The Digital Hub enters Academia

Exclusive pics from The Financial Times' Digital Hub, published in Viewmagazine.tv in March.

The hub, a contemporary feature of the modern newsroom is now making forays into academia.

Whilst most academic outfits feature lecture rooms equipped with the latest gizmos in presentation, the layout has preserved the hierarchy of the lecturer with students facing on from one direction.

Now news emerges in the UK of a university creating a digital hub, not unlike the FT's.

In this case, it's a sort of throw back to the ampitheatre of Aristotle's school - with a digital upgrade you might say.

Is this the first?

I can't be absolutely sure, but from my involvement in the BJTC, I have broad knowledge of developments, though I welcome your comments telling me how this or that institution is ahead of the curve.

I'll keep you posted with what I know as this may have wide ramifications for other institutes.


Universities of the Future
I have always felt the role of universities is to be where industry would like to be.

And occasionally it succeeds but perhaps not as much as it should.

However because both must fit like glove and hand, academia quite often mirrors the industrial world.

How else would it recruit an able workforce.

Couple of months ago, I produced a package on the University of the Future, which I think is ready for an update.

Turning the corner- the wired journlalist

The "once it was all so simple" talk is redundant really.

For from the seeds of Camp VJs philosophy [ and we just about scratched the surface] is the notion of the ultra wired journalists.

How to mash up, filter, disseminate to, and aggregate shared interests and well as encouraging new participants; it sounds a heady mix, but it's that simple.

I've been thinking through this for eons and it part explains why my career is a series of jumps from one domain to another.

When I aquired my first powerbook in 99, I cut a piece tin which Channel 4's Jon Snow [ I was freelancing there at the time] remarked... "and that's broadcast quality. Wow?

Yep

Over at the Beep, the then head of foreign news showed interest after a meeting, but echoed a much chimed comment" "What exactly do you do?"

Radio, TV, the Net, building web sites, magazines, making commercials and promos, Compression technology, Flash, Director, media policy - all of which I might add now have congealed into my Phd studies.

And there were many many others, whom like me, would get confused looks.

And now?

Still confused looks, that anyone should know more than the prerequesite: what ever that is.

It's changing, changing, get over it, said Jeff Jarvis in an interview I had with him.

So to the media I ask what are you going to do, he concluded.

There are no limits now to what we may learn and what we need to learn. The market, a tumbling one, is fluid. Yes video will ride the crest, but it's also about the new judgement of news, info flows. The skill now is in being one of them.

Not a news hound, but someone concerned about news as a consumer, with an understanding how to let it go, until like the kite runner you artfully reel it in.

What is news?

It's about the workflow of a new discourse in news. We haven't yet scratched the surface I feel.

Take this device for instance - a bluetooth transmitter recorder that allows me to leave a message and for that message to find recipient blue tooths within a radius; hoping about before it finds its source. Now what if I talked about a random selection of news items, what if I talked about this here and a number of us had meta key words. That message would find its way onto my device - from the US and the likes [ yes welcome to the thought police]

The whole world will be noisily exchanging data by the second that anyone could use - one big telephone exchange, but I can key into dense words thus filtering what I want to hear between said or not recipients.

News is in itself a conversation. It's just some bright spark deems one conversation more laudable than the other, depending on constituents, time, money, primacy, value etc.

And what of the old world. Will it realy be that soon? Will this very laptop become redundant for something else.

What will the future of studies at a university be like?

A former chancellor and government advisor gives an amazing insight.

In the next few weeks I'm going to be collaborating with Sandy, a financial wizz in the city, whose ideas mirror my own. One of the first pieces should be an insight into the high risk of money management in a manner which we hope opens uo further debate about the way things were done

Wired Journalism - The Game Changers

The Daily Telegraph is in bouyant mood. Its website traffic is outstripping its UK competitors it says.

It's a far cry from the news item you can watch me presenting as a newsreader in 1994 in which the Telegraph attracted 30,000 readers.

A senior exec tells viewmagazine.tv how they've become a leading multimedia provider.



And we bring you an exclusive short film about its new super journalists: 12 young men and women picked from arround 800 applicants, trained over a period of a year in the broad spectrum of traditional and new wired journalism.

It leads me to ask in our special journalism-academia section, what today is journalism?

Does this confluence of multi skills show us how broken traditional journalism is in coping with today's newsgathering and more pluralistic story telling demands? And how well is academia and training sectors doing in nurturing the new journalists?

More