Author: Bernie Russell

QuarkXPress vs InDesign

Bernie Russell Teaching

We’re having the QuarkXPress vs InDesign debate at the LSJ. It’s been rumbling under the surface for a while, and it finally broke out after our recent (successful) accreditation visit from the Periodical Training Council (PTC).

Quark
Quick summary: QuarkXPress was launched in 1987 as the professional print design and layout tool and quickly became the market leader. There’s no doubt it deserved its position. It was powerful and flexible, and could do everything from flyers to books.

But it got such a grip on the market that it became a de facto monopoly. And, as all monopolies tend to do, it got bloated, dozy, smug and expensive.

InDesign
Then along came Adobe InDesign, which had a better UI, seamless integration with other Adobe apps, and was …cheaper. It was marketed as a Quark-killer, and it could well end up doing just that. Quark’s market share is now 25%. It’s a minor player.

My view:

  • The PTC recommends InDesign.
  • The students want to learn InDesign.
  • The industry uses InDesign.

So…
Sorry, Quark. Game over. Goodnight. Thanks for playing.

But…
We have to make sure we don’t get hooked on InDesign as we were on QuarkXPress. It’s dangerous to get fixated on an application. All applications decay. Stick with them, and you’ll decay as well.

Adobe’s market lead will make it like Quark (bloated, dozy, smug and expensive). In fact, this MacUser post argues that’s happening already.

An app for that
And as we speak, there’s probably someone out there writing an app that will cost a tenner and do the job just as well.

Whereupon someone else will write an app that costs a fiver…

So, we should focus on what we teach and what the industry is using. But we should never get locked into one way of doing things, into using one tool. There are lots of tools out there. We should try them all.

Mao Mao
As Mao Tse-tung might have said if he’d been in the journalism business, and not gone on to have such a successful career in mass slaughter: “Let a hundred applications blossom, a hundred lines of code contend”.

(Bit tasteless. Might cut that.)

Skopje scoop

Bernie Russell Research

The LSJ has been asked to deliver a post-grad module on interactive and online journalism as a distance learning project with the School of Journalism and PR in Skopje, Macedonia.

There are four of us on the LSJ end of the project team: Jane Croft (PR/Social media), Gary Stevens (Broadcast), Debbie Wilson (broadcast) and me (online/social media).

It’s still very much in the initial planning stage. We’ve got a module outline from our colleagues, and some suggestions about possible applications for delivering the module

The Skopje university suggested using Share Point and WizIQ.

Sharepoint
I don’t know much about either, other than I had Sharepoint down as a Microsoft back-end system for collaborative working, content management, web-hosting, etc.

The best definition I’ve come across is from this post on ZDNet, which describes it as “the server sibling of Office”.

It’s certainly huge. The ZDNet post quotes Microsoft claiming to add 20,000 new users every day.

It’s used in education as a VLE (I found this blog which gives it a good write-up.)

WizIq
WizIq is an online course-creation and course-management tool. It looks fine, and seems to be easy (hmmm) to hook up to Blackboard.

But, the merits of these tools aside, there are some issues – there’s a learning curve for us, at least, and we may need to involve ICT in any installation at our end.

Also, because Sharepoint is a Microsoft creation, there may be limited support for other browsers.

So – do we stick with these, go with open technology/social media, or use a blend of both?

More to follow.

Profitable seminar

Bernie Russell Teaching

We got down to business reporting in this week’s L2 Specialist Journalism seminar.

It was a good discussion. The students got to grips well with the main topics – how business stories should be told, and the myths surrounding business leaders (Jobs a good ‘un vs Big Bad Billy Gates).

The group excels at focusing on the nuts and bolts of crafting stories to deadline, and with reader-appeal, and then looking at what this means for depicting complexity and nuance.

But then we went off at an interesting tangent.

One of the stories that came up for discussion was about high profits declared by a UK energy company.

You can fuel some of the people all of the time..
To personalise the story,someone suggested hooking it up to a piece about old people who had died because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes over the winter.

And all of the people some of the time…
What struck me was that they thought the connection between these two things – so-called fuel poverty and high profits – was obvious – though no-one could quite explain what it was.

But you can’t fuel all of the people all of the time
There is no connection, of course. If there were, lower profits would mean fewer deaths, and no profits would mean no deaths, which makes no sense.

The group wasn’t entirely convinced, though. The thing was, some remained very suspicious of the profit motive – even though it’s the pull of the profit motive that keeps us in iPads and fresh bread.

Reading unlist
So clearly, someone has to fly the flag for profit. It needs all the friends it can get right now.
How to get the message across? I’d suggest the following off-list material:

The Schiff book  is a readable, entertaining, and very convincing explanation of how markets work.

Or would work if they were left alone.

Moral
And the moral is:

A profit is not without honour in my seminar group.

Academic Phrasebank

Link Bernie Russell Resources , ,

The Guardian Higher Education Network carried a link today to an academic phrasebank aimed at foreign students.

Published by Manchester University, it’s described as “a new open access tool designed to help academic writers”.

Now, I’m sure some of you will hate it, and I’ll grant it could be seen as a bit cut-and-paste, why-write-your-own-stuff, etc.

But, as it says on the tin, it is for non-English speakers – and we have talked at our staff meetings about some of the difficulties those students face.

We could also use it as an introduction to academic writing for journalism students.

Referencing resource from Anglia Ruskin University

Bernie Russell Resources

I came across this simple-to-use guide to the Harvard reference system from Anglia Ruskin University.

It includes referencing digital media, forums, mailing lists, blogs, and they seem to be keeping it updated.

And it has a refworks hint, which is useful.

It’s under a Creative Commons licence, and they want a permission request and credit.

Fair play to them. It’s an excellent resource.

Research update

Bernie Russell Research

Just a quick update on my research project:I’ve started to look at some background material. I’ve got a copy of the Cullen report into the Dunblane shootings, and a  copy of a report by the Sportman’s Association which looked at police failings in the run-up to the shooting. (The association was formed in 1996 to campaign against the handgun ban.)

I’ve also arranged a meeting (14/10) with our subject librarian Judith Elkin, who has very kindly offered to help me out with my literature review.

Research project

Bernie Russell Research

Following on from the away day, this is just a short post to (pre) launch my research project. I’ll probably use a dedicated blog once I get going, but I thought I’d post here at first.

Research group
Ola has very helpfully set up and agreed to mentor a small research group comprising John Cafferkey, Barnie Choudhury,  and me.

We’re hoping to hold our first meeting fairly soon (when the induction/week one smoke has cleared).We already have a plan, though, courtesy of Ola, who emailed us with this checklist of how we might proceed:

  • Topic field
  • Topic focus (title and hypothesis)
  • Research elements – research questions, methods
  • Previous studies – review of and perspectives in literature
  • Abstract writing – 500 words
  • Refereed Journals – identify journals that will be interested in publishing your work.
  • Conducting research – collate data for your research
  • Writing research paper –  write your paper
  • Review of paper – internal review by two colleagues and feedback.
  • Submit for publication – submit your research to a refereed journal for possible publication.

So far…
I’m planning to do a study of the shooting press. I’ve had quite a few ideas, mainly around focusing on the kinds of journalism on display in the shooting press:

  • news reporting;
  • campaign journalism;
  • product reviews;
  • book and film reviews;
  • looking at how the shooting press is dealing with digital and social media;
  • accessibility and gender issues.

The handgun ban
But after a lot of thought, I’ve narrowed it down to the shooting press’s coverage of the 1997 handgun ban following the Dunblane shooting.

Wider focus?
That’s a very tight focus, I know, but if I need to, I can widen it in several directions:

  • a comparison between the shooting press and the general press coverage of the ban;
  • looking at the shooting press as an example of campaigning journalism;
  • comparing the 1997 campaign with the way the shooting press has covered the Home Affairs Select Committee report into the Cumbria shootings (which will mean looking at digital technology, social media, etc.).

Thoughts?

Tutorials: the issuing of extensions issue

Bernie Russell Teaching

We’ve had plenty of discussion about how best to arrange our tutorial support system, and within this, about who should hand out extensions. Have we got extensions right? I’m not sure.

Our guidance
Here’s the guidance we’re working to:

For extensions, these can only be signed off by the level tutor/prog leader. So, in order to keep it simple for students, it may be that [academic tutors] end up helping them with the extension forms, but then asking them to get [the level tutor] to sign it. (Notwithstanding student confidentiality, we may need to liaise with [the level tutor] over dates etc.)

Handbook
The Handbook for Academic Tutors says that academic tutors should be “the first line of contact for advice and support on academic matters”. It also says that academic tutors should be notified about absences, and goes into great (and very helpful) detail about providing support for students on a whole range of issues.

Given this clear sense of the role of the academic tutor, it seems odd that that tutor can’t deal with extensions. These will certainly be one of the main problems students will expect their tutor to deal with.

So we have a system where a student comes to us to solve this problem – and we listen carefully to them, then we send them away with a form to find another tutor.

Confidentiality
Our guidance mentions confidentiality, and that could be an issue here as well. If the level tutor is to do anything other than rubberstamp the form, they’ll have to know the reason for the extension; that means the academic tutor has to tell them – which could entail a breach of confidentiality; or the students does – which may be something they’d rather not do.

Numbers
And give that we have +150 level one students to deal with, is it a good idea to leave this to one person?

I’ve argued that it isn’t. It should be the academic tutor who hands out extensions. The students should see their academic tutor as the go-to person when they have a problem. And the tutor should solve that problem whenever possible, and not pass it up the line.

Rules
So who’s right? The majority view is with our current guidance, and obviously, that’s what we’re working to.

But as it happens, both could be wrong. The difficulty in resolving this is that what’s set out in the handbook differs from what’s set out in the regulations; and neither quite matches our guidance.

Here’s the handbook version:

…the tutor should…provide…direct guidance, including the agreement of appropriate assessment extensions…

This is from the regulations:

In order to ensure consistency in application, a programme may identify one person to approve extensions, either for the programme overall or for each level of the programme.

Both make sense. I prefer the handbook version myself. I can see the strength of the point about consistency. But I think our tutorial system should be based on the principle that the buck stops with the tutor.

However, if we go for consistency, then we have to make sure all our policies match up.

So…one for the Student Experience Committee?

(Er…yes…I’m passing this to someone else to fix…)

The 140-character job app

Bernie Russell Resources

I’ve done one post already about my snapshot survey of how the LSJ uses social and digital media.

I had planned another one on email, followed by one on Twitter.

But the one on Twitter just wrote itself, I think.

Roy Greenslade blogged today that Northcliffe media’s south-east division will only accept replies to a job ad via Twitter.

He quotes a blog post from Alan Geere, the division’s editorial director, saying: “They’ve got 140 characters to tell me what they can do and why I should consider them.”

Which means Twitter just moved from really-should-have to can’t-get-a-job-without.