There are no learning styles – or, at least, “no credible evidence that learning styles exist,” says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, in this post on Quartz.

However, as the post points out, most academics think there are and there is.

That’s worth thinking about.

We talked about the reflective logs last week. The aim was to get some sort of shape and structure, and to identify some headings we’d expect to see in any log.

Headings for the log
This is what we came up with in the lesson. It’s not an exhaustive list, of course, which means we might want to look again at the notion of ‘required elements’ mentioned in the marking cover sheet. (See below.) The log should include reflection on:

• a clear development path if the site goes live;
• design ideas covering accessibility, usability, typography, design theory;
• interactivity and social media, user-generated content;
• management issues and group work;
• your own learning;
• your audience and users;
• quotes from appropriate literature and web sites, properly referenced and listed in a bibliography.

Context
I’d aso expect to see some reflection on the wider context of online journalism; how it has developed in your own sector; and your thoughts on the sector itself.

Assessment
It’s worth reminding ourselves of the university marking criteria. They map fairly well onto the reflective log. (At least, they seem to. We can discuss this tomorrow.)

Marking cover sheet
We might also have a look at a marking_sheet to see whether you’d find this helpful as a marking tool. It would deliver some consistency across the group, though you might find it too restrictive.If you agree, Joss and I will use this when we mark your logs.

The weekly blogs
We should also look at the weekly blogs and how they can feed your final submission. I’ll have a look at these in the class tomorrow. (29/1/2013)

Hand-in date
We can chat about the hand-in date in the class tomorrow.

This is a quick response to a question from a student about style guides.

It’s just a ist of the ones I’d say were the most useful and/or interesting.

Style Guides

Yahoo! Style Guide
(excellent guide to writing for the web; covers everything from basic grammar to tips on SEO.)

Reuters Handbook of Journalism
(searchable; section headings)

The Economist Style Guide
(section headings)
Clunky page, but this is my favourite. I’d recommend buying the book.

Financial Times Lexicon
(searchable)

The Times Style and Usage Guide
(section headings; alphabetical links)

Telegraph Style Book
(section headings and alphabetical links)

Guardian online style guide
(alphabetical links)

BBC style guide
(useful for broadcasters and writers)

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.)

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:

• First stop: the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. (There’s even a free PDF.)
• Then there’s this video, where Milton Friedman tells the story of the pencil.
• And – best of all as an intro: How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff.

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.