Learning
What follows is the first draft of an article I intend to direct students to. It’s not a manifesto, or in-depth teaching philosophy, or anything of that sort: it’s more a collection of observations. Other teachers — and students — are encouraged use the comments to react to these, argue against them or add to [...]
This one’s for my students. You get better by doing, which means always practicing. It’s not about the assignments and the grades; it’s about going out and pushing. Challenge yourself. Take your camera out today and shoot as though cropping had never been invented. Make every pixel in every image count. Take a walk through [...]
Continue reading about To my students: Go challenge yourselves
I’ve spent the day working my way through the introductory tutorial to Flash Catalyst and then using what I learned to create a very small photo piece, which you’ll find here. (I had to link to the file, because I made it too big to be embedded. Go ahead and look; I trust you to [...]
Continue reading about What I learned about Flash Catalyst today
I’ve changed my thinking about student journalists doing free work. There was a time when “no” was my reaction to the idea of students providing their work for free to commercial enterprises. If they valued your work enough to publish it, I reasoned, they should value it enough to pay for it. But the nature [...]
Write or Die (motto: Putting the Prod in Productivity) is an interesting tool to help journalists-to-be get to that magical point where they have the confidence to write quickly. The web-based tool (there’s a desktop app; more on that later) lets you set a word-count target and a time limit, then gives you a writing [...]
Continue reading about Write or Die: Nice tool for learning to write quickly
Years ago, when I was a reporter who also did a lot of my own photography, I put aside the camera bag of Olympus bodies and lenses, and spent a week using only a Voigtländer Vito B, with a fixed f3.5 50mm lens, and a handheld light meter. The camera was so primitive, focus wasn’t [...]
I learned something today (or maybe relearned something I already knew), while walking around searching for an image to go with “duality,” my TSI word of the day. (Explanation here; photo here.) It seems the more I pay attention to a single concept, the more focussed I am on trying to see something such as [...]
There are a wealth of tools and sites for learning out there for upgrading journalism skills and learning new ones. Some links to what I have recently come across: • Both the Reuter’s Handbook of Journalism and the CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices handbook are available to all online. These should be of interest to students, [...]
Continue reading about Becoming a better journalist: some tools
I have only a basic understanding of how stock markets work, so I’m looking for a resource that can help me figure them out a little better. There are a couple of specific questions nagging at me at the moment: 1. Do stocks normally open higher than the previous days close and why? 2. What’s [...]
Continue reading about I need a little help here (updated twice)
The News University, an on-line training centre for journalists, is offering a free one-hour eSeminar on Covering Same Sex Marriage on April 14. It’s free for working journalists who register in advance.
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