On Mon, 2013-10-21 at 10:28 +1100, David Blackall wrote:
Thanks Brian, good idea/s. I am a baby boomer so am
not much good on
technical stuff but to make the wikinews front look and work like a
prestigious newspaper, more interactive with page turning, might be the
go (The Economist, New York Times, The Guardian).
I've put a preliminary site up at
http://edu.wikinewsie.org
However, I've not touched a fraction of the options available in the
theme I've put on there. All I've focused on for the moment is security
and responsiveness.
Create the sense or emotion that wikinews is as good
(which it is by
the rigour applied to reviewing) simply by a thematic look and an
interactive flow. I am now hammering the Glen Greenwald story with my
students, he is one of the many bloggers who have made good and then he
gets employed by The Guardian, which says it all about how blogging can
be as rigorous as journalism, blogging in most cases is journalism, as
is especially the case for wikinews.
I'd disagree with that; it's more the case that 5% (or less) of blogs
are actually journalism. With the entry-barrier to publishing being
all-but-eliminated, there is a very long tail of 'blogs of dubious
provenance'. Don't mistake the mainstream adopting the format for
blogging as a form of journalism being widespread.
I've still a fair bit of trial-and-error to getting
edu.wikinewsie.org
set up as I'd like. I may-well ditch the current theme (Customizr);
there are, after all, over 2,000 to choose from[1]. Those can be further
enhanced with plugins[2], which is where students who want to use a
blogging platform are going to need to acquire some technical skills.
[1]
http://wordpress.org/themes/
[2]
http://wordpress.org/plugins/
It should be possible, once I've a few more quirks and kinks ironed out,
to offer individual blogs to students. Beyond that, my gut feel is we'd
need to have mechanisms to import articles from Wikinews to blogs in
near-realtime. Beyond that, I don't know; plus, it's late here.
Brian McNeil.
--
Wikinewsie.org |
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
"Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases to be news."
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