Posted by Kathlyn in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

I know what you made last summer

… or at least, what I made.

This is the first video I made for Santa Catalina School, which runs a five-week summer camp for girls ages 7-14. This video was an attempt to show what life is like at camp.

While shooting this video I learned that kids move really fast unless told to stand still, in which case they will instantly act board and very, very “cool”.

I also learned that Monterey is windy and that wireless mics with tiny windsocks might be a good idea to purchase.

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Posted by Kathlyn in Internet | 0 Comments

Teaching Digital Natives

I presently work in the

communications department of an independent Catholic school in Monterey, Calif. Just last week, I was in a classroom here observing first- and fifth-graders being taught math via highly graphical word problems shown on Smart Boards. The class was fast-paced, engaging. Not a moment was wasted; the teacher flew through examples far faster than he could have with a chalkboard, whiteboard or even overhead projector.

Students were shown problems that reinforced the concepts they were learning; these concepts were repeated but there was no rote memorization.

I’m not even 30 years old, I thought, and already the way I learned elementary math is passe.

I couldn’t help but think about those math classes yesterday while reading through the New York Times’ front-page story on the way the Internet is challenging traditional education systems.

I thought this quote, from a review of the NYT story featured on the Nieman Journalism Lab website, summed up quote well what the NYT story was about.

“While formal learning has been, in the pre-digital world, a matter of rote obligation in the service of intellectual catholicism, the web-powered world is creating a knowledge economy that spins on the axis of interest.”

As someone who graduated in 2005 with a bachelor’s in journalism, I have witnessed firsthand how the Internet has transformed (better: is transforming) traditional journalism. Newspapers can no longer rest on the reporter/reader dichotomy; newspapers can no longer provide content via one medium; newspapers can no longer rely on reporters and editors being purely generalists.

It’ll be (better: it is) interesting to watch the education system wrestle with the same issues – shortened attention spans of its customers (in this case, young students), the long-tail effect (“the axis of interest”), crowdsourcing (texting while doing homework), multimedia environments (teachers must work with smart boards, websites, video lecture guests, smart phones… sometimes all in one lesson).

I am not trained in education, but one thing I can say from my perch here in Monterey is that I do think that independent schools will have an easier time grappling with the increasingly digital lives of their students, given their freedom from unions, politics (school boards) and higher streams of revenue (which enable – albeit don’t guarantee – faster rates of change).

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Posted by Kathlyn in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

Things I truly would not know how to do without the Internet

… Maybe it’s silly, but I had no idea how to chop an avocado until I watched this video.

Thanks, YouTube!

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Posted by Kathlyn in Journalism | 0 Comments

METRO: The creepy guy next to you also wants to read it

Thanks to the Newspaper Innovation blog for sharing this great ad today.

I love adverts for print products.

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Posted by Kathlyn in Fun, video | 0 Comments

Beautiful voice

In looking for some sidebar video for a blog post, I stumbled across this lovely clip of Maya Angelou discussing from where she draws her inspiration. Her thoughts seemed worth sharing.

Her thoughtfully chosen words, spoken with a beautiful, powerful voice, are an inspiration.

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Posted by Kathlyn in Journalism | 4 Comments

Par for the course

I watched several top-notch golfers implode today, beaten up by unyielding greens and cliffside fairways at Pebble Beach Golf Links.

But while watching the final round of this major championship, as well as during the hours I spent at Pebble Beach helping with local newspaper coverage of the U.S. Open, I saw an unspoken storyline playing out.

And that’s the continued self-destruction of traditional media outlets.

Where to begin….

At home during today’s final round, I tuned into NBC’s coverage while keeping an eye on Twitter. I monitored the hashtags #usopen and #pebblebeach, as well as the commentary of a few sportswriters I follow via my own account. All afternoon, Twitterers bemoaned the wonky weird commentary of Johnny Miller, a former PGA great who is now synonymous with odd golf announcing. An AP writer picked up on one especially bizzare comment:

Did anyone at NBC respond to this and many other Tweets about the announcers’ odd deliveries? Did the broadcasters respond?

Of course not. Would it have been difficult to tune in to what their viewers were saying? No. Would it have been difficult to plan ahead and perhaps solicit and take questions from folks at home via Twitter? No.

Lest we get too down on the TV boys, a look at newspapers.

All week at the media tent, I felt somewhat in awe of the big-name newspaper guys. Most are old enough to be my dad (I say “dad” because there were something like 10 women in the media tent) and they work at big-brand papers: The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The New York Times. Heady stuff.

Mind-boggling, though, is that they’re all sitting next to each other, each writing slightly different versions of the same stories without realizing that portals like Google, Yahoo and MSNBC are aggregating all their work in the same place anyway. When are journalists going to realize that the only “on ramp” to their work isn’t their brand’s website or printed product?

I have no idea why they all didn’t talk to each other – especially newspapers who share owners – to determine who is writing what, and how not to overlap.

Oh yeah. And extra weird is that the paper dudes sit right next to the dudes from AP – who, by the way, work for a wire service nearly every other newspaper represented at the U.S. Open pays to provide copy.

And they’re all.writing.the.same.thing.

The night before the final round, nearly every outlet I named above carried stories on the following topics:

- Tiger Woods’ big jump up the leaderboard and his quest for a comeback

- Phil Mickelson’s implosion in Saturday’s round

- Dustin Johnson’s lead; the fact that he’s a two-time winner at the PGA Tour’s annual stop in Monterey

- The little-known Europeans in the hunt: McDowell and Havret

- Tom Watson playing all five U.S. Opens at Pebble Beach

….and aside from various notebook items, that about covers it. So, what’s the problem here?

Think Google.

Here’s the Google News page for Sports, as seen about two hours after Graeme McDowell laid up for par on 18 to become the first European in 40 years to win a U.S. Open:

You can see that the national papers trump regional content providers, which is somewhat of a shame in this case. Consider the case of Dustin Johnson, who had a horrible Sunday round after playing well all week and owning the lead going into the final round. He’s won the past two AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournaments; the regional media are quite familiar with him and prepared to write good stories about him. He comes from South Carolina; the reporters from that state probably also have a lot of local knowledge on him.

But because regional newspapers – like the Monterey County Herald and San Jose Mercury News – are typically part of newspaper chains whose owners reside states away, they’re not able to quickly adopt to new media … and consequently don’t do things that would bump them up in Google rankings.

For example, neither the Herald nor the Mercury News have a policy of including many (if any) outgoing links. Further, their archive systems are terrible; most stories expire in two weeks. so it’s not really worth linking back to them. This complete lack of participation in linking culture seriously hurts them when it comes to helping their copy stand out on Google or on Yahoo homepages.

Also, it’s just kind of sad that sports writers from different mediums don’t link to each other – especially when many are friends (as I saw this week). Why don’t newspaper and magazine writers link to each other, for example? Trust me, the staff writers for Golf World and Golf Digest and the rest were all online writing the same storylines as everybody else, but their writers will usually have additional time to write even longer features on the tournament. Wouldn’t it be nice if, via linking culture, newspapers like the Monterey Herald could make their readers aware of a golf magazine writer’s blog – where he will likely post his longer and more insightful or golf-specialized posts – and for the magazine writer to link back to the paper (because some of his readers could benefit from the quick-hit stuff that newspapers live off of?).

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Posted by Kathlyn in Fun, Internet | 0 Comments

Where you at?

I really like maps. OK, I love maps: on Google, on the metro, in my GPS, on the golf course, at the tourist station, bound in a state-by-state collection of road maps or hanging on the wall.

And this is not just because I’m extremely prone to getting lost.

I can stare at my office wall map (which has sadly become a floor map of late, because I’m too lazy go to HomeDespot and find a new thingamagig for the back of it) for at least the duration of two TV commercials (hey, it’s the digital age!); I quite frequently do. The yet-to-be-visited southern hemisphere drives me mad. Vast expanses like central Asia beckon. I gaze at the islands of Hawaii and marvel that my national cell phone plan works there. I wonder nerdy things like, “Gosh, map makers must love when states like Kosovo declare independence – everybody needs new maps!”

OK, OK, so wall maps are so 18th century. Fast forward to the digital era, in which I am totally that girl who thinks it’s cute to see the London Tube map replicated on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs.

Maps have been Internet trendy for years now, and are being used for all kinds of purposes you or your seventh-grade colored pencils could have imagined. My faves include the Web Trend Map, a super groovy example of how maps can convey all kinds of meta-level info. Then there are the cool mashups like WikipediaVision, which helped me realize that duh, of course the people who edit English-language Wikipedia mainly come from England, the U.S., South Africa, India and Australia (and the French-language Wikipedia from France & Africa… and so on). Then there’s HerdictWeb, which helps me see watch which websites are being censored where. Want to see more GoogleMaps mashups? Yep, there’s a blog for that!

I’m just really amazed at how much information can go on a map. It’s enough to make a girl want to learn Flash (or at least some decent Photoshop skills, eh). I love this Golf World map of Pebble Beach, it’s basically the realization of an idea I pitched to the local paper for its U.S. Open coverage after I sat through a presentation about the fab multimedia section of the Las Vegas Sun, home to this super cool interactive map of the history of the Vegas Strip.

In recent weeks I’ve made a Google mashup showing where the EJC is currently training journalists, a second mashup showing spots in Maastricht a new colleague might want to visit (which I actually think is one of the nicest ways I’ve thought of to help someone who is new in town) and created an annotated map using the free photoediting tool Gimp to help my boyfriend with a presentation.

Yes, the terrorist cutouts are tacky. But with beards like that, they asked for it. And my boyfriend earned a good grade on his presentation, so there.

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