Praise for Farnham journalism graduates

Recently Googling to check on Farnham Journalism's search engine visibility (as one does), it was nice to come across some thoughtful comment and praise for the journalism work at UCA's graduation show, on Simon Clarke's excellent Freelance Unbound blog.

There is a strong production strand running through the journalism teaching at Farnham. I think this does help make our graduates more attractive to employers. On the print side of things, yes, one has to be careful not to spend too much time on art direction and graphic design issues at the expense of writing and textual editing, but on the other hand, as Simon acknowledges, wrestling with sidebars, pull quotes, captions and standfirsts on a magazine layout does sharpen the sense of what an editor wants from you as a writer. Our students get plenty of practice in writing copy to fit those 'top ten list' or 'that timeline in full' boxes. And consumer magazines these days are full of such things.

New year, new students, new post

I have committed the cardinal sin of blogging - the last post to this Student Journos blog was more than nine months ago, and it had gone decidedly stale.

My defence is that it has been an exceptionally busy few months at UCA in Farnham. Away from this blog, we have been launching three new specialist journalism BA courses - in sports journalism, motoring journalism, and leisure journalism. Our first cohorts arrived two weeks ago, and they are an eager lot. All the first year journos have today started a blog, and links to almost all of them can be found on the blogroll (right). So now that we are all actively blogging again in the Farnham journalism department, it seems an appropriate time to reactivate Student Journos and get some digital interaction going.

Pocketcasting - live!

I haven't had time to post to this blog for a few days, as I've been busy setting up my new HTC Touch Pro mobile phone. (In passing, Vodafone UK weren't very switched on in activating my new account with them and were slow doing the network transfer from O2 - I was offline for about eight hours.) However, the effort in researching software and installing it, and syncing everything with my old HTC device and my PC, has paid off - I am now pocketcasting. Better than that, I am now able to pocketcast live. Actually streaming from the phone.

As I wrote in an earlier post, these new generation mobile phones are game changers. They usher in a post-Facebook, post-rolling news era of constant, 24/7 personal connectivity. With these devices, communication becomes, in a real sense, real time; and so also, from a journalism perspective, does the information and news flow to the individual.

I'll post more on this later but for the moment take a look at Qik. This downloadable software for cam phones and Qik's servers enable live video streaming from your phone. When I bought the HTC, I expected to be able to record video on it and upload quickly to Twitter or Pownce. But I didn't expect to be webcasting from the phone, live. But, with Qik, you can.

Oh, too slow

My venture into the new and exciting world of pocketcasting has been frustrated by the killjoys over at mobile network O2.

Does it really take three days for the high speed mainframes over there to cough up a PAC code? Apparently so.

Until I get it, my shiny new Web 2.0-enabled HTC Touch Pro remains unconnected and somewhat impotent, although its built-in FM radio is neat.

I've been an O2 customer for quite a few years but they can't supply the Touch Pro yet. The excellent and knowledgable Paata at Vodafone's store in Portsmouth had them in stock so he won the business. But at this rate the network switch from O2 to Voda looks like it will take a week.

Voice of the students

Some of our TV Journalism students put together a quick vox pop video, featuring other UCA students - from Journalism and from other courses - expressing their views of what I suppose we could call the 'Farnham experience'. I've uploaded a compressed, web-optimized version (in MPEG4) and you can view it below. Running time is 3 minutes.

We're always encouraging our Broadcast Journalism students to work quickly so quite rightly they kept this one simple. It was shot on Monday afternoon, edited on Tuesday afternoon, and was being shown at our Open Day on Wednesday morning. Nice work - especially the editing, by Sam and Mike.

There's a 'hello, mum' moment near the end - there's always one, isn't there? - but at least it usually raises a laugh at the showings.

Some reminders for Year 1 Intro to Online Journalism students

Hi, Year 1s. A couple of reminders.

First, get into the spirit of debate in the blogosphere by leaving a comment on this blog and/or on one or more of your classmates' blogs. Just visit the blog and click on the 'comments' link at the foot of the posting on which you want to comment.

Second, we have talked a bit about how search engines work. Use the 'Gadgets' feature on Blogger to add a list of your favourite links to your blog page. It'll look like the Links section on my pages - that's the bit under my BlogRoll. Add a link to this blog and the class blogs that you like and/or which are relevant to your own blog (eg if you have a sports blog, you could link to the other sports blogs). Linking to one another's blogs like this will improve the visibility of the class blogs on Google.

When we set up our blogs, most or all of us selected the option to moderate comments before they go live online. So log in regularly to see if any comments have been submitted. Open up the comments and read them. If they are not libellous, obscene etc then click on the 'Publish' link to make them go live.

Web 2.0 in your pocket

I'm excited at the moment by the mobile web - all the interactivity, GPS-enabled connectivity and YouTubed video splendour of 'Web 2.0', in your jeans back pocket.

The latest generation of mobile smart phones - the iPhone 3G (over six million units shipped worldwide since its May launch); and the just launched (in the UK) Google phone, Sony Xperian X1 and HTC Touch Pro are game changers. Flash- and YouTube-enabled browsers with fast scrolling and zooming, powerful processors and decent resolution screens (VGA or WVGA on the X1, Google and HTC) offer a meaningful multimedia web experience 24/7.

These phones are perfect companions for the modern, Twitter- and Pownce-enabled real-time roving reporter and commentator. You can even shoot a video with one of these devices and upload it to your Pownce page - instant webcasting in real time.

With all of this in mind, I've taken the plunge. At the weekend I signed up for an HTC Touch Pro. Once my number has ported across, I'll post some updates on my adventures in pocketcasting.

'Management can't control what goes on in your head'

I wonder whether the political discourse might have undergone a change in direction this past week.

The debate around Baby P and the operations of social work departments has thrown up some surprising pleas for professionals to be allowed the room to exercise professional judgement. Surprising, because the more usual response to failures or perceived failures in public services has been to call for even greater oversight and control of the teachers or doctors or social workers or whoever in the front line.

There was a fascinating discussion on last Wednesday's Today programme on BBC Radio 4 (for a limited time it can be heard here, with the permanent Today pages here) in which London School of Economics social policy academic Eileen Monroe declared, refreshingly, that 'management can't control what goes on in your head, which is where the real work gets done, so what they focus on is what they can see, and that comes down to filling in forms and holding meetings'.

Monroe remarks that in the case of Baby P, 'Haringey has a beautiful paper trail of how they failed to protect this baby' - a satisfyingly concise indictment of the now almost universal dependence of politicians and managers on spreadsheets for their view of reality.

'It's the quality of thinking we have to improve - not the quality of data entry' says Monroe. If this maxim were now to guide policy and practice in the public sector then the quality of services, morale of the staff and efficiency of delivery would be revolutionized overnight.

Welcome to Student Journos

Hi. Welcome to the Student Journos blog. This blog is intended primarily for the undergraduate journalism students of UCA in Farnham, Surrey, but I've made it a public blog and all are welcome. Some of the comments and material may be of interest to journalism students, or would-be journalism students, anywhere.

Journalism at Farnham takes a multimedia approach and many of our students experiment with blogs and websites. Some of our students' own blog pages will link to this one. At UCA, students actively blog from only a couple weeks into their course, and as our BA (Hons) students are here for three years, the student blog pages will vary wildly from the basic first attempt, through the experimental, to more full-fledged topic-based blogs. Some who visit this blog may be thinking of coming to study at UCA, so maybe on these pages we can give you a little insight into what we and our students do.

Those interested in finding out more about the BA (Hons) Journalism at Farnham can visit our UCA course page.