2009 Media Super Student Journalist Awards/CAMLA 2009 Essay Prize

Posted on 22/07/2009 by admin

Two competitions for students that we’ve been told about … the 2009 Media Super Student Journalist Awards and the CAMLA 2009 Essay Prize (down at the bottom of this post)

2009 Media Super Student Journalist Awards

Clare Fletcher at the Walkley Foundation has kindly passed this on to us. Students can enter the 2009 Media Super Student Journalist Awards, by August 7. Details about the Awards and how to enter are below. Clare writes:

Students can enter stories they’ve produced for assessment – they need not have been published or broadcast – in categories for print, radio, online and television. It’s a great chance for students to have their work noticed on a national stage, and the winner will get to attend this year’s Walkley Awards – a priceless networking opportunity!

Clare Fletcher, Program Coordinator, Walkley Foundation

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ENTER THE MEDIA SUPER STUDENT JOURNO AWARDS NOW!

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and the Walkley Foundation are offering a unique opportunity for journalism students in the 2009 ‘MEDIA SUPER Student Journalist of the Year’ awards.

The winner will be invited to attend the 2009 Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism, to be held in Sydney in November.

The Award offers all tertiary students studying journalism, communications and media-related degrees the opportunity to showcase their talent, earn attention from the industry and give their CV a significant boost.

Entries are accepted in the categories of print, radio, online and television.

The award is available to students who have not previously worked full-time in the industry, for work that has been created between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009 and can include journalism that has been produced for assessment or work that has been published.

The finalists and the winner will be selected by a panel of three judges, on the basis of journalistic excellence, including newsworthiness, research, writing, production, incisiveness, impact, ethics, originality, innovation and creative flair.

In 2008, students from the University of Technology Sydney eliminated the competition and UTS secured the winning position, the finalists and the highly commended awards. John Connell was crowned The 2008 MEDIA SUPER Student Journalist of the Year for his radio piece, The Desert Talks Too.

Apply online at www.alliance.org.au/students.

For more information on the award, email students@alliance.org.au.

Media Super Student Journalist Award
c/o The Walkley Foundation
245 Chalmers St, Redfern NSW 2016
—

CAMLA 2009 Essay Prize

The Communications and Media Law Association is conducting its annual Essay Competition.

Entries close on Friday 28 August 2009. It would be greatly appreciated if you could bring the essay competition to the attention of interested students.

The contact and submission point for the essay competition is Ros Gonczi, Administrative Secretary of CAMLA, rgonczi@bigpond.net.au

Full details are in the attached letter template and flyer.

Michelle Rowland
for the Co-ordinators, CAMLA 2009 Essay Prize

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What is media literacy today?

Posted on 14/07/2009 by admin

Recently I was discussing, with colleagues, the sometimes vexed question of media literacies. In what sense should people be literate today—in what mode, or in what medium? Does literacy in one mode or medium mean you lose literacy in others. For example, do web literate “youth”—and “youth” is a term I don’t like at all because it implies a bunch of people who are all the same—lose their ability to read, or even worse, to concentrate. Is attention now a literacy? There are, today, a series of media panics about literacies, although this probably tells us more about the world at large than literacy per se.

We decided the central question concerning media literacies was variability, but what does this mean? For me, several things perhaps—

This does not mean fixed differences between established media, but ongoing variability in a very dynamic climate. The models that are a crucial part of literacy dynamics, and often the established businesses— newspapers, television channels, are all collapsing or changing dramatically. At the same time lots of new models, businesses, experience frameworks arise of course, although most of these are destined to fail (!). Everything is in constant variation. As Marx had it, famously, all that is solid melts into air: audiences, reception, production processes, narrative, software, business models, communications processes, advertising models etc. It’s very exciting but also pretty scary. All this this perhaps implies the need for a new “metaliteracy” – an ability to adapt. This is the single biggest thing to my mind. Our happier, more successful students have generally been those who’ve got this and gone with it.

This does not mean, however, that you don’t have to develop current literacies. Quite the opposite.

The first move here is acceptance (resistance is futile but surprisingly many students, not to mention staff, desperately resist many aspects of media literacies) and …

The second move is commitment to higher level literacy skills and knowledges over a range of areas. in short, the more you develop multiple literacies, the more you will be able to adapt as they change. It’s a bit like learning languages. One is work but we do it “naturally”. For those of us not growing up in bilingual homes, learning the second is hard work. However, once you’ve got two or three languages down, it’s much easier to adapt to more. Media literacies and knowledges are like that. You need to know how to make a competent video—in short, today you need visual literacy in production as well as in visual analysis—but you still need to know how to read and write text (and edit it, as well as publish in a range of forms!). You need to be able to put a good tweet together, but also be able to talk to a range of people face to face.

A problem: we think we get this. We are all these days used to “choice”—but this means, “if I don’t like doing this, I’ll just do that, etc”. Choice works in our favour—we get to choose. This is to some extent now changing. “Variability” will sometimes mean this, but it will just as often mean the opposite. That is, as above .. you will have to be good at more things that change, that are moving targets, that are demanding, and concerning which you have no choice. You must be more literate in more ways.

It’s about knowledge as well, across a range of areas.. You need to know about complex media set ups these days, but you also need to know about politics, climate change, urban conditions, social policy, the history of ideas, etc … all of these are also highly variable, subject to context. Most of the people (e.g. people like Jon Stewart) who do well these days are people who understand media variability and also, simply put, are broadly literate. They know lots of “stuff” (yes even non-media “stuff”). They can communicate, and work with this “stuff”, across a wide range of situations. So media literacies means more than knowing what the latest video is on YouTube (although this is definitely part of it). All forms of literacy—essay writing, reading, video production etc—are not just “outcomes” .. they need to be established (stage one) so that you get to the interesting stuff—knowing and working with content, real relationships, business, whatever (stage two).

Beyond this points are all the obvious. The media as we know it are changing very dramatically, as is the nature of media work. Perhaps a fair bit of the industry (to be fair, less often media workers, but more often the structures within which media work takes place) still has its head in the sand, or thinks it can self-spin or re-regulate its way out of the problems. Yet that still leaves those with their heads above the sand doing really interesting stuff.

Media Studies is currently caught betwixt and between all this.

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The Low Down.

Posted on 26/05/2009 by admin

UNSWTV’s The LowDown produced by media students Alex Barnett and Jan Duong with a whole bunch of Media Student talent including Chris Chong, Collette Isaac, Tom Ferguson, and Jeremy Barry.

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The Shape of Things

Posted on 26/05/2009 by admin

A fun piece from NUTS and a lovely video filmed and edited by media student Julia Dray promoting their current show – go see it.

c/o http://m.twitter.com/juliadray

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Our Aims

Posted on 21/04/2009 by admin

The Network Literacies Project allows the UNSW community—students and staff—to develop their network literacies. It’s a flexible project—it has to be. Contemporary networks are very dynamic. Tools, techniques and communities change rapidly. At the moment we are very much in development and  are really only ‘open for exploration’ by and for media staff—but we plan to expand this soon if we are able. Indeed, anyone else interested in developing a good network culture and is more than welcome to start a blog and join us.

The NetLit projects main aims concern the people and communities that use networks. We aim to enhance UNSW communities of learning and research by building a community of people sharing techniques to get the most out of networks. We also aim to connect UNSW communities more effectively to the rest of the world—both in the Sciences and what are increasingly called the Digital Humanities.

This site, New South Blogs, is a multi-user blog installation, using WordPress Multi-User (WP-mu). It is the notional centre of what is actually a distributed and largely decentralized project. Those involved also inhabit other networks and use other technologies (such as Twitter, their own blogs, Flickr or YouTube) with varying degrees of connection.

The NetLit project’s activities are a complement to more ‘centralised’ technical platforms (such as WebCT) used at UNSW. Being open platform, often open source, highly flexible (read constantly changing) and in general just very usefully “open”, the NetLit project deals in different aspects of learning and research to more formal platforms: probably less formal aspects but no less effective for that. We think that NetLit ideas and techniques will work best in blended environments of learning and research—centralised and decentralised, formal and informal.

We are grateful to the UNSW IT Investment Plan process, for an initial scoping and seeding grant for this project, in 2008. The project was conceived and developed by Mat Wall-Smith, with assistance from Andrew Murphie, as part of a long series of explorations of network literacies by the staff of the Media Program in The School of English, Media and Performing Arts.

Mat Wall-Smith and Andrew Murphie

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Flickr with NewSouthBlogs

Posted on 06/03/2009 by admin

You can easily add a slide show form flickr in your posts. When you log into flickr go to a particular tag set and then click on slide show. When the slideshow starts you’ll find a ‘share’ option in the top right-hand corner. Click on this an copy the ‘embed’ code that it provides.

Start a new post in WordPress- Click on the ‘HTML’ option on the right hand corner of your editing window. Then paste in your embed code.

Hit publish and your done. You can see a some cool slides/scraps for some of my audio design students here:

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Here They Come

Posted on 06/03/2009 by admin

There are some terrific introductions and characters coming through into the newsouthblogs aggregation. I thought I’d link through to a couple In order to highlight and answer some interesting points and questions about network literacies and media futures. First of all here is a great introductory post from Jambiental. A much shorter but equally great form Grace Foran. A great post from a Third Year – Raol . Oh – and here is a another one – there are many more but I’ll be here all day if I link to all the great ones. Why are these great introductions?

1) I am getting a good and I think fairly honest post about why these students are interesting. and what they will bring in terms of persepctive and interest. As I said in the lecture I subscribe to people not ‘sites’ – so I’m looking for people that I think are going to write about interesting, considered, engaged topics- but who also have an interesting perspective on things.

Jambiental made it into my personal Google Reader account – he sits next to Lawrence Lessig, William Gibson, Howard Rhiengold, and Jim Groom amazing company. It also helps that I’d already met Jambiental over at twitter- so there was already a social link there – I knew a little bit more about who he was…and that he had an interesting perspective.

2) Online you are what you write, so if you write: ‘I dunno what I’m doing or if this stupid thing works, I hate this stuff…’ Am I really going to want to hang out with you? Work with you? Collaborate with you?

3) Both Jambiental, Grace and Raol, strike a good balance in terms of tone: Kind of Smart Casual – Their writing is clear, well edited, but still conversational. They don’t devolve/evolve(?) into txt spk, use a single emoticons (none would be better), do not use odd formatting and do use headings and paragraphs. Some people are better at this than others- but the only way to get good at writing is to write a lot and reflect on that work.

4) This isn’t facebook. It is a publishing platform. Blog posts should probably develop an idea that they link to, and/or they need to stand on their own (be contextualized) in order to function well as a network node rather than what we might call a ‘stub’. A stub is a addition to the network that isn’t going to sprout further links. A comment on a blog post that says something like “great I completely agree- nice post” is a stub (the above post has a great example of a comment that is a stub and belongs on the page with the original post). A comment does add something to the network but its better added in the comment field of a blog not as a permalinked post. That way it always has that context to help it make sense. A blog post needs to frame and develop what the post or topic it is responding to.

3) Grace, Jambiental or Raol don’t worry so much about what to post, whether he’ll get it right or wrong,they just write about what interests them. You are media students – we expect you to have a passion for media, to write about sites, stories, media forms, films, networks, technology, 18th century literature, post-structuralist theory, anime, graffiti, locative media……whatever…and to start engaging with it a a deep, more considered level. This is also how you become ‘present’ and ‘visible’ to people who share your interests or who are intrigued by your perspective.

Some posts openly wonder whether they are really experienced or qualified enough to start a ‘professional’ blog (see the next note on metadiscourse). The answer is -in short- ‘Yes you are?’ – If you are waiting for someone to officially induct you into the hallowed halls of professionalism then you’ve got the wrong idea. You will be waiting around while many of your future potential colleagues are just writing/making/networking and becoming more and more visible. Get started, get reflective (work out what works and what doesn’t)..that way you will develop a professional and engaged perspective.

Over here we have a student that is already mo-blogging – that is blogging from a mobile device – there are a whole lost of other ways you could remix/mash-up services and modes of engagement and their is nothing more effective in terms of ‘adding value’ than writing a step-by-step instructable that explains how others can use technology/media or just do ‘stuff’ – I hope Brain Drain snaps this opportunity up by developign and contextualizing this post.

4) Jambiental, Grace, or Raol don’t get lost in what I call ‘meta-discourse’. What is ‘metadiscourse’? That is when you start every sentence with something like ‘In this essay I will…..’ this may be a hang-over form our wonderful high-school system – but I still find myself writing ‘In this paper I will explore the…’. So meta-discourse is when we write about writing what we are writing (loopy huh?).

Avoid it in your essays – but also a avoid it on your blogs- particuarly when it is a course exercise. Many student blogs start with ‘A don’t know what we are meant to be writing here?’ The answer is you are just meant to write – I gave a pretty clear list of questions that you might address in your first blog. But see point four if you need more guidance. Think about the fact that you’ll soon be in a course and your lecturers and colleagues want to know a bit about you.

This doesn’t mean you can’t be critical or reflective- Just that you should contextualise that and perhaps aim to initiate a conversation so that rather than stopping the argument or conversation you are extening it – Cazbar has five comments….nice networking. Of course I think she raises some great points and they are all points I want to respond to because she has developed her argument and has a unique perspective. Difference is what makes the network a vital, interesting, and fundamentally interactive and social space…In some sense Cazbar’s post answers itself. There is no way in a pre-networked world I would have read her writing, answered it personally, and be looking forward to engaging with her in the future. The online components in this school don’t replace face to face – in fact they make it easy to link up with a wide variety of people and even perhaps meet for a coffee or another form of beverage – chat, start new projects, have fun, learn from each other.

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Twittering, Bookmarking and Blogging: Moving from Platforms to Cultures

Posted on 05/03/2009 by admin

The Network Literacies program has been quite a revelation- it has been a gradual sign on and I expect that we’ll see a whole lot of additions in the next few days with users signing on and aggregating blogs before the final lecture tomorrow and the start of term proper. Then there will be the shock of many course actually using these systems in class which will add another level of participation.

Already we are seeing the potential of twitter as a back channel for student communication with each other and with staff and also the wonderful immediacy that it brings to the network. This became apparent as various digital media lecturers across institutions started introducing twitter in classes – there seems potential for instant and fluid collaborations and interactions between masses of students enrolled in like disciplines across institutions. We swapped hashtags between Canberra and UNSW, launched a Diigo group that for aggregating work being done in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney which will (when I catch up) feed another blog @ NewSouthBlogs.org. This happened very quickly – without much forethought and I was reminded of the way the mobile phone allowed us to stop planning (I think this came for Shirky) to connect because we were always already connected and connecting. This sounds a giving over to the haphazard and short term – it is in a fruitful kind of way- but the haphazard emergence is also parralelled by more thoughtful channels and potentials for considered and long term collaboration on various digital publishing projects. Assoc Prof @ U Syd Mark Pesce was on the local radio today being interviewed about twitter – he said the value of twitter was as a side or back channel. In some ways I agree, but I think perhaps the very notion of one mode being to the side or the back has now given way to a proliferation of temporalities and an increased ability to traverse and work between the different temporal envelopes or channels that afford differing ‘ways of carrying variation’ – different scales of recursive cultural development. Instant discussion can occur about a linked blog post in twitter. The flurry of tweets can fold inot a more considered engagement as network of permalinked posts. Those posts might lead into a conference panel, into a Journal Issue, into a new book, and all the time and at every step new lines of flight can emerge and develop- at every step there are new posts perma-inter-linked, new tweets and hastags, and the cycle endlessly recurs and bifurcates. When you mutliply out the potential in video, and music or whatever other form that spins your dial the cultural implications are deep, profound and incredibly exciting for emerging media producers.

Its heartening to see new students that despite the intensity of being introduced to such a wide ranging and ditributed approach are excited by the possibilties and fundamentally understand the inherent potential of emerging media and changed information ecology.

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Network Literacy: What Students and Staff Need To Do

Posted on 02/03/2009 by admin

Welcome!

Please jump over to our Support blog where this post is accompanied by step by steps to get you started.

Network Literacies is a new aspect of the media program at UNSW that allows us all to work together with new forms of online publishing.

Let’s begin by saying that the best way to get involved in this is—well—to get involved. If you don’t at first understand things like RSS, use them! This post will get you on your way. You’ll soon get the picture (quite literally).

We’ll be using social networking tools such as blogs and microblogs (e.g. WordPress, Twitter), image and video sharing (e.g. Flickr, YouTube—including UNSWtv), and data feeds (RSS).

  • However, it’s not about the technologies! It’s about bringing people together in new ways to enhance everyone’s education and research (it will also enhance the “research-teaching/learning nexus”).
  • It’s for students and staff—for students and staff to engage with each other, for students to engage more activity with other students, for staff to engage with other staff.
  • It’s also for UNSW to engage with the rest of the world, in both education and research.
  • It’s flexible. Today we’re just beginning to set up a framework to work with. How students and staff will develop this is something we’ll see over the next 12 months.
  • It’s still something of an ongoing experiment. We think it will be great and we hope overall a positive experience. At the same time, as with all contemporary media, it will always be a changing experience. Many things will work—some won’t. We’ll learn from the latter and move on.
  • It will usually, to varying degrees, supplement other aspects of education and research. It’s by no means a replacement for talking face to face, for classrooms, or for sitting in the park reading a book or thinking things through.
  • It’s not Facebook. For lots of reasons (Facebook is too closed, keeps changing it’s rules …)
  • It should make it easier for all of us to work with each other across different media (text, images, video, data—and the relations between all of these).
  • It should make it easier for all of us to work together across different content. We’re starting with media courses, but hoping that the Network Literacies Project will also help you read poetry, explore history, make music, think philosophically, make better social policy … the possibilities really are endless.

Two quick summary points, before we get into it.

First—you’ll be using lots of “technologies”, and there are some tools we’ll be making compulsory for everyone involved. Again, however, it’s not about the technology, it’s about being able to use whatever comes up next to work with networks, and to build your own networks for your own uses. It’s about engaging with what’s happening now, and more effectively (via archives and databases), with what’s happened in the past. It’s also about adaptability and “future proofing”.

Second—relax! Both staff and students are moving into this as a kind of happy experiment. We’ll be learning from each other and in the process developing what we hope will be a happy and helpful network culture that should enrich your experience at UNSW.

Credits: Thanks to the UNSW Learning and Teaching Centre, and to Sean Brawley in the Faculty’s Learning and Teaching administration, for providing funding for various pilot projects. Gay Hawkins, myself (Andrew Murphie), Meg Mumford, Olivia Khoo, Ross Harley, Gillian Fuller, Brigid Costello, Alyssa Rothwell, Ed Scheer, Xavier Fijac, Anna Munster, Adnan Lalali, Peter Cossey and Mat Wall-Smith have all worked on these early projects. Most importantly, Mat Wall-Smith has been the conceptual and technical engine behind this current Network Literacies project. He thought it up, and has led the rest of us to bring it into being. Finally, thanks to all the students over the past few years who have engaged with earlier versions of the project.

OK – So, More Specifically …

The Concept

The internet is big, crazy and fast. It’s not just a series of sites any more. It’s a series of dynamic relationships [Mat Spiel] How do we keep up with it? We use RSS. RSS encourages a different form of publishing – and different relations between people who publish.

Principles

The Network Literacies Project is about your UNSW identity (or perhaps, more broadly, your learning, teaching and researching identity). By this we mean—as opposed to your private identity. Most people now use these, or similar technologies, in their private lives and their more general social lives. That’s great, but that’s not what this is about. So:

  • We think it is probably beneficial for you to keep your private worlds separate from your UNSW identity. This will usually be as simple as using a different username at UNSW.
  • It’s usually going to be a good idea to keep the same username across the tools and sites involved. This is so that, for example, if others find your blog posts interesting, they can easily find you on the Flickr image sharing site and look at the images you’ve been making. Or they know where to look for feeds for all your networks.
  • Things are going to be pretty engaging and often fairly free via the Network Literacies Project. However:
    1. Keep it legal – respect copyright, for example.
    2. Respect others (keep it polite .. no abuse – if things are heating up for you take walk, check out the local park, etc)
    3. Respect yourself

—-

So what is the Net Lit Project? Where do you begin? What do you have to do first? There are a few steps you have to take but these are pretty simple. If you’ve done all this before that’s great. If not, you should find it pretty easy. In either case, however, you need to do the following things now.

The First Things to Do

(Again, choose your username carefully in what follows as we recommend you use the same username for all the different accounts we will want you to set up (see down the page).

(Again, Please note that you should have accounts that you can use for your university work. These will probably be different to your personal accounts if you already use the following. We think that separation is a good idea.)

1. Set up an account with Google Reader (you can use Bloglines or others if you want, but we prefer Google Reader).
2. Set up a blog—we recommend you try WordPress.com or Blogger.
3. Write a blog entry.
4. Categorise and tag your blog entry.
5. Plug your blog into New South Blogs.
6. Subscribe to your own blog in Google Reader.
7. Find other blogs that are part of the UNSW experience.
8. Subscribe to other blogs and feeds in Google Reader.
9. Comment/trackback on another blog.

The Second Lot of Things to Do

Subscribe to, or download the following:

Compulsory

Diigo (social bookmarking—we recommend using the Diigo toolbar in the Firefox browser .. those who already use Delicious, you can upload your Delicious links into Diigo, and you can set Diigo up so that all bookmarks also register in Delicious)
Flickr (photo sharing)
YouTube (video sharing)
Twitter (micro blogging)

Optional

Firefox browser
last.fm (musical taste sharing)zotero (academic reference collection and sharing – this is a Firefox browser extension)

Explore all of these and start thinking about how you might develop and use your web presence in your experience at UNSW.

You might also think about how you can develop productive relations with other students/staff that will serve your learning/teaching/research here.

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Future/Fact Farmers

Posted on 02/03/2009 by admin

Another first feed from a first year student Natalia just entering our new Journalism and Communcations degree program. Its great to see this that some of the students coming into this degree are aware of the way emerging technology changes the whole economy of journalism. I completely agree with Natalia its an exciting time to be entering this field – a chnace to really define yourself as a ‘future farmer’ – and innovator in your field from the very get go. Many of our most sought after graduates have found work with the big newspapers and media companies not fo any Journalism training (because that was not what we did back then) – but because they took an entrepreneurial approach to new and networked media production – they could move between media forms easily and had a natural curiosity and an experimental approach to the potential of new and network media.

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