Students and Garden Gnomes: messing/mashing up the future of online journalism

© 2008 IADIS. Experimental Media is a master module in the Communication and MultimediaDesign course at the Limburg Catholic University College. In the academic year 2007-2008 the module focused on the future of online journalism and the students were asked to develop experimental concepts and prototypes to deal with journalistic input and output. In this paper we will first briefly sketch the contextual background of changes in online journalism: changes that affect the processes of news gathering and creation, news selection and the publication platform for news. Secondly we will look at the specific content material that was offered to the students to start working with: the garden gnome as an example of folk culture. In a third part the technological platform for the students will be introduced: a developer version of the Flash Media Server combined with smartphone technology and mobile connectivity. On a contextual and content level the students succeeded in the set up of the expected experiments. A detailed discussion of the technology used in the student's projects however, reveals the student's eagerness to work with and combine existing online technologies and applications which contrasted with the presumed student's adoption of the technological framework offered in the context of this Experimental Media module.

ISBN:9789728924553

Jaar van publicatie:2008