Changing the j-school curriculum
Kim Pearson, a guest contributor on E-Media Tidbits at Poynter, writes the following about the need for more computational thinking in journalism:
There’s no longer an argument about whether journalists need to be digitally literate. Today, newsgathering requires the ability to write programs that scrape public records databases and design interfaces that make the information in those databases interesting, relevant and accessible. It requires the programming and design skills to create interactive presentations that model complex public policy issues or explain social processes. It requires the mastery of social media technologies used to organize online communities around shared interests, issues and concerns. It requires the ethical grounding needed to ensure that the content generated by these advanced tools is accurate, fair, comprehensive and proportional.
However, the digital transformation of newsgathering and delivery requires that journalists become creators, not just consumers of computing technologies. I’m not saying that journalists need to become programmers. I’m saying that we need to be able to reason abstractly about what we do, understand the full palette of computational tools at our disposal, and collaborate to deploy those tools with maximum efficiency and effectiveness. That means understanding the underlying structures and processes of media creation.
And more:
Infusing computational thinking into journalism alters the epistemology of the field as fundamentally as the advent of objective reporting did 100 years ago. Formal journalism education emerged as part of the effort to codify and institutionalize the best practices of that day, and to serve a news industry oriented to an assembly-line based manufacturing culture. A new journalism is emerging, grounded in computational thinking, that mimics the values and processes of knowledge production in the information age — what some experts call remix culture. (See Lawrence Lessig, Eduardo Navas, and Henry Jenkins for more on that concept.)
If you accept this image as the future — or part of the future — of journalism, then efforts to design a curriculum to prepare students for that future would require a different set of skills than we teach presently. If we consider the amount of time students have to prepare as finite, then we can’t just add this kind of thinking and work to the existing curriculum. We have to fundamentally alter the approach, content and shape of journalism courses. What we chose to do in j-schools must respond to our imagination of the future, which in turn will alter what comes next. If we care about what comes next, we will do everything in our power now to imagine, analyze, design and respond to it.