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Pervasive Computing in Journalism Education

5/2/2005

PERVASIVE COMPUTING TRANSFORMS JOURNALISM EDUCATION AS MOJO PIONEERS CONVERGENCE MAJOR

Mike McKean
University of Missouri School of Journalism

This fall the Missouri School of Journalism will offer students a new major, the first change of that magnitude in more than 50 years. The 1,000 or so undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the world’s first school of journalism can now specialize in convergence as well as the traditional disciplines of advertising, broadcast news, magazine, newspaper and photojournalism.

What d'es “convergence” mean in a journalistic context? Is it a new way to tell stories? A new way to market stories? A new business model for traditional media industries? A new way to bring the audience into the process of gathering and telling the news? The answer is “Yes” to all of the above.

MOJO (The Missouri School of Journalism) faculty embraced the notion of a separate convergence major in the fall of 2003 in the face of some decidedly bad news for the journalism profession. Daily newspaper readership has declined precipitously over the past 40 years. In the last decade, similar declines have occurred in TV news viewership (Crosby, Online Journalism Review, March 4, 2004). Significant percentages of Americans believe the news media are biased, uncaring, and even immoral (Pew Center for the People and the Press, January 2005). And the Net Generation is not developing the habit of consuming what journalists produce. As author Merrill Brown put it in a recent report from the Carnegie Corporation, “The future of the U.S. news industry is seriously threatened by the seemingly irrevocable move by young people away from traditional sources of news” (The Carnegie Reporter, April 2005).

For some time, Missouri had been looking for a partner to help transform its journalism curriculum while updating its aging computer technology. After much consultation, the J-School signed on with Apple Computer as one of five charter members of the Apple Digital Campus initiative (the others are Duke University (NC), Ohio State University, Penn State University and Stanford University (CA)). The partnership is now expanding to other interested colleges and universities through the ADC Exchange, a web site that includes blogs, threaded discussions, sample tools and galleries of student work at http://edcommunity.apple.com/adc (registration required).

To carry out our vision of pervasive computing in journalism education, we purchased wireless laptops for all full-time faculty in the spring of 2004 and adopted a laptop requirement for all undergraduates beginning with the Fall 2005 freshman class. A core group of instructors has already begun experimenting in courses that will have a direct impact on the new convergence sequence.

One experiment requires freshmen living and taking courses together as part of a “residential community” to participate in a “movie” competition using Apple’s iLife software along with loaner laptops and mini-DV cameras (http://jfig.missouri.edu ). Faculty members judge the movies and reward the winners at a campus-wide event. While we made mistakes the first time, many students demonstrated a surprisingly good understanding of digital and visual literacy given their lack of college-level training. This experiment also showcased the power of peer and group learning with a minimal investment of faculty time and resources. In 2006, a new one-hour “careers” course will expose all first-year students to the project.

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