Mindmeister

The Mindmeister program that was introduced has really helped me organize my thoughts. I often get misdirected onto tangents and forget the real reason I was doing a project. By using a Mindmeister map to get ideas down and then sorted into a logical order, it made the preparing of a project go so much faster.

I accidentally taught my  daughter how to read when she was four years old. I have been wanting to explain this concept to others. By starting with the Mindmaster map, I was able to get the important factors down. This lead to a very quick and easy presentation that I will be uploading next week.

I have made the Learn to Read Mindmeister map available at:



http://www.mindmeister.com/294365293

I highly recommend this program to any student, starting as soon as grade four.

Thursday

Notes from the class discussion:

Review of Critical Thinking
protected by law the same as print journalist

must make an effort to do fact checking

New form Journalism
publish the lede first and then build it as information becomes available

Right side Basic News Writing
ABCs
W5
INCUR PP

Objectivity
Lede
Writing in a Journalistic style rather than a narrative style.

can be taken to the New forms of Journalism

Hacker Journalism
computer activity that may not require a programmer skill set
manage a large amount of data to extract information from it

Contributors to Conservative party compared to appointees to the EI boards
all freely available data that just needed to be analyzed
11 appointees were conservative, one was Liberal

interviewing data, interrogating data,
rather than interviewing witnesses

Daily Reflection on eJournalism

May 13-16, 2013
I had planned to spend the weekend getting caught up on what had been happening in the eJournalism course. I got caught up on my sleep instead.

Tuesday - Count Down to the End of this Class

As the last day approaches only six sleeps away, there may be a few nights without sleep.



Rent seeking behaviour
people own certain values and rent them out.
they believe they have a right to rent them out.

This was the day the power went out at BU. It is enlightening to realize how dependent we are on electricity. Then it was pointed out that many in the world experience power outages many times a day.

Wednesday

A quick summary of what happened in class on Wednesday,  22 May 2013.

UStream was attempted with Jean.

It is not great for interaction like Skype, but more for broadcasting to many people. Anyone with the link can join into the broadcast. They have to sign in to write in the comment box.

Journalism is saying something that someone does not want you to say. Everything else is just public relations.

Citizen Journalism and Global Journalism had a good example. Harper landed in Peru after snubbing the Canadian media. The first question a Peruvian reporter asked was about Nigel's cheque to the Senator.

Within twenty minutes, I had UStream uploaded onto my laptop and  iPhone, signed into the account, verified with emailed link. It took a minute but I was able to find the link to the buejournalism.

Logical fallacy - AC/DC conflict featured on Murdoch Mysteries. I may kill an elephant so we should not use it.

Holding people to account is difficult when the people in power own the media.

Shirky - Here Comes Everybody. The positive side of the internet is that it has given everyone the opportunity to be a journalist. The negative side of the interenet is that it has given everyone the opportunity to be a journalist.

Cognitive surplus - taken from television viewing time. When asked where people get the time to create everything on the internet, the biggest drop is the time spent with not interacting with the television. The population has moved from being passive receptors of broadcast news to active participants of the news stream.

Herman, E. S., and Chomsky, N. (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1st ed.). Pantheon.  "Thought control in a democratic society." 

Discussed Ryan Holiday's book, "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying

Moved to the left side of Mind Meister and the New form Journalism branch.

Because it is so new, there are  no textbooks. It is difficult to write a textbook when the field is still evolving. The best skill to for the new journalist to develop is their critical thinking, just like the old form journalist. The style is the same, format similar, and the still needs news value. The delivery system is the big difference.

The discussion of journalism became so interesting that I focused on the discussion rather than taking detailed notes. Some of the topics that were discussed include:

Gonzo Journalism 1972 election
on contract with Rolling Stone Magazine, serialized
reporting with a fax machine, large, bread box size,
looking for telephone jack to plug it in and send the story.

The least factual, most accurate ...

radiacally new format of journalism
 
Hunter S. Thompson

Guerrilla Journalism
define guerrilla

occupy wall street
idle no more
tweaking the nose of power

Participatory Journalism

people like to share
Look what I did.

and can do it easily.
My eighty year old mother can Skype.
changed the way journalism is done.

twitter for speed, print for detail, online print sites for details

Wikipedia editor

amazing, entense amount of activity on Wikipedia]

Blogs have exploded.

Drudge report

Full fledged participatory
wiki journalism, Wikipedia
Boing Boing - participate as a journalist or as a commentor


Collaborative and contributory sites
Reddit
Slashdot

Thin Media
list server
Google groups
     Yahoo groups



a lot of ridiculous ones but still more productive than watching television commercials

Personal Broadcasting sites
UStream
Blogtalk Radio
Newsletters

Paper.It
Scoop .it
Spundge
one click and put it in your newspaper

super villan censored

Poynter
a good journalism school


scoop it example

giving credit

Ambient Journalism
twitter

Hacker Journalism
getting information that others do not want you to have
legality is questionable
holding authority (major corporations) to account

adbusters
trying to immunize us fromall the advertising and commercials.

Pharma
Makeup
Monsanto

Culture jamming
corporate culture
adbusters.org

amnesty international now a corporation
supported by US government so can not report about Gitmo

Punk Rock sold out to commercial success and lost their face

How to become a hacker
crackers
script keys
ethos and codes

anonymous

black hat and white hat hackers

code academy

w3school
Digital Humanities

when is a journalist protected?
Is a web blogger protected the same way as a journalist?

Yes, Court judgement.
http://www.caj.ca/?p=358

http://www.cba.org/BC/public_media/rights/240.aspx
Defamation


Whose beard are you pulling

http://scc.lexum.org/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/7837/index.do


http://www.rtndacanada.com/ETHICS/codeofethics.asp
code of ethics for eJournalism

14 points

Advertorial
Is it really an objective article or is the purpose really to sell an item?


There is so much I could go back to and look at deeper. Maybe after the final project is posted, I will have the time for further research on these interesting topics.

My Final Project

I have created a PickaKucha presentation about this eJournalism course.

It is on my wiki pages:


http://maryjones1909.wikispaces.com/

Brandon Sun Publisher Sits at My Luncheon Table

This event has so much to do with eJournalism that I have to blog about it even if I preceed it with a "Name Dropping" warning.

The publisher of the Brandon Sun, Eric Lawson, was attending the Brandon University Foundation Annual Luncheon. Because of my late husband's association with this institution, I am sent an invitation as well. I am not too familiar with the members of this elite group of citizens so chose a chair at the edge and chatted with one of the clerical workers that I had dealt with. A nice lady approached the table and confirmed that the two seats on my left were still vacant. Out of the thirty to forty tables, Eric Lawson ended up at my table.

So the boring pre-meal socializing suddenly became interesting as we compared a few of the changes happening to Journalism from his point of view and my experiences in the course. He had come from New Brunswick and a job with the Irving newspaper group (part of Irving Shipbuilding and Irving Oil).

I was able to hold my tongue and not explain how upset I was about the loss of my paperboy who also played with my kittens and made sure I was up and dressed by 8:00 AM every morning so he could greet and cuddle the balls of fur.

His wife was also very interested when I explained the diversity of the students and how everyone is bringing a unique point of view to share with the rest of the class.

So, the publisher of the Brandon Sun has been made aware of the eJournalism course now offered at Brandon Unversity. Karma must have guided us towards the same table. How else do you explain our encounter?

Brainshark

My first attempt at using BrainShark in class: This has been removed because it was soooo bad. The final project is a better example of how BrainShark works.


BrainShark is a program that will help turn a PowerPoint type of presentation into a video that can be played whenever the viewer wants it.

This allows the author to review and edit and update and review again for further improvements. A positive side effect is that the time factor can be controlled. During a live presentation, it is common for the knowledgeable speaker to go off on a three minute tangent, often more than once. By setting a time limit (Brevity of ABC), the author has to focus on the important information before it loses the interest of the audience.

PechaKucha or Pecha Kucha has become the standard to for a twenty slide presentation where there are only twenty seconds per slide for a total of six minutes and forty seconds. This is the attention span of most web surfers. By using this as a standard, it eliminates the tangents and useless information.

I hoped to do another BrainShark presentation and add it to this blog. But there is other course work that needs to be worked on.

Credibility

Today's class was an interesting discussion about credibility in journalism.

Like virginity, once you lose your credibility, it is gone forever.

How to spot logical falicies:

For example, ad homonym attack is where the person's morality is discredited so that their message will not be accepted.

Manufacturing content is when the writer creates a reason for the government to spend money on the product their contributors sells.

It is the citizen journalist, the blogger, that has to be the BS detectors to counter the corporate and government public relations propaganda.

Bradley Manley leaking documents to WikiLeaks. He felt it was a crime against humanity. Prior to giving it to WikiLeaks, he offered to respectable news outlets like New York Times but was turned down. WikiLeaks was the only distributor that would get the information out to the population.

Amnesty International will not help anyone that is wrongly accused and treated deplorably by the American government because they get a lot of their financial and intelligence from them.

Many "publishers" will nt carry stories because it may tarnish the reputation of a major advertisor. This destroys their credibility as much as inaccurate information.

Test Doc

Sea Cadets on Parade

View Sea Cadet Parade in a larger map Battle of Atlantic Parade 2013

Class Demo Video

Class Demo Video

While making this video, I learned the proper way to connect my microphone to my laptop. The jack does not go in the headphone slot. My next video will have sound now that I learned this important lesson.

Procrastinating

I usually do not pass on stuff from facebook, but this summed up my last three days perfectly. Although I learned many new concepts in the eJournalism class, I was also very productive at unimportant thing.

"Borrowed" from : https://www.facebook.com/grammarly

I would also like to recommend that readers download and install their application at:

http://www.grammarly.com/

It has helped me to double check some of the "typos" before I hit the publish button. It even works in the Blogger text box.

Audio Test

This should hopefully work.



Record and upload audio >> and now to publish

Riverbank Discovery CentreRiver Repairs

I was about to waste these words of wisdom on eBrandon when I remembered that I also have to fill a blog with this content.

The situation is that the flood of 2011 did extensive damage to the riverbank and the options are to either spend $1.5 million to repair the riverbank (as reported in the Brandon Sun on 8 May 2013) or "keep it natural" and move the building (as suggested by members on the eBrandon.ca forum: http://ebrandon.ca).

Now I am not an engineer, but I believe that it would cost far more to move the building and walking paths than to repair the river bank to stop the erosion. This figure is not available, but it is quite possible that the intelligent people at Ducks Unlimited and the Riverbank Discovery Centre have priced this out and found it to be an unacceptable alternative.

It has been the process of removing marshes up stream (they acted like a sponge to reduce the flow of water in the spring) that was a major contributor to the 2011 flood so saying we are not allowed to "modify nature" to repair the damage done by other modifications is pure hypocrisy.

There have been river modifications to build the bridge a few meters away so it has already lost the "natural" aspect of the scene. Using rocks to repair and prevent further erosion would be an education feature in the studies available at the centre. Most of the rivers in Europe have been modified in some way to accommodate the civilizations that line their banks.

The decision to build it in the current location included the highest flood level for over a hundred years and that 2011 was a rare occurrence, surpassing over three hundred years of record keeping. With proper management of the water upstream (which was not done in 2011), the probability of reaching 1,184 feet above sea level has become negligible. There has already been a major investment in preventing a reoccurrence so the rest of the river should not panic with fear that 2011 will happen again.

But where to get the $1.5 million for the repairs now becomes the big question. A common management lesson is to not bring a problem to supervisors without also bringing a possible solution.

I would like to recommend letting donors "Buy a Rock" (where size matters). A boulder half a metre in diameter could cost the donor $1,000 (with a tax receipt issued), but the child could buy a palm sized one for a loonie. Businesses and schools could paint a rock with their colours if they donated the money. I would like to put my tongue in my cheek and suggest there are a few people that could contribute the rocks in their head for free. (Removing tongue and back to the topic.)

Once the rocks are purchased, the labour to get them into place is just down the road. During the flood, some of the residents in the Brandon Corrections Centre demonstrated excellent community service on the dykes and in other places where brawn was desperately needed. Many received business cards with pleas to contact the business owner because they had shown their leadership and work ethic that the business needed. I regularly dropped off snacks on my way home because they were working to protect my home in the old part of Kirkcaldy. They appeared happy to be doing something constructive rather than counting the hours in their (overcrowded) cells.

There are also programs to hire the under thirty who need experience. Is there an environmental science or engineering student at BU, U of Manitoba, U of Regina, U of Winnipeg, etc. that could use this as part of their studies or even their graduate thesis?

By thinking outside of the box rather than going into panic mode, Brandon can retain a beautiful and educational asset, give people who want to reform an opportunity to redeem themselves, and let a student receive a life changing experience. If those that favour this idea could donate what they can afford for a stone or two, the repair could be done with minimal government cheque writing so that it becomes a feather in the cap of the citizens rather than a photo op with ugly signs and Harpers's profile (or was that supposed to be signs and Harper's ugly profile).

Comment if you have anything to add to this discussion.

Titles That Grab the Reader

Time has to be budgeted as much as (or even more than) money. While others may have more or less cash, we are all given the same number of hours in a day. For the same reason I will not spend $10 for rotten food or a shirt that falls apart, I do not want to spend fifteen minutes reading something that is useless to me. This is why titles have become so important as I scan the book shelf, magazine index, or a list of search results. I am looking for something to grab my interest and give me a reason to spend ten minutes or an hour with that piece of writing.

Because I demand a good title before I read something, I feel I should give a good title when I write. In 2009, I wrote an essay that ended up being published by the Winnipeg Free Press in part because it had a title that grabbed the reader. Would you want to spend time with the story, "My Daughter Joined a Gang"?  Click on this link if the title grabbed you and there is a desire to read the rest of the story.
http://kgsolutions.ca/gang.htm

The professor for the writing course I took last fall used the title for my final project to discuss with the class ways of building a great title. "Million Dollar Baby" was the top line followed by "The Cost of a Teen Pregnancy". This figure was the amount I had calculated (on the spreadsheets in Appendix A) as the difference in lifelong earnings between a teen having a child before completing high school and a woman in her mid to late twenties starting a family after graduating with a university degree. My Canadian History course last Spring ended with a paper titled:  “In Flanders Fields, From the Pen of John McCrae to the November Boutonnière."

I consider titles to be a puzzle to solve. If you are stuck with a great piece of writing but no title, tell me about it and maybe we could brainstorm some ideas around. Many ideas came to me while I was in the shower or washing dishes. Folding laundry and vacuuming are other mindless tasks that leave your frontal cortex available to explore title possibilities. Now that the weather is nice, you can rake my lawn if you need a mindless activity to do while thinking about a title. Staring at the blank space on a computer screen has not proven to be very useful for me.

Russian and Google Translator

Это тест функции Google Translate. Я пишу сообщение на английском языке, но она появляется в другом окне на русском языке. Я просто играл аудио-версию, которая была очень интересной. Я не хочу быть грубым, но акцент пришли через настолько сильным, что я думал, что диктор компьютера бы исключить избыточное слюны.


Да, это шляпа от крупной в русской армии Band. Не спрашивайте, как я приобрел.


To save the reader the trouble of translating it, I will publish the original text:
This is a test function Google Translate. I'm writing a message in English, but it appears in a different window in Russian. I just played the audio version, which was very interesting. I do not mean to be rude, but the accent came through so strong that I thought that computer speaker would expel the excess saliva.

Yes, this is my a hat from a Major in the Russian Army Band. Do not ask how I got it. 

Zoro to the Rescue

Okay, so I missed a couple of letters of Zotero, it has rescued me from the clutter of digital hoarding. Faster than a sword can slice the zed logo of Zoro, Zotero organizes my numerous sources of information. I have lots of information but can never remember exactly where I read, saw, or heard it.

Unlike Dr. Sheldon Cooper, I do not have an eidetic memory and must therefore rely on external memory devices. But the devices are only as good as the software that organizes the data. On my latest essay for Philosophy, the five citations took close to two hours to organize and insert into the paper. If I had Zotero running, it would have been minutes.

As soon as I arrived at my home computer, I installed the StandAlone, FireFox, and Chrome versions. The "Drug Trials" was researched in Google Scholar with the good results stored in Zotero. Although this was done on my home computer, the data is stored in the cloud so the links will appear on my laptop in class tomorrow (or next week or even next year), and any modifications I make there will beat me back to my home computer.

I may still be a digital hoarder, but at least now I will be able to find what I have because it will no longer be  cluttered into various virtual scraps of paper.

sources: http://www.zotero.org/

Visually Pleasing? Not My Strong Suit!

I am hoping you like the new look of my blog page. I am not artistic and settled for a template until I fully grasp the extent that I can play with the various gadgets to further enhance it.

To me, the road represented education and the fact that it is not clear what the final destination is just further confirmed that my university studies and where it may lead me are also a little out of focus.

So I invite you to join me on my road to wherever it may lead me. All I know at the moment is that it is going that way, but my long term destination could be just about anything and anywhere.

Free Software Useful or Useless

When deciding if "Free Software" is worth the bytes it is stored on, a big factor is the person recommending it. The information about various gadgets and must have software is the "drinking from a fire hose" situation. I do not have enough time to try and understand everything and have created various filters in my life to help with many decisions.

Unfortunately, I have often made the decision to not make a decision at the moment because the deluge of information has flooded my brain and totally confused me. The exponential expansion of free software has me wanting to not download or install anything.

The slogan, "WW _ D?" originally had a J  in that blank but, depending on the situation, many different initials can be inserted to help me come to a conclusion before I become overwhelmed. My mother deals in refurbished antiques so if I am looking for home decor, she is who I listen to. I may need some building done in my yard, but will not make a decision until I talk with Lou. So when the professor talks about great software, I insert a "G" into the slogan for a great filter that will make the bytes on my laptop used to a higher standard.

So it was with confidence that I downloaded and installed C-Cleaner and Malwarebytes, not only on my course laptop, but also on my home computer(s). I have the main one done, but two others will be worked on this weekend because I have to finish my blog first.

I have found them to be user friendly and very intuitive. I am sure that many of my machines in the past were rendered problematic because of the digital clutter that I have difficulty throwing out (much like my house, but that is for another blog). The beauty is that it removes the junk that I am not even aware of without me having to know about it. "I am a digital hoarder!" Having this software sneak the junk out the back door without my knowledge is actually what I need. Like the decision to install software has often been delayed, the decision to get rid of clutter is also postponed until I have the time (which is never).

I do not have any experience with PC Decrapifier and therefore will not make any comments. All I know about it is that when I ask myself "WWGD?", I get the answer that I should uninstall it from every gadget I have. I understand the C-Cleaner will help me with this task.

Journalism Class is Going to be FUN!!

The first class of the new eJournalism course started at 1:00 PM today even though some sources had it as running from 2:00 to 5:00 PM. But I only missed the ramblings of MR. Blaikie and not too much of what DR. Gatin had to share with the students.

This daily posting of a blog entry will be interesting as I am not one to follow a regular routine from one day to the next. I will have to make a point of doing the entry as soon as I get home or many of my in-class inspirations will evaporate.

I am looking forward to learning how to grab important information from the internet an insert it into a web site, hopefully automatically. With the Green Party as a project to focus the course topics towards, this becomes a practical use of my time and not just a theoretical practise with no real world applications.

My fellow classmates are a diverse group with many interests from Disaster Management to International Students to Education Professionals. Although the twelve appeared to be a low number, it may prove to be ideal as we will have an opportunity to share our various disciplines and how eJournalism will be used in their field.

I now have to create a Skype and Twitter account. Luckily, I have a personal help desk to assist me as my brother works at ACC in their IT department. I have been interested in these gadgets but also had a fear of messing up with them. This course will push me out of my comfort zone and further into the twenty-first century.