I wrote this post for my students over at our class community on Ning, then realised I really wanted to share it here too. 
I think I’ve mentioned CoPress before, but I’ve just been reading a few of their latest posts, and they just have so much useful info I wanted to mention them again.
CoPress is “a non-profit organization dedicated to providing college news outlets with the technical resources and support network they need to innovate online.” Among other things, they’ll host your student publication for you! And yes, before you ask, they’re happy to work with Australian unis, I already asked them.
The CoPress blog is awesome, packed with useful info and links. Here are two recent posts I thought you’d find helpful:
A awesome walkthrough of a multimedia “deep journalism” website put together by the Amherst Wire. You’ll see they even show you the flowcharts they drew to help them design their site.
A recent “link sharing” post they made looked at the recent big changes in newspaper publishing including the closure of the Seattle PI but it also has some really handy links about how student publications are using WordPress (and some recommendations of good plugins).
If you browse recent posts on the blog you’ll see they constantly mention new web tools (or how to get the most out of existing ones) – this post made me want to check out BlogTalkRadio – a way to record podcasts and then let listeners ‘call in’ with questions.
Hopefully at least some of those links will be helpful to you.
Webstock 2009: Peace, love and a eulogy for Web 2.0
February 23, 2009
It opened with a call for website creators to help save the world, and closed with a call for Web 2.0 to grow up already… In the course of just two days, speakers at New Zealand’s Webstock conference evoked the perils of ecological disaster, suggested that computer games might be able save the world and performed a eulogy for Web 2.0. A heady, visionary blend of themes, attitudes and exhortations – this was Webstock 2009.
NEWS09 Presentation: How to get your student publication online
February 7, 2009
Welcome to students visiting from today’s NEWS09 conference. Please feel free to ask a question or leave a comment. Keep me posted if you decide to try out any of the ideas or tools that were mentioned today – I would love to hear how you get on.
As promised, here’s a copy of the presentation I gave today on How to get your student publication online.
I’m teaching digital media at the University of Melbourne
January 6, 2009
I’m happy to let you know that I’m going to be teaching at the University of Melbourne this year in the School of Culture and Communications. In Semester 1 I’ll be teaching Advanced Editing for Digital Media, which is basically the web publishing component of the Uni’s postgraduate publishing degree.
This is exciting for me because I’ve been wanting to teach for a while, and it means I get to try to help solve a problem which I became acutely aware of when we interviewing journalism graduates for an online role at Crikey, which was that unis seem to be producing graduates who treat the net like just another publishing platform instead of getting involved with building and interacting with online content and communities. And of course, uni courses tend to lag far a year or two behind what’s actually happening out there in the world – I’ll be trying to overcome this the best I can.
I’ve never taught a formally structured course before – and I’ll be looking around for ideas and inspiration for how to not suck as a teacher. I’ll be drawing lots of inspiriation from Dr Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography videos and blog – but any tips, links or suggested reading would be gratefully received.