This month’s Carnival of Journalism takes us on a tour of a truly frightful house of promise and peril: the world of new gadgets and software tools.

To refresh your memory, the prompt for this month was:

How do you decide to dedicate time to a new tool/platform/gadget? What is the process you go through mentally? And then later – how do you convince others to go through that process? And, last: How do you ensure that the tools you do adopt are used once the “newness” factor fades?

Without further delay, here are some of the responses (links open in new tabs):

Alfred Hermida writes, “The starting point for this discussion is the public, not the tools. Talking about tools is the last thing we should be doing.”

Joe Gullo looks for “the community factor” for new software tools, but says the results are often lackluster: “The hardest part is sticking with the product. It could be the most amazing service or product, but something has to keep me going back and using it.”

Dave Cohn makes an important distinction when evaluating any new tool: “Most platforms/tools/gadgets are tactical – not strategic. You should always keep your strategy in mind so that you can evaluate a tool about whether or not it’s helping to achieve that final goal.”

Carrie Brown focuses on the “evangelism” part of the question, and gives a list of ways to help others see the advantages of new things. This is important for college j-students, especially. “Contrary to popular belief, many of these so-called “digital natives” are often neither savvy about new tech nor exceptionally eager to go beyond their Facebook and Internet Explorer (?!) comfort zones.”

Lauren Rabaino walks through the process and provides examples of the best tools: “The best tools are the ones that solve a coverage problem or put a significant twist on already-existing storytelling tools. Sometimes — and these are my favorite kind of tools — you stumble upon one that fills a huge need that you didn’t even realize you had.”

Jonathan Groves explains how he decides what products to stick with, providing examples along the way. As for convincing others? His approach is slightly different. Click the link to read it. “What’s important is that we choose what best fits us, not everyone else.”

Stijn Debrouwere makes his first appearance in the carnival this month (welcome!). In his post, he posits some fountational reasons why journalists don’t adopt new tools: “our industry is slowly amassing an unsettling amount of cargo cult behaviors: we’re imitating a 20th-century writing style and ethical code without the first idea about how these contribute to journalism that is informative, engaging and fair.”

Jack Lail reiterates that, although it’s painful, “… experiment you must, lest you end up still using a 14,400 baud model and Windows 98 for the rest of your, indeed, wretched life.”

Andrew Zaleski, another new carnivore, explains “Ultimately, I stick to one governing principle when it comes to social media: how will the respective tool improve (and make easier) my work as digital media editor for Urbanite magazine?”

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Image via Wikipedia

Your blog host is hosting this month’s Carnival of Journalism, with a scary theme for Halloween. Ooooohhh! Check out the details here, and feel free to join. There’s no membership fee.

Edit: This is my second go-round as host of the Carnival. I hosted the third-ever Carnival in February 2008.

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A taste:

It’s tempting to peer into the future and see a time when people receive all their information via moving images, but that time isn’t near, and I don’t believe it will ever happen, mainly because video (moving images) has a disadvantage in that respect. It’s not scannable.

Go here to read the rest. And I welcome your comments.

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I have been using Google+ (I hate that + symbol, I’ll just spell it Google Plus from now on – what’s the AP style on that, anyway?) for about two months now, since soon after it launched.

As background, I have to confess that I don’t use Facebook that much. Blog posts from the ICM weblog are autofed into my “Feed,” but beyond that, I’m not on there much. So I don’t necessarily have a large area of comparisons to make between FB and Google Plus. But I do follow Twitter closely when I’m near a computer or the iPad.

That said, I do like the way Google Plus lets you put people into Circles. I can see this being useful for a journalist once more people adopt the platform (assuming that they do). Also, for an educator, it can be a useful way to organize students into classes – intro to journalism, for instance – and then feed information only to those circles.

In this particular feature, Google Plus distances itself from Facebook. Maybe there’s a way to organize people into different “categories” on Facebook. I don’t know, and I really don’t care to take the time to find out. It’s pretty easy on Google Plus.

I’ve also used the Hangout feature twice, and found it useful. In one interview, I talked to people in two different places, so I could use the video feature and see everyone I was talking with. This is not a “new” feature, necessarily, as iChat has had the ability to videochat with more than one person for a while.

But it is seamlessly integrated with Google products (you do need to download a plug-in for it to work with your webcam). Others have used the Hangout feature for press conferences. I imagine there are people who have used it for meetings, as you can have up to 10 webcams in one “hangout.”

This could be useful for a journalism instructor to host a webchat with professionals around the world so that students could interact with several professionals from the local classroom.

For a student journalist,  it could be a good way to conduct an interview with a subject who’s not easily accessible for an in-person interview (taking the place of the phone interview).

Another feature I’ve used is the integration with smart phones. I can take a photograph on my Android phone and it’s automatically uploaded to Google Plus (you can set this feature to automatically publish the photo, too). I can then go into Google Plus on the web and tweak the photo, add a cutline or other information, and then publish it to my stream. This would be more useful for journalistic purposes than in the classroom.

The main drawback for a more consistent use of Google Plus in the academy, in my opinion, is the lack of adoption.

It’s only been around two months, and although there are a lot of people I follow from Twitter already using it some, they are mostly early adopters.

And there are a number of people in my circles who joined and haven’t posted anything yet.

Certainly, this is going to be a huge obstacle for Google Plus to overcome. By comparison, Facebook started on high school and college campuses, and thus built a reliable core of users before everyone could join.

On the other hand, Twitter seems to have captured the market at the moment with regard to “breaking news” or instant updates. Until Google Plus begins to feed updates like Twitter, it won’t take over that space. But I’m not sure that’s the space Google wants to occupy.

Also, Google Plus still has a “beta product” feel to it. Early users have had complaints about the use of real names, and the lack of “corporate” accounts. I’m sure Google will iron out these issues, but in the meantime, it still seems somewhat “toy-like.”

Of course, all this could change in 6 months, or a year. I expect it will. And I think it would be wise to revisit this topic in the future.

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Image via Wikipedia

The Carnival of Journalism has been going on the past few months, and I’ve missed posting to them. However, this month’s topic is very interesting, and I feel like I have something to contribute, if a little bit past deadline.

The topic:

A failure in your life (personal or professional) that has lessons. It must be your failure and you must have to take responsibility. But this will be a safe space to discuss our failings and what we can learn from them.

I’ve had a number of personal and professional failures over the years, many of which have been deep and emotionally wrenching. But I want to focus on one particular failure which happens frequently.

Having just finished turning in final grades for this semester, the concept of failure is very real at the moment, as it is at the end of every 15 weeks in the university system. Every semester, I deliver grades that are, shall we say, less than optimal.

And in some way, each of those less-than-optimal grades I view as a failure on my part as a teacher. There are students who get it, who do great work in classes, and others who never seem to grasp concepts, techniques, technology, etc. or they just decide to stop coming to class.

I know, deep down, that there is only so much an instructor can do, and the rest is up to the student. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deliver those grades. Maybe it does for some people, but not for me.

At heart, I want all my students to succeed in the classes I teach, because I really love journalism and “multimedia” or whatever we’re calling it now, and I want them to love it too – or at least like it enough to do well in my classes.

As well, I have no personal animosity to students. I wish them the best in their endeavors, because I would like the same were I in their shoes.

And so every semester, I look over the grades, the schedule, the professor evaluations, the equipment and try to figure out different ways to tackle the subject matter, to spend more time one-on-one, to smile more, anything to find a way to connect with those students.

This fall will be my 11th year teaching collegiate journalism classes, and I still feel the need to reinvent my courses constantly. And that’s the thing I think is the lesson from this failure: Even if you think you have things down, there’s always a time to look back, evaluate, and try things differently.

I always tell students that the beauty of college is that every 15 weeks you get a chance to start over with a clean slate – new subjects, new instructors, etc. Nobody in history 101 cares if you didn’t measure up in poli sci 101.

And each semester is a fresh chance for a teacher to start the class with a clean slate as well. It’s part of what keeps me from despairing over these small failures.

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