I have been off line for a bit reprogramming the site and - at the same time - wading through a pile of marking so massive that it is giving me a mental hernia trying to get through it all with my characteristic thoroughness and incorruptible, externally supervised fair-mindedness.
This is a new version of the message board which will be much easier to use. It will also allow students as well as staff to register so they can leave messages, or comment on messages. I have to decide on a policy for student users. I think it will be easier just to give access to lecturers and admin people, since y'all can set up your own blogs in order to comment about things.
All the first years from September will blog from day one as part of a new, improved 'induction' to the course which will actually involve meeting journalism lecturers and doing some warm up journalism activity, and not just sitting in a room with a random representative of the university, attending a comedy lecture with an unfunny annoying bloke from New Zealand and then getting drunk for a fortnight. Well that's the plan anyway.
First years (soon to be second years) have all got blogs, at the least ones who are presumably staying have got blogs. The people with no blogs I have no idea who those people are of course. But the bloggers I know very well because hiw I (anyway) work is to have a look at the blogs whenever I get a minute, then when I see you in person (assuming you have supplied a photo) I kind of know who you are. This is much better I think and enables me as your humble servant to cater for your needs much better. The only reasons I can see why a small number of people resolutely refuse to blog is that they are:
(1) dead
(2) have left
(3) can not write
(4) belong to minor religious cult such as the Menanites (if that's how you spell that) who are opposed on principle to the use of modern technology
(5) Are hiding but, like ostriches, do not realise that I can see them clearly even though they can not see me
If you are a lecturer I will already have sent you an invite asking you to subscribe to 'blogger' that will mean you can easily add messages. The control panel is easier to use than the Joomla controls we were using in the academic session now ending.
Mind you lecturers are a but shy in the blogging stakes. Maybe that will change, though they may also figure under excuse heading (4). If so I do apologise for any offended sensibilities.
Students and staff alike can also sign on as followers of this messageboard which is, if effectm a modified blogger blog which has been embdeded in the coursesite using a bit of simple HTML code, meaning they get automatic email alerts when the coursesite is updated.
The old message board is here... in case anyone needs to trace back the old messages. (http://www.virtualnewsroom.co.uk/joomla2/index.php).
[lecturers and administrators can log in to the old site by following this link. = http://www.virtualnewsroom.co.uk/joomla2/administrator]
All of this is part of a massive update and clarification of the coursesite. All the teaching plans for next year will be published here, along with associated teaching materials (such as 'media law web' and the 'WINOL' job descriptions.
For BA journalism you need to navigate to BA Journalism and then to "course details". You can get a good idea of what we will be studying and when, but we are still waiting for some details of the timetable.
The top page of the site at the moment is designated "MA journalism" because at the moment this is the course we are featuring and which we need to be most visible on the web at the moment. We are starting to recruit students to that from all around the world and all around the country.
We stopped recruiting for the BA Journalism just after easter. We gave all applicants very tough tests and a thorough interview and sadly had to reject a great many. In the end we made only 52 offers from hundreds of applicants. 26 of those have accepted us. That's amazing, because they will have four or five other choices on their UCAS forms and the people we were making offers to generally had around 350 or more A-level points - so they had a lot of choices.
Winchester is still pretty unknown as a university, but that should improve because of the work that is going into the sub-domain (a lot).
Basically we had a good year this year by moving a lot of the broadcast journalism into the form of live newsdays (second years) and newsdays with more emphasis on true content embedded within the WINOL website, very much in the style of BBC news online.
At the same time we developed online magazines using pictures and flash and video - very much the continuation of some of the things y'all have been looking at with Karin Stowe. I think The Vault magazine is very good and has a decent chance of winning the Guardian Student Media award. templates for The Shed and New Winchester Review were also created. I am going to start adding some of the third year dissertation and project work for that over the summer - so that will be a really excellent thing, I think - a really good showcase for the university and for students one and all (this is a team game) and genuinely innovative.
In the same way as the studio and newsroom and WINOL works, then students and lecturers together will create this sub domain so it will quickly become very good, trusted (like a sort of reliable version of Wikipedia as we add all our essays and so on) and will make the university better known and spread its deserved and growing reputation far and wide. As I plunge back into the marking pile with a naturally heavy heart and I can say that I have had a fantastic year with you lot and we are going to really put our foot on the gas next year and its going to be even better.
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