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.