Steps forward in multimedia reporting

This semester we took our first leap into multimedia reporting here at Lehigh University. I had an amazing class of 11 students who really embraced the material with a vigor and made this a successful semester. I am having them all blog about the course and evaluate where they are with these skills, and I told them I’d do the same for myself. Again, it’s hard to teach this unless you model it.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

• Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
• Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
• South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
• Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling.

When I started this course I had no idea how it would go, and secretly feared it would flop (things I can reveal now, heh). Fact is we had never done this before in our small department at Lehigh and I have a fairly specific way of teaching that could have made it an utter failure. Essentially, I didn’t want to set up a class that ran well due merely to the excitement of a particular personality (though I have excitement in spades). I’ve seen this happen before from my undergrad days: professor comes in, sets imaginations on fire, then they leave and the whole thing breaks down. Not that I’m planning on leaving or anything, but I wanted sustainability from this course so that if someone else teaches it for a semester then we have continuity. This kind of goal required me to structure it in a way that meant buy-in from the students was essential to success – not easy to get, but when you do get it the results can be spectacular.

The results were spectacular, and I am happy to say that beyond the standard claims of credit that I need to make for The Record as it relates to tenure and promotion, we succeeded because the students bought in. Simple as that. I could have all the ideas in the world, but they have to run with them.

Some things I learned that have become something of a running list for me:

Model, model, model: Bad news for educators scared of blogging and The Twitter: Your students won’t get it if you don’t use it. Much to their probable annoyance, I was engaging my students outside the classroom in these spaces, using @replies and retweets to get their attention. I wanted them to see I was watching in that non-creepy way, yes, but I wanted them to see how this stuff works too. Would my students have gotten Twitter if they didn’t see me modeling it for them in these spaces or showing them how to livetweet using the Super Bowl as a backdrop? Doubt it. Would they get a feel for blogging and a better sense of Web culture if I weren’t in these spaces? Don’t think so. So you need to take the plunge in this stuff and use it. Don’t just dabble. I don’t think you can fake your way through this. [Side note: Is this made well for the way the academy is set up? I don't know and am in the middle of that grand experiment. As a tenure-track professor I am still feeling my way through the need to be in these spaces so that I can be a great teacher while still making sure to not neglect research needed to get me tenure. I have done OK with it so far, but don't think that worry is gone.]

Simple is not bad: I focused on new media concepts and provided them with entry-level equipment. The stories they are telling are not any more complicated than what they were doing with writing. We can’t fetishize the camera equipment to the point where they are so focused on pressing buttons that they forget the humanity in the story. I feel very strongly about this. So if they have a cut off head or a lighting issue, big deal. Was the story any good? We can fix the technical stuff, and my rallying cry has been, “That was a damn good story, now imagine how much better it could have been once you clean up the technical stuff.”

Adjust to technical difficulties: I had a group come back with great footage but no audio because of a lapel mic battery going out. How do you grade that? Well, you can’t. So I learned to have a very flexible grade book with technical problems. And I bet they always test the mic at the start from now on.

They learn quickly: I think we could have left Windows MovieMaker behind fairly quickly and moved to Sony Vegas mid-semester because they picked up editing fairly quickly and in fact might have become faster at it had they had more powerful tools. This is where I failed: I wasn’t ready for this. I have just started playing with Vegas, which is the most FinalCut-ish program I have seen on PC but one I have never used. I wasn’t ready to teach it. I’ve already gone into why it’s impractical to go full bore on Macs right now for us given that most of our other classes need the PC, but there was a middle area that I should have been more prepared to leap into once I saw how fast they picked it up. Lesson learned, and guess what I’ll be doing this summer?

Patience: I learned to have a lot of it, both with myself and toward the students as an instructor. I think the biggest asset I bring to the working lab environment is that I try to keep it light. I want them to learn and work hard, of course, but if things are going nuts I try to keep the humor of the situation in mind. No technical flarb is the end of the world; I’ve learned lessons from being on the other side of the teaching relationship.

Social media emphases: I was delighted to see how fast they took to Twitter and owned it. When showing them hashtags I created #j198 on the spot, and they began to use it outside of class. It became a conversation index and soon they were creating their own tags. Totally unexpected but it shows the buy-in. They struggled more with blogging this term. Part of it is that I don’t think I defined the expectations enough or gave them room to explore enough, so I’m thinking about having them blog about non-class material and we work on a theme together, then have a blog for their group to which they publish class work. Not sure if that will work, but I have the summer to think about it.

Equipment: The Zi8 was just perfect for this kind of class, so we made a good choice there. They did video, photos, and podcasts with the thing and battery life was just fine. We quickly realized that lapel mics were a must for any kind of decent sound, so that will be standard next term. I’m wondering if a monopod might be a good item for them to have too based on good input from my colleague John Jirik.

Resource guides!: The ones I made for the class were well received and I’m thinking of just publishing the PDF versions online; would any of you find that interesting? I have step-by-steps on how to blog, podcast, use Twitter, make slideshows, make maps, etc. I suppose I could just do them as a blog post too. They didn’t seem to find the books handy but I think I want to keep the Briggs book for next term and just emphasize it as a resource guide.

Co-create: I made it clear at the outset we were doing this journey together. I was learning how to best integrate this course into our curriculum and they were learning, in the words of one of my students, “everything.” So I learned to give them freedom to find their own stories and voice while also being a sounding board. I don’t do the authoritarian thing all that well. I wanted them to take ownership of their work and not do what they thought would please me the most. This was an important part of the process. On presentation day with some excellent faculty and guests in attendance, they spoke with excitement about their work. That’s what we call a WIN.

Feedback: I didn’t do nearly enough of this in class in formal class time, another failure of mine. I tried to pack so much into the course that I didn’t spend enough time doing the one thing I love in classes, which is going over work done by classmates. So I am revising next term’s schedule with that in mind. I provided feedback individually or at the group level, but I was a little distressed to see students worrying about their performance in the end and think that’s directly related to this hole in the process. Speaking of grades ….

Throw those grades out: I quickly junked the points structure because it wasn’t working. How do you grade a video assignment from a student who’s never held a camera? Baffled me. I could do this at Missouri because the students were a little more technically prepared by the time they got to me, but at Lehigh it didn’t work. So next term the grading process is really easy: 50% participation, 50% final projects. You come to labs, do the assignments, work hard, meet deadline marks, and you get your participation credit. All of this feeds into an excellent final project as well. Work hard and kick ass on your final project, you get an A. How hard is that?

Get an iPad: This has nothing to do with the course, just figured you’d expect me to say that.

Will I revise? Sure. I have big plans for smart phones when we teach this next term that will emphasize some of the location services I’ve been thinking about this term. And I have a cool PR project in development that will add another layer of this for the class and deal with that strange convergence between journalism and marketing. Last, while I spent some time on it in class the final projects revealed to me I didn’t go deeply enough into hyperlinking. They got the linking component, but not always the why. It’s good to take people to others’ sites; don’t reinvent the wheel.

On the whole, this class in many ways embodied my entire teaching philosophy: learn by doing, be allowed to make mistakes, and learn from one another. The last part is crucial: they worked together and learned from each other, they learned from me, and I learned from them. I’ve always hated the term “expert” because it is pretentious and implies that one can keep up with the steady stream of knowledge in our field, especially in new media. I see myself as a guide that uses the knowledge I have to help them learn what they want and need to know.

It’s not hard to see if I am successful at this in a given term. I pretty much know. As I watched my students present last Wednesday, I couldn’t stop beaming at their success. And it was theirs. You gotta own it, after all. They have a ways to go and skills to sharpen, but they’ve taken a huge first step and are that much more ready for this really hopeful time in our journalism.

If you’re a small school making this conversion, let’s talk. I’m working on a case study that we’ll look to get published sometime soon, but this plunge isn’t all that daunting. It takes time and energy and some know-how, but it’s completely doable.