An interesting point has come up in a lot of the lab sessions, as well as in the feedback survey that we conducted last week.

There are a lot of different ways you could run something that is referred to in print as an “online journalism lab”.

We could teach you all a formulaic set of steps to produce the same identical output for each student.

There have even been two or three isolated requests for this. To those two or three people I can only say “sorry”.

Instead, I’d like to explain clearly what we are doing in the labs, why we are doing it that way, what you should expect from us, and what we are expecting from you, the students.

We have a huge amount to cover, and the amount of material that sensibly fits under the umbrella ‘online journalism’ is growing unbelievably quickly, however conservative your definition of that term. In short, there simply isn’t time to spend an entire lab covering everything that is relevant, and simultaneously end up at the end of the year having actually created work that itself fits under that umbrella.

Our primary goal in the labs is to ‘learn by doing’, and the portfolios you are creating are the spaces in which the body of that work, if it is to be assessed, should happen. In other words we aren’t just doing throw-away exercises, we’re doing work that you keep, and upon which we can build a still more comprehensive skill set that will prepare you for an uncertain future.

As we have seen, the technology by itself, be it <div> tags, twitter, or hex colors is relatively meaningless and underwhelming. The implication of this is that if we are to do things with that that have meaning, and that befit a leading journalism program, we have to make these technologies servant to our own ideas.

In other words, where the lectures on this program, judging by the feedback, are serving very successfully to communicate the theories and precendents of online journalism, we have to start with what we learn in this more theoretical space, as well as with what we learn in our work and training as journalists, and work backwards to figure out how and indeed whether each of the technologies can be useful to us.

In the labs we are explaining the technology, but we always explain it in a context formed of our ideas. You have to bring this context with you when you come to labs.

When you are learning algebra, you are learning nothing but an abstract system – how to solve for x. It leads only to more complex abstract systems like calculus. Numbers are inherently abstract.

Journalism is a different story and always will be, whatever form it takes. While it has an abstract purpose, which can be defined as such (Wikipedia defines it as “the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues, and people while striving for non-bias [sic] viewpoint”), it is intrinsically linked to the outside world, and any technology used in that journalistic mission should be no different.

The entire MA is training you to be a journalist. This corner of it shows you how to take that same journalistic self into a new space, but never for a moment should you feel that because the technology is unfamiliar, you have checked your “journalist” hat at the door.

You bring the context.