Update: This discussion about this is continuing over at Poynter and in a topic thread at Wired Journalists.
Amy Gahran has stirred up a bit of fuss at Poynter with her post J-School: The Right Tools Teach the Right Mindset, in which she questions the wisdom of j-schools teaching their students to build websites in Dreamweaver.
Some samples that capture her argument:
That’s a big problem, because tools embody mindsets. Focusing on Dreamweaver teaches exactly the wrong mindset for online journalism: that your Web site is mainly an island unto itself.
~snip~
The vast majority of content that news orgs and independent news venues publish online are not the kind of thing you’d ever touch Dreamweaver for.
~snip~
In short, a working knowledge of real CMS technology and how it integrates with the internet is what gives a journalist’s career legs these days.
Requiring journalism students to use Dreamweaver is about as useful as requiring them to learn calligraphy. It makes your content looks really pretty — and it generally won’t be worth a damn on a real journo job or project.
There are a variety of responses in the comments, some supporting, others the use of Dreamweaver. (And by the way, I really wish Poynter would find a way to keep article and comments together instead of offering them on separate pages.) Samples of the each:
Kathy Gill: I think there is something to be said for understanding the fundamentals of the Web — where it came from, the values (open standards) underlying its development and adoption, what – exactly – HTML and XHTML and CSS and RSS /are/. How to fix a link or reposition an image (get your hands a little dirty).
Jim Stovall: We have a news web site within our curriculum called the Tennessee Journalist (tnjn.com) that runs with an elegant CMS based on the Django framework. The students love it. They are flocking to the site because they can concentrate on creating their packages rather than having to figure out the technology. They can use text, pictures, audio, video — the whole array — and it’s very easy to upload to the server.
I find this an interesting debate because the question of what tech to teach plagues me fairly constantly. I teach in a small journalism program, so we don’t have the luxury of being able to offer a wide variety of specialized courses that dig deeply into all the aspects of the new age of journalism.
In the past, I have taught Dreamweaver and Flash in some detail and even, a while back, things such a how to build web pages in Netscape Communicator (I’m that old). But, particularly over the past two years, I’ve shed a lot of the deep technical teaching.
I’ve boiled my decision-making down to two questions: what do I have to teach that enables better storytelling and helps prepare the learners for the workplace?
That’s why I’ve shed Dreamweaver and focussed on making them familiar with blogging software and front-end CMS use. It’s why I’ve cut Flash instruction back to the basics (how to use it to bring together storytellng elements such as video, photos and text into a package of journalism).
It helps that tools get simpler, the best example of that being Soundslides. Students get it in less than an hour, it replaces the need for build-your-own Flash slideshows, and the code for embedding a Soundslides swf into a Flash package is a line or two long and easily explained.
Video and audio editing? Sure, I could teach a semester on each. But I can also relatively quickly give them enough knowledge of the basics of Audacity or even Final Cut Express to turn them lose and let them try, fail, try some more, fail some more and learn.
By cutting back on the detailed tech teaching, I’ve been able to expand the time available for teaching about the storytelling all this makes possible and how best to take advantage of it all. My goal, at semester’s end, is that students have a basic grasp of the essentials (how to use CMSes, edit video and audio, build a Soundslides slideshow with and without audio, etc.) and a deep understanding of how all this affects their ability to go tell the world interesting and important stories.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying that I’m with Amy on this one.
TAGS: EDUCATION, JOURNALISM, TECHNOLOGY
A fuss? Moi? ;-)
Thanks, Mark.
This makes me think — how do considerations like the CMS you use and its options, as well as more generally the strategy of providing updates, engaging with the community, being aware of search visibily, collaborating with other reporters, and connecting with coverage from elsewhere as well as sources affect journalistic storytelling? How can they drive the narrative?
- Amy Gahran
Reply
Tough questions. I think, as much as anything, all of that is a process of learning that students have to be engaged in for it to take root and make personal sense to them. I don’t spend any time, for example, on SEO in the classroom, but when I report the individual story hits to students or they start getting comments on their articles (although not many do), little “aha” lightbulbs go off and (I hope) that informs the way they approach storytelling in the future.
Part of the “problem” is that there’s no cookie-cutting approach to journalism and that while all reporters share a common culture and common knowledge base, every one that I’ve ever worked with approaches the beast from a slightly different angle, doing it in the way that makes sense to them, adopting or rejecting new skills and methods based on their understanding of storytelling and themselves.
I throw a bunch of stuff at my students and they do a bunch of work, fail a lot, succeed a bit and move forward. (That failing and succeeding thing applies to me as a teacher, too.) I’m mostly comfortable with the idea that those who are serious about this (and not all are) are taking stuff out of all this that will make them better (or different) storytellers, and that they realize that once they get the diploma or degree the learning and trying doesn’t stop.
Reply
exactly my approach Mark. With a few blips this year I have managed to get my students off dreamweaver and on the CMS’s etc.
I think the real issue here is not the way we teach them as much as the way we demand they learn. Give them access to the kit, give them a pointer on how to use. Then give them a story to do and get them to learn by doing. I honestly think that is the best way to learn.
But there is resistance to that approach. By who? The students. Go figure
Reply