Essay instructions are available in Bilda

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The essay instructions are now available in Bilda.

I uploaded the instructions 02.00 Saturday morning December 5 and you will have exactly two weeks from now to write the essays. The deadline for handing in the essays (in a drop box in Bilda) will thus be 02.00 on Saturday December 19.

Please read the essay instructions carefully, there is information there about the form of the essay, the criteria for evaluationg/grading the essay, what happens in you hand in the essay late etc.

Essay instructions delayed

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I wanted to publish the essay instructions today, but I am delayed. I found out that Google would turn up at KTH in their "academic outreach" activities and spent a large part of the day at that event.

I hope I can publish the instructions later today or tomorrow. You will anyway have two weeks to complete the essay from when you get access to them - I'm sorry for the delay. I appreciate that you'll need around/a maximum of 20 hours to complete a great essay but that estimate will naturally vary a lot from student to student... (My rough calculation: 20 hours to complete a 10-point essay; 40 hours to complete five 4-point individual seminar assignments (8 hours/assignment)).

The upside is that there might come a couple of suggestions for master's thesis work out of the discussions with Google - especially if you are a hand-on kind of person who would like to create/program (some) "demo" applications...

Cancelled seminar (group 2 & 3) today!

My younger son is ill and has to stay home today. For different reasons, we can not with short notice find someone who can stay home with him and neither can my wife - so I have to stay home today.

That means that today's seminars (group 2 & 3) unfortunately will have to be cancelled. This does not affect the two lectures tomorrow (10-12 & 13-15)

/Daniel

This week's readings - journalism

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When you are finished with the seminar 3 assignment, this is what you should read to prepare for this week's lecture on "Participatory culture" and the seminar 4 assignment (next week):

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The topic of this week's both lectures is journalism and citizen media. These are the readings:

1) Benkler (2006), "The wealth of networks"; "The trouble with mass media" (chapter 6)

2) Witt (2006), "Constructing a framework to enable an open source reinvention of journalism".

3) Leetaru (2009), "New media vs. old media"

4) Gillmor (2006), "We are all reporters now" (BBC News)

Notes:

- Both text 2 and 3 come from the online (peer-reviewed) journal "First Monday" which publishes scholarly papers about the Internet (internet culture, the neworked information economy etc.).

Late assignments

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I have told you before to send late assignments by mail to me.

I now realize that a better solution is to create a folder in Bilda where you can drop late assignments. That folder is called "Seminar 1-5 - Late assignments".

Don't forget to both include your name and the seminar number in the title of your text/file before you upload the file!

Guest lecture: "media in realtime shock"

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We will have our second and last guest lecture next week, on Thursday after lunch:

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Axel Andén - Media in realtime shock

- How does traditional media deal with citizen journalism and the realtime information flow online?

- How can journalists work in different ways, on different platforms and with different perceptions of time?

- What are the risks with these current developments? Who is in power? Where are these changes taking us?

[Please take a moment to think about these issues. What do you imagine or expect Axel to talk about? Can you think of questions you would like to pose in advance? /Daniel]

Axel Andén is editor in chief at Medievärlden (Mediaworld) - a publication covering the media industry. Medievärlden’s owner, Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association, decided to close the printed edition of Medievärlden and go online-only from november 2009. This decision has put the magazine, founded 1920, in a totally new situation. The lecture is based not the least on my experiences and thoughs about the relationship between traditional and online media - based on the changes that my magazine is going through right at this moment.

Thesis proposal about blogs

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I wrote another thesis proposal about blogs that is accessible in Bilda, (Blogs thesis proposal.doc).