change the world in the way it wants to be changed,” Ailes said.
Tom Huang, Poynter adjunct faculty member, has a slightly different take: “Actually, you should go into journalism if you want to save the world. My point is that you don’t get to choose the time that you’re called upon to be brave and do your best work. Don’t forget: A time of crisis and change is a time of incredible opportunity,” he wrote for Poynter.org.
What’s your take on this? Whether you are a student, educator or professional, we would like to know what you think about the value of a journalism degree. Poynter’s Howard Finberg, who has been thinking about the future of journalism and journalism education for years, will be giving a talk at the European Journalism Centre on the future of journalism education, and he hopes you’ll fill out a very short [four to five questions only] survey. He’ll share what he learns at AEJMC this summer as well.
FJP: NewsU will give you a 35 percent discount code to any of their Webinars or Webinar Replays for doing so. Feel free to share your thoughts with us too! (@the_fjp)
Joseph Pulitzer Wishes Columbia J-School a Happy 100th Birthday
This weekend is my 10th reunion from the Columbia J-School.
More importantly, it’s the school’s 100th anniversary.
So in honor of it, the school’s founder Joseph Pulitzer returns to see what’s new.
Puzzled, disappointed, he doesn’t like what he finds. — Michael
How to Work With Data
The other day, Bitly’s data chief Hilary Mason explained how to get started with data.
Today, she discusses how to work with data, from getting it, to exploring it to interpreting it.
A while back, Hilary and Columbia mathematician Chris Wiggins wrote about this process, called it a taxonomy of data science, and gave a roughly chronological account of what one does with data: Obtain, Scrub, Explore, Model and iNterpret.
No, that’s not a typo, it’s part of an acronym: OSEMN, which rhymes with possum, which means you pronounce it “awesome”.
To get more details than Hilary offers here, check their article. It offers code examples and tools and tricks to work through each of the steps above.
The History of English in 10 Minutes
A compilation of ten videos on the history of the English language.
Ed note: Watch as one woman works to bring back the language of the Ohlone, a Northern California tribe.
Getting Started With Data
Hilary Mason, Bitly’s data chief, gives advice on how to get started in data science, from finding a buddy to tutorials you can watch and books you can read.
Bonus: Why you don’t need to be a math whiz.
Double Bonus: See her next video, How to Work With Data.
Your teachers are onto you.
Via.
UK Foundation to Launch Free Academic Journal
Over the past number of years a growing, vocal group of researchers has protested the rising cost and copyright restrictions academic publishers place on their journals.
Part of the issue is that many academic researchers are publicly funded and believe their work should be released under an Open Access model, made freely available to the public with few copyright restrictions.
This has led to thousands of academics to boycott publishing giants such as Elsevier over its practice of bundling journals (ie., institutions can’t buy one without purchasing many others) and placing restrictive copyright over journal articles). Much of this came to a head over the last few months with academic publisher support for the now-defunct US Research Works Act, a bill that would have prohibited open access mandates for federally funded research (eg., the US National Institutes of Health mandates that research conducted with its grants must be freely accessible online. The Research Works Act would have eliminated the mandate along with similar ones from other governmental agencies).
Enter into all this the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based foundation focussing on scientific research.
Via the BBC:
One of the world’s largest research charities, the Wellcome Trust, is to support efforts by scientists to make their work freely available for all.
The Trust is to establish a free, online publication to compete with established academic journals.
They say their new title could be a “game changer” forcing other publishing houses to increase free access.
More than 9,000 scientists are boycotting a leading paid-for publisher for restricting access to their papers.
The Wellcome Trust’s move is the latest salvo in a battle about ownership of, and access to, the published work of scientists that has been simmering underneath the sedate surface of scientific research for years.
The majority of the world’s scientific journals are accessible only via subscription, including highly influential titles such as Nature, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine.
This isn’t be the first attempt at Open Access academic publishing. A personal favorite is arXiv, and open archive hosted by Cornell University. For the math nerds, you might remember it as the place where Gregori Perelman originally published his solution to the century-old Poincaré conjecture.
But while not the first, the Wellcome Trust’s move is a very important step in increasing the flow and access to the world’s scientific research.
I like to know I’m writing for a real flesh-and-blood reader who is excited by the words on the page. I’m sure children feel the same way.
Harvard College Writing Program director Thomas Jehn • Fathoming the idea of automated essay grading — essentially, essays graded by robots. The idea is getting pitched in a contest by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which plans to offer $100,000 in prize money to any group of programmers that can figure out a way to automate the process of grading essays. We’re with Jehn: If students are spending all this time writing essays, it’s only right that the person on the other side of the coin is also a human being. (via shortformblog)
FJP: Perhaps if robots are grading the papers, students can use robots to write the papers. Then everyone can call it even and head outdoors for class.
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