Educasting from Ireland

1000 Bucks for Travel Thoughts

World66 will pay you to travel. All you have to do is help World66.com update their guidebooks by writing while traveling. They have ten travel grants waiting for travelers with a plan a good writing skills.

Why They Write

LONG-TIME BLOGGERS have an assortment of reasons to explain why they write online. I do it because good writing inspires. It feels like art. One of the reasons for maintaining a classroom blog is that it offers a forum to practise writing. In the newspaper industry, where training is woefully underfunded, sharing the lessons of great reporting and writing remains one of the best ways to learn the craft. It's the spirit behind the "Best Newspaper Writing" series, The Providence Journal's "Power of Words" site, Lee Enterprises' "Writing Matters," Bob Baker's "NewsThinking" and "No Train No Gain," home base for newspaper training editors and coaches. All of these sites deserve frequent visits by those beginning to learn Media Writing.

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via Poynter.

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Flickr in classrooms

FLICKR -- Next academic term is Flickr's time to enter the Media Writing classroom in Tipperary Institute, as a product description technology. The tasking involves progressively deeper involvement with the photo-sharing technology, starting with an abstract description of what the web service does, a detailed description of the Flickr API, and adding notes to Flickr photos.

We have collected photos of multimedia developers at work and will have multimedia students annotate images with relevant information to identify the kinds of apparel people wear, products sitting on desks, and articles in offices. This exercise has a practical purpose--it is designed to develop an awareness of product placement. When seeking sponsorship, promoters need to know how to leverage product placement. Wired explains why:

Three steps to creative writing

THE ARTISTS WAY -- Julia Cameron specifies three "Basic Tools" that she uses to improve creative writing. We are using elements of each step in the Media Writing course in Tipperary Institute.

Fifty Tools to Better Writing

TIPPINST -- We have added Poynter's "50 Writing Tools" to the reading list of our Media Writing course in Tipperary Institute. They're also strongly recommended for writers of Irishblogs.

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Roy Peter Clark -- "Fifty Writing Tools"

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Best essays online

DERVALA -- Here's a great tip from a great essayist: "Philip Lopate’s anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay. This is desert island stuff: 75 essays, from Seneca to Richard Rodriguez. It stops just in time, too, before this last decade’s boom in pity-me memoir and precocious autobiography".

Citizen Metereologists

CLONMEL -- We have started thinking about a meteorological station for Tipperary Institute in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland. If we get it up and running by September, we will join the citizen metereological movement spawned by WeatherBug. It's a way of blending citizen journalism with weather reporting. Our ace card: we have very presentable reporters who are well-able to make 30-second mobisodes out of the weather reports.

Media Writing Exams

TIPPINST -- After spending part of a sunny Sunday grading exam scripts from my first year Media Writing course, I'm scribbling a few reminders as revision notes for the next cohort. It looks like everyone who took the final exam passed the course but only because of compensatory marks earned during continuous assessment. This is the first time in four years that people have failed the final exam. It means the final exam requires a tough revision.

Cross-cultural imperative

TIPPINST -- One obvious point of using Yahoo! 360 is you quickly become aware of the international reach of the program. I have "friends" on three continents. I have discovered that I need the Chinese fonts installed on every system where I access my Yahoo! 360 blog. Said another way, we need to install all flavours of Chinese fonts on all computers in Tipperary Institute because we have routine correspondence now with Chinese students and Chinese bloggers. This is probably good advice for all Irishblogs.

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Bonus Link: Irish Born Chinese weblog.

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Digital Storytelling Festival

DSTORY -- The 8th Annual Digital Storytelling Festival is moving from Sedona, AZ,  to the broadcast studios of KQED in San Francisco. It opens on 7 October 2005. Pre-Festival workshop runs 5-7 Oct and the post-festival workshop continues from 10-12 Oct. The festival is an annual event where the digital storytelling community gathers to examine compelling projects, to share information and ideas that inspire, invigorate and create a thoughtful dialogue around digital storytelling. Some interesting storylines, emanate from those with Irishblogs.