The Serbian Web Journalism School [1] was recently featured [2] in an independent online Journalism site called Journalism.co.uk and the report says that the school will be introducing new online elements to its teaching curriculum in the early part of 2009:
* Each student has a blog. They have to produce one post per week based on assignments. Feeds from their blogs are available on NetVibes, here [3].
* An online programme will be launched early in the new year, making use of web tools such as SlideShare.net [4], which will enable lecturers to embed their audio narration over presentation slides.
* A book on web journalism is in preparation, which they hope to publish it in few months.
* Bilingual lectures are planned for the second half of 2009.
Meanwhile the classes of the school are progressing well. American photograph and reporter Russell Gordon took a crash course on photojournalism [5] for the participants.
Russel Gordon, photo by zikica.zivkovic [6]
Some reactions of the students from the project blog [7]:
Darko Nikolić wrote [8] “photograph can sublimate creation of web-journalist making his work more special, and considerable.”
Students listening to Gordon's lecture. Photo by cbojan [9]
Besides talking with Mr. Russell Gordon, students had a lesson to analyze economic situation of Serbia in relation to the countries in region:
Gordana Erić [10] observed that Serbia is most expensive of all countries created on the region of ex-SFRJ. The prices of basic life comestibles are among the highest in the region.
Ljubisa Bojic conducted the lecture no. nine on role of photography in web journalism [11] on December 27, 2008:
How to create a good photo? What are the possible use of photographs in the web-journalism? Students opened accounts in the social network “Flickr” to upload their photos.
They learned how to create slide show with the uploaded pictures and publish on their web sites. After that some students made web-comics with the help of the online service “Pimpampum”.
The students were also taught how to organize their sites [11] using netvibes.
In a recent session the student journalists also engaged in a philosophical discussion [12] on the topic “Lethargy that rules Serbia over the past several years”:
Gordana Erić believed that the main points of the lesson are the facts that society got into crisis primarily because of the bad educational system, unbalanced society qualities, and certain character lineaments of our people, among the rest the one which for all mismatches blame everyone else.
Katarina Jovanović said that Absolute Genius tried to explain with „selected” words that they should not only „stink and wait” anymore, but under lot URGENT to do something when it comes to their lives and surround.
Here are two films made after the discussion by Katarina Jovanovic [13] and Miloš Kuks [14] using photo, video and audio:
Thumbnail image by zikica.zivkovic [6]