Teaching data journalism (Abraji 2021)
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The document provides guidance for a data journalism teaching session with three key points: 1. Understand your audience - know their interests and problems in order to provide relevant examples. 2. Solve their problems - identify how data journalism can help with story ideas, leads, reporting, publishing and investigations. 3. Provide techniques - teach computational thinking, trial and error approach, managing expectations, and focusing on relevant skills. The goal is giving students support for solving future problems rather than just tools.
Teaching data journalism (Abraji 2021)
- 1. @PaulBradshaw, Abraji Congress 2021 MA Data Journalism, Birmingham City University / BBC Shared Data Unit Teaching Data
- 2. 3 things in 10 minutes: 1. Audience 2. Problems 3. Structures
- 3. #1 Know your audience: ● Are these students interested specifically in data? ● Do they even know what data journalism is? Really? ● What examples fit into their world? ● What problems do they face that data journalism can help them solve?
- 7. #2 Solve their problems: ● Coming up with story ideas: FOI ● Finding story leads on news days: data releases/research ● Specialist reporting: FOI, statistics ● Disruptive publishing: visualisation, interactivity, open data ● Investigations: FOI, scrollytelling
- 13. #3 Give them techniques: ● Computational thinking: break down problems (algorithms), pattern recognition, abstraction ● Trial and error (science), not learning by rote (humanities) ● Tempering expectations (no one can do everything) ● Directing focus (which skill is most relevant to their ambitions, or to the story)
- 14. Read more here
- 16. “An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes. “A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.” Adrian Holovaty A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change (2016)
- 22. tl;dr ● Write for your audience — not yourself ● Solve problems first — don’t create new ones ● Give them support structures to handle future problems — not just tools and skills
- 23. @paulbradshaw