[OLPC library] journalism and writing in general

[Seth Woodworth]

Interesting.

Welcome Bob, to the library list.  We are glad to have you.

How do you feel about blogs as reporting?  There have been a few discussions
about setting up a multi-user wordpress installation for the purposes of
journalism, and being able to upload their stories to the web.

I am interested in journalism as well.  I used to run my college newspaper
in fact, so I have a bit of experience on the management side of journalism
and copy-editing *groan*.  I try to help coordinate volunteers for OLPC, so
if you have any questions feel free to drop me a line privately or to just
ask on any of the list-servs.  We tend to be friendly people here. :)

Also, keep in mind that when content is created, we need to a mechanism for
translation as well.  We have many dedicated translators who do this for us
via our Pootle server.

Seth

On Jan 9, 2008 1:05 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 9, 2008 10:21 AM, Bob Stepno <robby at stepno.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I'm new on the list,
>
> Welcome, Robby.
>
> > owner of a G1G1 XO,
>
> Us haz teh bestest toyz, yah.
>
> > interested in contributing
> > as an editor or writer for content related to "doing journalism" --
>
> An interesting topic. Journalistic ethics are much in the news today,
> and the children will have to have their own version of this
> conversation.
>
> * What is news? New information about recent events, certainly, but
> selected because it is important to somebody for some purpose. It is
> essential, therefore, to use multiple news sources for multiple
> purposes. Sometimes the only effective way to report the news is to
> give the historical context, particularly when it is about changing
> people's opinions.
>
> * How should news be reported? Provide the facts, certainly, but how
> about helping the reader to find more information? Give some
> indication of what the news means to stakeholders, but don't presume
> to know what it *really* means.
>
> * What about bias? Every news source has a purpose. That isn't bias,
> by itself, unless it isn't acknowledged. Or unless the purpose is to
> promote a certain view and suppress others. Which it almost always
> unconsciously is.
>
> "It isn't what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know
> that just ain't so."--Confidently attributed to four 19th century
> humorists, and to many others.
>
> * How do we separate fact from opinion? That's easy--badly.
>
> In fact, according to philosophers of science, there isn't any such
> thing as a fact apart from a theory of the universe that gives it
> meaning. Even if it's just the theory that we see things that are
> really there, and we aren't dreaming all of this, or hallucinating
> some of it. What we accept as fact depends on our scientific
> knowledge, and also on our cultural bias, our notions of economics,
> and a multitude of other factors. Was Martin Luther King a Communist?
> That followed from certain widespread theories of the time. Is the XO
> a toy? Some theories of education would say so. Our theory says that
> those theories have been discredited, but people haven't given them up
> yet.
>
> What do you think, Sirs?
>
> > both writing and fact-gathering, as well as using whatever
> > text-editing, media recording and content management tools are
> > developed for the XO environment.
> >
> > I've started out by looking at the journalism-related activities
> > mentioned in the wiki, and reading about related topics at
> > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Journalism
> >
> > I added some comments to the journalism tutorial/notes olpc has
> > inherited from an earlier MIT Media Lab project...
> >
> > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Journalism
> > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Learning_activities/Journalism
> >
> > To get used to the wiki itself, I've added some notes about my
> > background and XO experience here:
> > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Robby
> >
> > Please pass along suggestions -- and any related links I've missed --
> > so I can take a look before I get completely submerged in the January
> > semester at my own university.
>
> If at some point you would like to coordinate a new Free journalism
> textbook project, make a page for it and put a link on the OLPC
> Publications page on the Wiki. Note that I said coordinate, not write.
> This is a collaborative education venture. We will need to hear about
> the problems of journalism on the ground in the target countries.
>
> > Bob Stepno
> > http://stepno.com
>
> --
> Edward Cherlin
> Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
> http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay
> _______________________________________________
> Library mailing list
> Library at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/attachments/20080109/ce578164/attachment.htm