Highlights of the Semester
One of the things I've always enjoyed about being an editor is watching talent develop. Over the course of this semester, I became proud to be editing the work of the students in this APPLES service learning class at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Showing an incredible amount of initiative and self-motivation, the 10 students in this class overcame obstacles and provided North Carolinians with a valuable public resource for them to understand and engage in an important public policy issue.
Any errors or shortcomings you find on the site are mine. Please let me know about them.
Here are the highlights of what the class did this semester:
Elisa Greenwood acquired and published online for the first time the winning grant applications as well as the comments made by the grant selection panel. By doing so, she helped make the applicants and the state Department of Public Instruction more accountable for the $7 million of taxpayer money they invested in efforts to improve the state's graduation rate. This service will also help future grant applicants better understand what the selection committee wants in winning applicants.
These documents have always been public record, but were inaccessible to anyone who isn't in Raleigh. As one woman at DPI told Elisa, there has been incredible demand for these documents and she has spent a lot of time photocopying them. In one fell swoop, Elisa made these documents instantly and simultaneously available to anyone for public inspection.
Elisa also added value by attaching a good deal of metadata to each document, so that the public can sort the winning applicants by a variety of information about the district demographics and the applicant. She explains how she did it in her online tutorial
Kristi Uffman was the director of our social media effort. She helped us create discussion groups on Facebook and YouTube where students as well as state education leaders such as Howard Lee, the chairman of the N.C. State Board Of Education, and June Atkinson, the state superintendent, can discuss the issue and engage with each other to share experiences and find solutions. Krisit is also coordinating an outreach program with the N.C. Scholastic Media Association to get high school journalists to contribute stories to the site.
Sara Kelleher lead our efforts to engage with the Latino community. She created Spanish-language content for the site, for Facebook and for YouTube. Sara also produced a tutorial for journalists who want an introduction on a cheap way to shoot, edit and publish news video.
Across the state, Latinos have the lowest graduation rates next to Native Americans. Audrey Hill took a look at the issue through the lens of a Carrboro student, Mariana Gasca, who dropped out but has been lured back to school.
The students put a lot of effort in to finding, reporting and presenting unique perspectives on the dropout rate. Erin Smith did a an audio slide show about a student and her mentor working together in Durham. She also produced a tutorial about using Sound Slides.
The story of Nikki McDonald was told by Eva Hendershot. Nikki is working hard to get her diploma -- a promise she made to her mother before she died. Nikki got married at 16, then got pregnant and then dropped out. Like so many North Carolinians without a diploma, she is surrounded by family members who also did not graduate. Her mother, father and husband all dropped out. But Nikki expects her new baby girl to get a diploma.
Jimmy Lucas dropped out of high school 35 years ago and never went back. Now -- after a divorce and some jail time -- he says he is trying to live what he calls "the dream" life in America of working for himself. Lisa Andrukonis tells his story with text, photos and audio.
In Durham, they are trying to cut of truancy as a road to dropping out. Lander Atkinson looked at their multi-pronged approached to truancy by profiling each of the key players at Riverside High School's "truancy court." Lander also has some advice and words of encouragement for anyone starting out on their first reporting assignment.
Community-based approaches are widespread in North Carolina, and Ryan Greene has the story of efforts at a program run by the YMCA in Gastonia.
Every one of the students faced challenges this semester -- from a source who died to a computer that died. These challenges provided us with great learning opportunities. I, for example, learning a lot about building a site in Drupal. Perhaps the biggest lesson learned came from Kevin Kiley, who tackled the ambitious task of teaching himself how to use Ruby on Rails to program a database of high school droput statistics. Only two problems -- his professor unwittingly set him up with a lot of out-of-date tutorials and, as Kevin learned during his reporting, the state's education data is almost useless for a public that wants to better understand what's working well and what's working poorly in a state with one of the lowest graduation rates in the country.
And those are just the highlights. The students were also busy blogging, reporting an interactive FAQ about the dropout rate, and sharing links with other professional journalists.
I'm both sad and relieved that the semester is over. I hope the students are proud of their work and that their efforts help illuminate some new ideas about how to report public affairs for new media. And I'm already looking forward to seeing what the students next spring will do to top it.
- Ryan Thornburg's blog
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