Knight-Mozilla learning lab

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Week three (July 25 to 29): blog assignment

Thanks for all the work on your blog assignments thus far. Some of the most interesting posts featured videos, sketches and mock-ups -- check out some of them highlighted here in the first of our weekly blog round up posts.

This week, we've included a specific question to answer in your blog response:

Keeping in mind the objectives and challenges identified in this week’s presentations by Shazna Nessa and Mohamed Nanabhay, how does your project take into account the need to facilitate collaboration in the newsroom (whether real or virtual), while acknowledging that team members will have varying technological skill sets?

Deadline:

Monday, August 1 (no later than 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. BST)

Task:

A 300 to 500 word blog post.

Please stick to the word limit -- use visuals in place of words if you're having trouble with this limit.

For more detailed guidelines on the 'Weekly blog assignment' visit:

http://p2pu.org/en/groups/knight-mozilla-learning-lab/content/weekly-blog-assignment/

With this blog we’re looking for you to engage with the weekly lectures – in part, this is to demonstrate your understanding of the lectures and to describe how the lessons apply to your final project idea.

How to submit:

Post a link to your blog post below as a comment.

Task Discussion


  • Engin Erdogan   July 31, 2011, 10:52 a.m.

    Real-time Collaborative Synthesis: The Next Frontier? 

  • Corbin Smith   July 30, 2011, 10:09 p.m.

    There's a chance I might be late on this one. (Just, for what it's worth.)

    Getting hit by a car today messed up my plans, and tomorrow I'll be photographing a wedding all day.

    .... though I'll likely find a way to get everything done.

    Looking forward to seeing what everyone has been working on!

  • Tathagata Dasgupta   July 30, 2011, 10:23 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Corbin Smith   July 30, 2011, 10:09 p.m.

    "Getting hit by a car ... ", Now, how did you manage to do that? ... Hope it wasn't severe to put you in a news story! That'd be ironic ...

     

  • Corbin Smith   July 30, 2011, 10:51 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Tathagata Dasgupta   July 30, 2011, 10:23 p.m.

    Unfortunately cyclists getting hit by cars are so common in Toronto, it is a non-event unless there is a fatality.

    My bike needs to head to the shop early next week, and I am a little worse for wear, but I'll be fine. :)

  • Tathagata Dasgupta   July 31, 2011, 12:07 a.m.
    In Reply To:   Corbin Smith   July 30, 2011, 10:51 p.m.

    Sounds like we can weave a story out of this ...

    What we need is a  map with a slider on the time axis showing bicyclists getting hit by cars over Toronto (if the cops are keeping a record of the data (and making it available online)). Additonally we ask bike accident victims, active onlookers and common citizens to submit  geotagged reports in the form of images of roads/potholes, any abbreation of the width of the bike lanes and if the traffic signals have gone out of service etc ..)! Some more analysis of the data should bring out what exactly is the problem.

    For additional lulz, we can feed this to google prediction api (or any machine learning toolkit) and based on its prediction send out email/text notification to citizens/bikers to avoid pockets of accident prone areas in Toronto. Of course you'll be sent additional infomercials on bike injury related insurance policies, better bikes and biking gears tailored towards safety, and resturants, who specialize at spraying chilled protein shake jets into the open mouth of bikers in motion.

    It might not be a news for a single victim, but if it crosses the tipping point - there a news and a monetization scheme hiding somewhere.

    (Tolling is so fun)

  • Chris Keller   July 31, 2011, 12:40 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Corbin Smith   July 30, 2011, 10:09 p.m.

    Dude, glad you are OK... 

  • Juan Gonzalez   July 31, 2011, 6:18 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Tathagata Dasgupta   July 31, 2011, 12:07 a.m.

    It's been a while since I rode my bike in T.O. (after one such incident), but this idea got me excited!  How about we find the data (one of my Twitter followers is an influential person in the organized biking community), setup a fusion table and use heatmaps to show the areas with more incidents.   How come this has not been done before!!

  • Chris Keller   July 31, 2011, 6:50 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Juan Gonzalez   July 31, 2011, 6:18 p.m.

    Bay Area Citizen Bike Accident Tracker - http://www.baycitizen.org/data/bike-accidents/

    Similar project in Chicago - http://www.stevevance.net/crashportal/?page=bikecrash

  • Tathagata Dasgupta   July 31, 2011, 8:46 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Chris Keller   July 31, 2011, 6:50 p.m.

    <whining>

    Labshepherds, Labshepherds ... Chirs is distracting us with links to sexy  data ...

    </whining>

  • Corbin Smith   Aug. 1, 2011, 2:18 a.m.
    In Reply To:   Chris Keller   July 31, 2011, 6:50 p.m.

    I'm really pleased thay my injury has led to such an awesome discussion. Im curious about how we would determine causality. Mapping data is great, but I wonder if we'd end up with a pretty visualization with no real benefit....

  • Marian Liu   July 30, 2011, 8:51 p.m.

    Here's my entry for this week's assignment - the key to collaboration is communication.

    I took what I learned from team building in business school and applied it to the journalism-online world. Take a read and tell me what you think!

  • manuel pinto   July 30, 2011, 7:09 p.m.

    Good evening, this is my blog post! 

    Don´t sell a thing! Sell a vision!

    BONUS: Gisele Bündchen PICTURE. No credit card needed!

  • Laurian Gridinoc   July 30, 2011, 6:23 p.m.

    News Stories & Interaction http://bit.ly/r8Xk2S

  • Laurian Gridinoc   Aug. 1, 2011, 5:52 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Laurian Gridinoc   July 30, 2011, 6:23 p.m.

    Since that post was way too long and the collaboration bit I had in my mind not fully explained. Here is an additional short post on collaboration: Collaboration in PLESPER

  • Trina Chiasson   July 30, 2011, 10:11 a.m.

    This week's post: Collaborative Scrambling for Stories

    BONUS - Read to the end of the post to check out my interactive prototype.

  • Juan Gonzalez   July 29, 2011, 11:58 p.m.

    In "the audience wants to participate" I manage to address the fundamental question for this week: how to foster collaboration in the newsroom?   But I do so by bringing forward the one participant that is often left out of the process:  THE AUDIENCE.  

    Also, Inspired by Oliver and elaborating on the work from my last two posts, I go on to refine a set of design directives that put me about one step away from an actual HTML prototype for my Video Dashboard idea.

  • Chris Keller   July 29, 2011, 8:58 p.m.

    Hard not be a little defensive with this week's post after feeling that I have heard a lot lately about "how difficult it is" to teach journalists anything.

    But I managed to channel it into an optimistic 480-some 500 words, three videos -- including some mockups -- a product implementation plan, and a couple entertaining looks at life in the newsroom.

    Jordan, Ted and myself also had an entertaining "collab convo" after today's lecture that's been storified here and posted to my blog here, so be sure to check that out at either link as well.

    And earlier this week, I reviewed my weekend of brainstorming and sketching.

    And if anyone has any insights, suggestions or criticisms, drop em in the comments on my post. And if any devs want to help, I know I could use some in getting a working walk-through done. Just parsing json and writing it to a viz.

    Have a great weekend everyone.

    Chris K. 

    Oh, and just because...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Aza_OyeEE

    And I'll add this in case anyone is interested or might find it helpful: My tips for leading collaborative teams and making progress

  • Nicholas Doiron   July 29, 2011, 8:37 p.m.

    Just posted and tweeted this week's blog post:

    http://mapadelsur.blogspot.com/2011/07/collaboration-in-news-network.html

    Also, back on Monday I posted a longer explanation of my FollowFrost video interview idea.  I have a screenshot and a (very under-designed) page showing what I'm trying to do: http://mapadelsur.blogspot.com/2011/07/open-season-on-my-open-source-project.html  I'm going to hack on that design this weekend, and add a video interview if possible.

  • John Bell   July 29, 2011, 6:44 p.m.

    Here's my week 3 post:

    http://www.nmdjohn.com/2011/07/29/moznewslab-week-3-in-which-rules-are-broken-and-blatant-theft-occurs/

    Like Regnard a couple posts down from me, I also talked quite a bit about other people's proposals and how they fit with mine.  Lots of potential connections going on here.  I mostly addressed the specific question for the week by saying that it's not entirely relevant to my app, though I do think that journalistic input would be useful.

  • Laura Hilliger   July 29, 2011, 10:18 a.m.

    I edited and added to my post to address the actual question at hand...

    I have spent a fair amount of time working on the interfacing and figuring out the UX to this thing. 500 words wasn't enough, and I didn't have time yet to make a video - which is something I will probably do this weekend.

    Lab Shephards - Do feel free and push the review of this post until later, because I will likely be giving a video overview of how the idea has grown and changed. What it is now, I need to explain it again - for myself, to see if I can!

    I also talked to a meta programmer (technical architect for the world's largest online tech store) who informed me that my idea and implementation is a bit complicated. Then he said, "But it's freaking rad, so you should dream big. There's plenty of programmers in the world."

    The Final Pitch description here on P2PU says "Sound Lofty? Yes, yes it is!" You're getting more than you bargained for with this group. I give massive KUDOS to everyone's work so far, and am super excited to hear and give feedback.

    Now...if I could just articulate myself!!!

  • Regnard Raquedan   July 29, 2011, 8:48 a.m.

    Here's my third weekly blog post.

    My idea (WiND) has new tweaks pertaining to the journalism challenges and collaboration.

    BTW, I've mentioned some folks in the learning lab whose ideas can potentially mesh with WiND. Please don't hesitate to contact me if any of you are interested. Thanks! :)

  • John Tynan   July 29, 2011, 7:17 a.m.

    How I learned to stop worrying and love the crowd:

    http://opensourcebroadcasting.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love.html

  • Travis Kriplean   July 28, 2011, 11:20 p.m.

    Newsroom implications for discussion summaries

    Not nearly as exciting as the video blogs posted below ;-)

  • Laura Hilliger   July 28, 2011, 5:58 p.m.

    I just realized that I didn't actually address the question in my blog post, so I will have to rewrite and resubmit!

    Deleting link...

  • Nicola Hughes   July 28, 2011, 4:34 p.m.

    Here is my post for Week 3. Here is my video outline:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im4nV610MTI

    And the feedback I got from my pals at GeekUp:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b2bQLzTN0c

    It's all on the blog with links to better content!

    Looking forward to feedback cool

  • Laura Hilliger   July 28, 2011, 5:38 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Nicola Hughes   July 28, 2011, 4:34 p.m.

    After reading your blog and watching your videos, I've decided that I will probably be opening my computer this weekend. Excellent, excellent presentation (I had to watch a couple parts of it twice because there's sooo much to hear and understand!

  • Tathagata Dasgupta   July 29, 2011, 8:27 a.m.
    In Reply To:   Nicola Hughes   July 28, 2011, 4:34 p.m.

    Before dozzing off to sleep yesterday I remember seeing the first video ... and probably reading Khoi Vin's response of NYT redesin ... I generally have pshycadelic dreams on hot and humid nights like this, but this one that I woke today was a kick!

    The number one Bengali newspaper http://www.anandabazar.in/ (don't click the the link - horrible marquee tag will blind eyes) which is best known for its pulp fiction journalism, has managed to come up with a printed paper which kept updating itself as politicians kept changing their statements. I broke into cold sweat trying to keep up with the ever changing words and infographics - every article I just fnished reading became a new one in a matter of minutes (that's pretty much the same speed our politicians change their comments, ideologies and parties). There was just no finishibility as I struggled to keep up with the world ...I woke up in discomfort ... phew it was just a dream. Thankfully the world has not changed.

    I staggred up to my inbox filled with unread mails, the tab on on twitter shows there are thousands of new links to read, hackernews frontpage has changed with more techstories that I MUST read, comment, vote up for karmapoints, need catch up with Scoble & others on G+  etc. etc.

    The tag line of the Bengali daily is "Porte hoy, noile pichiye porte hoy" ... meaning "Read (it) or get left behind"!

  • Saleem Khan   July 27, 2011, 1:47 p.m.

    I've noticed that some of the lab participants have occasionally focused on the third, optional weekly lecture for their weekly blog assignments, or do a round-up.

    For everyone's benefit, should the assignment posts be about:

    • any one of the three weekly lectures
    • one of the two mandatory lectures (Monday or Wednesday)
    • a mix of the two mandatory lectures
    • a mix of the three lectures?

    Thanks for clarifying.

  • Alex Samur   July 27, 2011, 2:16 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Saleem Khan   July 27, 2011, 1:47 p.m.

    Thanks for the question Saleem. In light of the tight word limit, we advised in the assignment that you respond to one of the two mandatory lectures. That said, you may find there are common themes introduced by lecturers and are welcome to comment, respond to a mix if you choose. Just make sure to keep it to 500 words...hope that makes sense! :)

  • Mark Boas   July 27, 2011, 4:26 a.m.

    Just a heads up - I'm getting a server error for our weekly blog round up posts

  • Phillip Smith   July 27, 2011, 10:24 a.m.
    In Reply To:   Mark Boas   July 27, 2011, 4:26 a.m.

    Try this link: http://ps.ht/qP5g0B

    Working for me right now.

  • Alex Samur   July 27, 2011, 2:27 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Mark Boas   July 27, 2011, 4:26 a.m.

    Thanks Mark! I seems to be experiencing some issues with my web hosting...hopefully temporary...

    Alex