[UPDATE! Read everything you need to know about this project here.]

In yesterday’s CollegeJourn chat, a group of student journalists produced a road map for our first global collaborative reporting project. Sarah Jackson blogged about the idea here, and Josh Halliday wrote about it for the Online Journalism Blog here.

Students, join us. Take up the assignment. Use this opportunity for one of your journalism classes, produce a piece for your college media outlet, or just jump in because you want the unprecedented experience for your resume. Teachers and pros, we welcome any help and guidance you can give us!

We split the topic of health into two, so that the feature writers and beginning reporters could jump in to one area and the data-miners and investigative reporters could jump into another.

If you want to do a news feature, here is your assignment:

What does health mean in your area?

Get creative. We want to get humanizing stories from around the world. How does your town’s attitudes toward health differ from the rest of your country, and how does your country differ from other countries? Find those stories and share them.

Here’s some prompts you may want to explore:

• What is physical health?
• What is mental health?
• What is good health care?
• What is a healthy work/leisure balance?
• What is healthy eating?
• What are healthy relationships?
• What is addiction?

Use writing, video, audio, slideshows, whatever you see fit. You can produce one story or many. It’s up to you to get creative. But do get specific to your geographic location.

If you want to help us with the data-driven reporting, here is your assignment:

How does the health care on my university campus compare to the health care at other universities?

We want to examine what happens when a student becomes sick or injured on the university campus. What process do they go through, what’s the quality of care, and how does it rank with other campuses around the world?

The first leg of the assignment: Establish a narrative on what happens to a sick or injured student on campus. The second part is gathering data from each area, such as:

• Distance to nearest hospital or clinic
• Ambulance response times
• Average cost of visit (if not to student, then to whom?)
• Number of clinicians per 100 students
• What services are available on-site
• Population statistics over time for the campus
• Statistics like weight, pregnancy, AIDS diagnoses, gonnohrea/syphillis, etc.

Any statistics we can find that will help us compare campuses, we want to dig up. It will also take a basic explainer on how your country’s health care system differs from others, and that will take collaboration and note-sharing.

We realize this can be very complex. We also want to be flexible in case the stats are unavailable, but we want you to use good reporting skills to do whatever necessary to find out.

I should also mention that the coordinating and planning will be conducted in the English language, but we are open and willing to find a way to accommodate non-English speakers. (Suggestions welcome!)

We are going to use Paul Bradshaw’s Help Me Investigate website to coordinate. Please contact either me (suzanneyada ~at~ gmail) or Josh Halliday if you want to participate, and we will invite you to the HMI group. (We also have a WiredJournalists‘s group you can join here without invitation.)

This means for you North American CollegeJourners that the Sunday chats will be moved up to 3 pm ET/noon PT until further notice, so we can chat at a reasonable global time and update each other about our progress.

So you have your assignment. It’s due Oct. 30, but each week we will advance our reporting and share notes, so we will know where we need to go for the next week. You’ll have a support group and clear guidance for what’s expected week by week.

More logistics will be hammered out, and we will keep you informed.

Any questions?

EDIT: Here is the Google group we are using to do internal coordination. Leave a comment here on this blog and then join — I’d like to know who you are!

The weekly CollegeJourn chats can generate some massive ideas. Like the Bring-A-Professor night last February, where we asked educators, professionals and students alike how they would like to see journalism schools change.

This time, we’re breaking out of the navel-gazing. Let’s stop talking about journalism and do some journalism.

We talked last Sunday about ideas for student reporting projects (transcript here), then quickly realized that there’s real potential for online collaboration around a particular story or topic.

Two ideas popped up, and they could go hand-in-hand. The first one focuses on data-gathering from all over the world on a particular issue. This is more geared for hard news. What information can you waaaaay over there access that my readers waaaaaay over here would want to know? Is (insert topic here) really this good/bad around the world? This one was inspired by ProPublica’s Adopt-A-Stimulus-Project efforts, but we need a subject that students around the globe could tackle.

The other idea would be focused on a word, like “victory” or “death” or “love” or “injustice,” and have student publications around the world publish stories that reflect their geographical location and culture with that theme. This could be feature, or hard news, or even arts and photography students could contribute.

It’s possible to cross-breed the two, but I had an idea of offering both assignments at the same time — the theme-based idea for audio/video reporters, feature writers or beginning journalists, and the data-gathering idea for the investigative journalists, data visualizers and computer-assisted reporting students. (BTW, I’m not suggesting multimedia reporters can’t be investigative and vice-versa, but some stories and topics lend themselves to different platforms, you know what I mean?)

On Sunday (that’s tomorrow!) we’ll be deciding many of the details, such as what the assignment will be, deadlines (if any), how to collaborate and what to do with the final product. Sarah Jackson (@sarahsodyssey) has already blogged about her vision here. It’s an exciting one.

Please join us at 8 p.m. BST if you’re in Europe and 3 p.m. ET/noon PT if you’re in North America. Those locations have already had CollegeJourn chats set up, but we want to expand to other continents, too, so please check out what time that will be in your time zone.

Also, join the newly formed CollegeJourn group on WiredJournalists. It could be just the platform we use to do the planning and collaboration.

From left: Moderator Geanne Rosenberg, Suzanne Yada, Sandeep Junnarkar, Dan Gillmor. Taken by Dan Kennedy: http://twitpic.com/crwn1

I came back from the AEJMC conference full of ideas. I think my panel on social media with Dan Gillmor and Sandeep Junnarkar went really well, though Jeff Jarvis had to cancel for health reasons.

First, what I told the educators (in addition to the points in my last post):

• Try BarCamps. Let the students organize themselves for one weekend a semester, and have them put on their own conference. Assign it if you must, but let them decide what needs to be taught.
• Students want the ability to experiment and fail. There needs to be a grading system that allows for this.
• Educators and even some students feel queasy about marketing themselves. With all due respect, they need to get over it.
• Don’t teach social media tools, teach concepts behind them. Don’t teach Twitter, teach why Twitter.
• Live-twittering or putting your face down to your notepad, it’s the same thing. It’s “continuous partial attention,” and it’s what journalists do. (I’m not particularly good at it, so I didn’t live-tweet the conference.)

Other ideas from the panel:

• Too many students think someone’s going to fix the industry for them. Sorry. It’s all on the students now.
• J-profs need to get out of “oracle mode.” Gillmor said he had to learn to hold his tongue, and Junnarkar said he had to find ways to be less harsh in editing but still get the students to correct themselves. (I’m torn on this one; I want my stories ripped apart!)
  
• Students are becoming very reluctant to talk to anyone in person, even over the telephone. I’ll be honest here: I’m fighting this problem myself, and though I’m getting better I could use any prodding at my disposal. Instructors, wield the pitchfork.
  
• “Industrial journalists” was the buzzword of the panel, referring to the people working in the media that produces a physical product that requires manufacturing and shipping (i.e. a newspaper). Lots of people resented or delighted in the distinction.
• From what I’ve heard of Arizona State’s program, it has a lot of things going for it. Gillmor sets up a Ning for each of his classes and has students write and correct Wikipedia entries. There’s also an entrepreneurial class, and (if I remember correctly) students edit each other’s work on live on WordPress.
• In the old school way of sourcing, journalists had friends of friends, or sources of sources. With social media, you’re able to source at a more random variance, but not everyone in the world is on social media, and it limits your options. Use both.

In the discussion after the panel, there was a rift between longtime educators and others who felt that journalism education was going the way of the dodo. Or rather, the way of print.

That was to be a theme for the rest of the convention. People walked out on Nieman Lab‘s Josh Benton, who challenged the future of the copy editing, at least according to Doug Fisher’s write-up. (More of his AEJMC blog posts are here.)

The tone oscillated between old-school mourning and new-school chastising. But it honestly, truly, wasn’t as much of a downer as it sounds. I enjoyed myself. It was my first AEJMC, and I went as an undergrad. So I came with eyes wide open in the belief that AEJMC can’t really be that stodgy — when someone like Dan Conover writes a winning paper like this?

Other random AEJMC thoughts (because I have links to dump and I love me some bulleted lists):

• I have a new respect for educators and researchers. I still don’t want to go to grad school.
• The conference naturally had a heavy focus on research, which I love. Problem is, research is in the past. I’m also interested in the D of R&D. Let’s develop, yes?
• Check out Lisa William‘s slideshow, “Thinking like a startup for journalists” (which you will simply have to see in person for full impact. She’s hilarious).
• I went to visit the Christian Science Monitor newsroom. Bill Mitchell of Poynter was also there and already wrote up a great summation. I spoke with editor John Yemma and told him, in all honesty, that if I were to start a publication from scratch, it would mimic their model (online first, weekly print delivered by post, in-depth stories, etc.) Not a kiss-up.
• One of the highlights of the convention was the Great Ideas For Teachers presentation. Posters with curriculum ideas lined the walls of a ballroom. Read this year’s winner here, previous winners here, and order them all here.
• Guy Berger’s AEJMC assessment was based on the limited tweeting and blogging coming from the conference, and I wish I blogged as the conference was going on. (But the stupid hotel charged for Internet access. Who does that nowadays? Grr!) The gist of his blog was fairly accurate, though.
• Michele K. Jones, Alfred Hermida, Carrie Brown-Smith and Steve Fox also weigh in on the conference.
• Read AEJMC’s blog posts and Hot Topics. A lot of thoughtful observations there.

It’s late on Sunday night before my flight out to Boston. I’m going to attend the AEJMC Convention for journalism educators, and I will be on a panel on social media’s role in the future of journalism with Dan Gillmor and Sandeep Junnarkar (filling in for Jeff Jarvis‘ last-minute cancellation).

I will be speaking to a host of journalism educators, and I am not going to waste this opportunity.

So just a few hours ago, we held a CollegeJourn.com chat about what we, the journalism students already immersed in social media, wanted to tell these educators.

Read the full transcript here, but here’s a very brief summary:

• Professors need to not only teach social media, but practice it. It is now their job to understand this.
• The students are also resistant. Just because they’re young and on Facebook doesn’t mean they know social media.
• There’s a lesson plan in comparing ethics policies, legal quandaries and best practices of news organizations using social media. Less emphasis on teaching the tools, more on teaching principles.
• Students who know social media should become TAs or peer teachers, or help organize a bootcamp/BarCamp at school to teach both students and the professors about social media.
• But, professors, please still keep hammering fundamentals. Don’t get lost in the latest buzzword. Everything taught about social media should point straight back to the basics.

But even after all that discussion, the most telling is the separate session that happened among three college journalism powerhouses (if you don’t mind me being so bold). Daniel Bachhuber, Greg Linch and Joey Baker from CoPress were particularly peeved at the idea that all it takes is a few social media courses to bring j-schools up to snuff.

What they want is a revolution. A radical dismantling of the entire structure and starting from scratch. Adding a class on Twitter isn’t going to cut it.

Read this, or better yet, download the podcast to hear for yourself. Also, read Daniel’s previous posts here, here and here on rebooting journalism education.

CollegeJourn had previously hosted a Bring-Your-Professor chat night, another must-read synopsis. It sounds like we might need another one. This time, will there be a single school out there who will listen?

ADDENDUM

Hoisting up some more links for your reading pleasure, thanks to comments from Daniel, Greg and Joey:

• Mark Hamilton’s “Remaking Journalism Education: Some Thoughts.”
• Vin Crosbie’s “Anatomy of a 21st Century Media Executive“ and “Getting Journalism Education Out of the Way.” (Plus Joey’s Publish2 links.)
• Greg’s posts on “Wanted: Resident Butt-Kicker (Thoughts on journalism education)” and “Rich Beckman discusses how to reshape journalism education.”