Monday, February 14, 2011

The mice will play.

I'm teaching again.

I taught last semester but you probably didn't know that. It was pre-blog.

Technically I'm co-teaching with a friend, Brian Duggan. Brian is the business reporter at the Nevada Appeal and a former classmate. We teach online journalism, J453 for the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno—Monday and Wednesday mornings—and so far, I love the class. I can't begin to explain how nice it is to have a partner. I wish more classes were structured this way.

It's a 400-level production class. We ask each student to maintain a weekly blog as well produce a variety of stories for the Web. They live blog, they tweet, they build slideshows; in a few weeks they'll start their audio and video projects.

This week, Brian—demonstrating a complete lapse in judgement—took a vacation. He entrusted me with the educational well being of our pupils for two, count 'em two, class periods. Enough time to inspire a revolution at best, and at the very least a mutiny.

You know, when the cat's away...

Never has so little power corrupted someone so quickly. Today, after forcing the students to help me fold laundry—I'm kidding. We talked about photojournalism. It's kind of my thing.

I tried (successfully, I hope) to condense an entire semester of J313—the class I taught in the fall—into an hour and 15 minutes. It was a bit of a crash course but I hit the basics.

  • Tell the truth.
  • Decisive moment.
  • Watch the background.

We went over terms, and using file info; and I shared some of my work. Here's the PowerPoint from the lecture:

Photojournalism for J453 - A Crash Course


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