KMD Digital Journalism 2010

Hi,
I'm Nadhir, a Tunisian IT Engineer, 11 years of exp. between Web development, system administration, management IT projects and online marketing.
I held senior positions in multinationals recently as CIO of the first and only English-speaking University in Tunisia (South Mediterranean University, partner of the University of Maryland, USA).
Since 2007, I started to work as a freelance ICT consultant.
Passionate about education and training, I founded in November 2009: www.e-taalim.com , the first e-Magazine on e-Learning and Blended Learning for executives, professionals and students in Africa and the Arab World.

I was very happy when I knew about this course and the P2PU initiative and I posted an article about this project on my blog.
The fact that this course is online and free is highly important for me. As a start up leader, I do not have time and resources to take other type of courses.
I'm very keen to be part of this course as this experience will enable me to be part of an international team and share with them my experience.
As a self learner, I'm sure that this will be an imoprtant step in my professional development.

As you see, I'm new to the media field and very curious to learn about it ...

I'm 36, married and father of a charming boy, Taha, 3.

c

Hi I'm Gary

I'm 24, unemployed, and live at home with my folks in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I have a BA from the University of Johannesburg (majors in law and psychology) and a general business degree from TUKS. I worked in a book store for 3 years, full-time and part-time.

My experience in communications is pretty limited. At business school we worked with e-mail in our syndicates but it was pretty nightmarish. I've never participated in a wiki or message board, I've never been on Twitter, heck I'm not even on Facebook anymore.

Even though the way we used e-mail was ineffectual I discovered that contributing to a team was far more rewarding than any of my solo studies. That my work was judged by my peers rather than a faceless examiner was a great motivator (for me anyway).

My main reasons for taking this course are to learn how to collaborate more effectively and to meet interesting people.

My passions are writing, walking, singing, dancing and watching film

Hi everyone

My name is Conrado and I'm from Guadalajara Mexico I have a BA in Media Arts and two minors degree, one in Journalism and the other in Latin American studies , I been working in different areas such television, publicity and political campaigns. I'm kind of activist of digital liberties since I been part of the Mexican Pirate Party.

I hope this course help me to increase my notions of how it must be the journalism in digital age and how are the perceptions of this around the world.

Twitter: @Conco02
IRC: Conco02

Hi, I'm Mike Caulfield, from Keene NH, USA, and a bit of a late add.

I have two interests in this course. The first is that I'm currently an Instructional Designer for a state college, and I am curious to see how this model works. I've been a proponent of open education for many years, but admit there are still questions as to how it might work in practice. I'm hoping my experience here might help answer that.

The second interest I have is that in my political life I was one of the early political bloggers doing research on particular state-level issues and reporting that out. I was actually one of the first bloggers to get credentialed for covering party events (and that first event I recieved credentials to was Obama kicking off his campaign in 2006 in New Hampshire). I developed during the course of that a fairly cynical view of traditional political reporting -- but admit there's an awful lot of issues with current citizen journalism as well. I'm excited to get an informed set of views from the guides and my peers here -- hopefully make me less cynical and more effective...excited to be here!

Hi all,

my name is John Weitzmann and I'm a lawyer, mainly based in Berlin, Germany. My professional focus is intellectual property law, but - contrary to what many others in the field do - on the open access side of things. One of my homebases for this is the german CC jurisdiction project of which I've been the legal lead for some years now, but I also do freelance consulting around OA.

In this course I want to learn some basics and techniques of online journalism, also because I joined the editorial board of iRights.info lately and have done traditional radio with federal broadcasters in Germany. I guess, to actually learn something about this field of journalism is better than trial and error.

My only other experience with online courses dates back to 1999, when the first "online seminar" was offered at my uni. It was a big thing at the time, being the first course of its kind in a german law faculty, and was also a big test run for online collaboration. Our course here, however, is the real thing compared to the old days, when participants were actually all living in the same city. So, let's see how P2PU works out ...

Hey guys,

I'm Rick, a Canadian currently living in Tokyo. I do a lot of freelance writing for a number of publications, primarily focusing on technology in Japan and China. I really enjoy conversations about the future of news, and I guess that's why I'm here.

I studied English in university, but recently I'm playing around a lot with Drupal and dipping my toes in basic programming in order to better understand how to effectively present information on the web.

Hi all

My name is Richard Smart, a freelance journalist based in Tokyo. I originally specialized in the nightlife scene here, but am finding more and more now that I am getting drawn to stories on political issues Japan faces and stories about Japanese society as a whole, whether they involve current trends, legal problems, crime politics... whatever.

My reasons for taking an interest in this course is that as a nation, Japan is heading more and more online. There are now online English Web sites (I always write in English - that's difficult enought without trying to write in other languages!) such as CNNGo, Time Out, WSJ and a number of Japan Times blogs operating out of Tokyo. It seems that the trend toward online journalism in Japan is gaining momentum.

On top of this, I have noticed that when I tweet or add to Facebook links to work I have done it often gets a response from people that may otherwise not have read those particular stories. This seems to point to trends in the industry that journalists will have to keep up with to stay ahead.

My use of Twitter and Facebook over the last two years seems to be the tip of a very deep iceberg.

I studied Humanities at university, specializing in the history of Western philosophy, origins of racism and contemporary relevance (a decade ago) of nineteenth century economics. In my spare time now, I am an avid reader, husband and a part-time DJ.

I look forward to working with you all in the coming weeks.

Twitter: @tokyorich
Facebook: Richard Smart

Hello guys and girls,
I'm Lena, 23, student, born in Slovenia and currently living and studying in Belgium. My background is in Social Informatics, which is learning about information technologies and social change. Right now, I'm doing a master of Science and technology studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and trying to find out as much as I can on online learning and social networking technologies.
The course is great fun already and the teacher is really cool. It's amazing how real life and virtual life connect in this course. Needless to say, I'm really excited about the following lectures and experiences!
Twitter: @lesnuitsdelena
IRC nick: Lena

Hi,

I am Calista Burbank, I am 28 with one little girl and a little boy on the way. I have a bachelors in Communicative Disorders and alot of training and experience in business. I currently work full time in Accounts Payable for a apartment management company.

I recently returned from a social media marketing training by Robert G Allen and Sabrina Gibson and am excited to take this course in pursuit of bigger dreams.

Calista

Hello Everyone,

My name is Hala Eldemellawy, I am half Egyptian half Bahraini and I was born in Seattle, Washington.

My background is in Mass Communication (Major: Integrated Marketing Communications, Minor: Multimedia) & I am now studying towards a Master’s degree in Media Design at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.

I am interested in the possibilities of reporting and storytelling online and I hope through this class I would be able to master some of tools available for citizen journalism.

It's a pleasure getting to know all of you.

Hala

P2PU: Hala
Facebook: Hala Eldemellawy

Hi everyone!

I know I am about four days too late - it's already June 8th and the course started June 4th. And I'm not very good with introductions.

So, I'm just gonna do my best here.

I'm 18, from the Philippines and this will be my first course here at P2PU. I've been here quite a while but the first round wasn't good for me - to mean, I wasn't able to enroll. It was a matter of timing - bad timing that is. And I was very interested in joining the first round.

Anyway, I was a university student until the semester before the last one, but due to financial issues, I had to stop. So, now I have to do self-study.

I'm mostly a computer person - learning how to program and design and develop web pages and stuff like that. But mostly, I try to learn how to code because of games design.

I've been interested in journalism since I realized that journalism can do a lot - it can even change the world.

I've never had a formal course on journalism and I am very excited to learn a lot here from all of you guys.

Thanks,
MJ

You can find me here:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/skye.advincula/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/iamMJae/

Hi, I'm Laurian Gridinoc and I'm a "quick learning generalist." I'm originally from Romania, I'm a medical doctor turned to interactive media (mostly web design and dev); then I did a master in computational linguistics (natural language processing) and moved to Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University, UK) to do research on semantic web (mostly towards semantic browsing). I'm also the current tutor in the P2PU Cyberpunk course.

I see the online journalism as being the one of the only forms of delivering ideas, making arguments, etc. as opposed to the other online content which is driven by questionable marketing departments. (I'm not clear here, I know.)

I'm interested not only in proper engaging content, but in how to create a context for a specific piece of content, from proper interlinks to actually relevant sources (that support arguments) rather than links by topic and more. My research at KMi was about semantic links and semantic navigation, I would like to explore what does it mean to have a "meta" narrative that spreads over a set of articles.

I doubt that the current "paper" journalism crisis will be solved by the iPad; things have to change, more than a change of delivery medium. I'm interested in how to create engagement with readers and how to collaboratively work with your readers, along the ideas (and more) from informationarchitects.jp

[removed links as "submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted"]

Hi everyone,

My name is Mohamed Nanabhay and I'm going to help teach this course. I'm the Head of Online and website Editor-in-Chief at Al Jazeera English based in Doha, Qatar.

I hold a BSc in Computer Science and History from the University of Witwatersrand and do graduate work the the University of Cambridge. I am also a member of the Board of Advisors of the Qatar University Mass Communication programme.

I'm really looking forward to working with and learning from all of you. Seems like a great cohort!

We've decided to use the forums here as the central place for posting information instead of a group blog like last year. We're having some workflow issues causing delays in getting some blog accounts open as well. Please post the answers to the following questions here in addition to your introductions or post on your personal or class blog and post a link to it here.

# Written a blog post about your personal motivation to join the course.
# Written a blog post as a group about your project, and a self-introduction
post on the group blog.