Behold On The Danforth Magazine! Just launched yesterday!
The magazine above was created by my (recently graduated) students as the final project for my Magazine 2.0 course, which is the web component of the post-graduate Book and Magazine Publishing program at Centennial College’s Centre for Creative Communications.
While I cannot take credit for their hard work and inspirations, this magazine is everything I had envisioned when I developed this course (and advocated for the use of Wordpress as a CMS).
All of the content on the site was the product of their other courses in the Magazine and Publishing program. My course was simply a means of showcasing what they had learned via the creation of a dynamic web2.0 magazine website. I can only take credit for the provision of tools, philosophies and examples. The rest was up to them.
Here’s how we did it …
The following is a distillation of my course based on current industry practices and my own approaches as a web2.0 content specialist and consultant for the magazine industry.
Using Wordpress as a CMS for magazines
As some of you already know, Wordpress is one of the most stable and user friendly open source content management systems out there. It’s easy to learn and easy to manage. In fact, you can teach yourself quite a lot about Wordpress by starting with the free blogging version. With little more than HTML, you may be able to move up to Wordpress.org to transform a blog cms into a fully functional website.
- my wordpress bookmarks for further reference
- all of my course bookmarks
In a nutshell, my course took them through the following stages to this final result:
So how did we do this? Here is a step by step overview of my course that outlines how we went from HTML website to dynamic CMS in three months. This model can be repurposed but the outcome cannot. I’d have to credit my students for their individual vision, creativity and outside interests. You cannot teach that - but you can, if you enable trust, tap into it. I was merely a facilitator.
1. You and the web: where do you stand?
This just in: Not everybody likes the web.
It’s really important to provide an opportunity to talk about our differences of opinion about the web and our individual relationships to it. For my course, though very rah-rah-rah-web-is-great (the purpose and focus of my course being relevant industry level knowledge of web production - not critique), offered many opportunities to criticize and examine current problems with the web such as the digital divide, privacy, corporate monopoly and other issues.
I used an affinity line to get students to position themselves in relation to their place on the adoption lifecycle (i.e., early adopter, late majority, laggard) and say why. I also created a web2.0 mags diagnostic to survey students on their interests, experience, needs and concerns about the course - namely, what are their genuine interests v. the stated goals of the course.
2. Web1.0 v. web2.0: What’s the difference?
Unpacking the definitions of web history in relation to web philosophies, history and tools. We talked about early design driven sites (that didn’t have a lot of functionality) versus a shift in focus to usability, functionality and user-focus. Students were asked to find and critique 3 definitively web2.0 mags in relation to basic usability and social and participatory media.
3. Content Management Systems (CMS) and web content
Given that I wasn’t teaching a class of programmers - or would be programmers - I got students started with CMS using the free Wordpress. Each student signed up for their own account and chose a theme. In the coming weeks, they would use their Wordpress blog to post assignments and get comfortable working with a web interface. This got them all comfortable with the basics.
We also learned about web usability writing (via Jacob Nielsen and online news media - CP style, CBC style and others) and created web only writing assignments designed to ENGAGE an online reader via interactive multimedia content choices and direct address/questions within the text.
Throughout the course we touched on design but it was given a fairly light treatment in relation to usability, content management and features. Students were asked to find Wordpress.org themes that were simple and professional looking but offered functionality and hackability. Mimbo and Revolution proved very popular!
4. Web2.0 tools and trends: Delicious, WIKIs, Facebook/SNS and more
Every week of my course I would introduce the start of the class with a new tool or trend - such as delicious, Yahoo Live, Twitter and anything else that was truly emergent. I was able to bring in industry experts via these technologies. It was a lot of fun! I’ve written about this here. Understanding and critically engaging new tools was an essential component of this course. While this was likely the most overwhelming part of my course, many students expressed increased critical awareness of the social media tools they were already using and began to interrogate peripheral questions about user controls, privacy, opt-in/out models, open source v. proprietary models and other emerging issues around social media.
5. Web analytics, marketing, advertising and reach
While this was not a primary focus for my course, it was a necessary area of learning. Given that this is one of the most challenging areas of web production, I narrowed our exploration of analytics tools to statcounter and Google Analytics. Since statcounter is free, simple to understand and compatible with Wordpress we began there. Google Analytics was introduced but left as a ‘further exploration’ for those entirely invested in marketing and analytics. In addition to analytics tools, we examined emergent web marketing strategy in relation to community building, reach and increasing traffic.
6. Web2.0 Magazine strategy: Features, content, design, marketing and community vision
Based on all that we had covered, students were grouped to put together a complete web strategy for the On The Danforth magazine. Most used Google docs presentation (a tool I’d used throughout the course) and sent their link to the rest of the class for further reading. Each group was responsible for a whole strategy but all were encouraged to think about focusing on 1 or 2 of their strongest ideas (i.e., a community in NING or a User Generated Content model). Their ideas were very smart and reflected their cumulative knowledge from all of their program courses - as well as their prior knowledge and extracurricular expertise as web users.
There was a whole lot more but these were the primary areas we covered and those I would suggest to others with a similar project in mind.
Wonderful project. I would love to see a learning environment like this at my local campus. You really got my wheels turning with this article.
How many people participated?
How long was the excercise from start to finish?
Was the final project graded by peer review or by yourself?
What was the inspiration behind starting such a course, what led up to it?
Thanks for sharing this information.
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Thanks Keldwud!
How many people participated?
I had two groups for the same course. 35 students in each group so close to 70 students.
2. How long was the excercise from start to finish?
My course (a mere 2 hours a week - not enough time!) began in September until the end of March. It was madcap! This course should either be a year long or a half semester but 4 hours. 2 hours lab, 2 hours instruction.
2. Was the final project graded by peer review or by yourself?
BOTH! I had part peer evaluation and then graded according to the criteria of the assignment. During the presentations, all students evaluated the content according to a productive criteria (that would be professionally relevant).
Because this is an industry course (not theory, not secondary learning) the methods of evaluation and assessment were closely aligned to industry practices - so final presentations were professional presentations evaluated according to a client “sign off” (though everything gets a grade).
3. What was the inspiration behind starting such a course, what led up to it?
I was asked to teach this course because of my experience 1) as an early adopter to web2.0 social media 2) industry content producer 3) instructor at the college and 4) magazines industry consultant.
The course was the product of my recent presentations for the magazine industry and explorations of social and participatory media.
I designed and developed this course according to cutting edge/emergent philosophies, tools and trends. As far as I know, I’m one of the first to create a course specifically designed for the above purposes (i.e.., non theory production focused)
Additionally …
As I was just telling my partner, I’ve presented all of these same tools and philosophies to a variety of different learners - college, at risk, corporate and otherwise with varying results.
I’d like to say, for the record, that the final results depend almost entirely on the group you’re teaching - their prior knowledge, their interest, your ability to generate trust/interest and etc.
I taught virtually all the same tools to another group of students - those who did not have a university degree (and largely at-risk) and there was little engagement, participation and etc (same group were failing many courses simply because they weren’t coming to class, doing any work, etc). So again, it doesn’t always come back to the teacher and their *special* whatever.
Students, by and large, define the quality of our work. If you cannot earn their trust, you have nothing.
[Reply]
Hi Melanie, wonderful stuff and a really interesting analysis of what you do, why and how you do it. We end up doing very similar things here on the PG Dip Magazine Journalism at Cardiff University (Wales, UK). Our students end up producing course magazines that have to have both print and digital presence. There’s a lot of preparatory work, talking round the intentions and how to achieve them. If you want to have a look at the end products, these are the two we did this year:
http://journalism.cf.ac.uk/tracks/
http://journalism.cf.ac.uk/indienational/
We use a CMS that was custom built by a late colleague but are thinking of making an across-the-school switch to Wordpress, so having your recommendation is good.
The magazines are made in the second semester. In the first semester we have a standalone “Online Journalism” module that introduces a lot of the more historical/theoretical/ethical considerations. This is taught jointly to Magazine, Newspaper and Broadcast students (we still have specialist silos) and it is very interesting to monitor the reactions of the different groups. We have encountered most resistance to the whole idea from Newspaper students but it is difficult to untangle the skein of expectation and attitude that causes it.
On the Magazine course our approach is to emphasise from Day One that students will be working in a multi-platform world and they had better not just get used to it but positively embrace it. UK magazine employers increasingly expect journalism graduates to arrive with everything PLUS on-camera presentation skills.
Anyhoo - thank you for sharing your work with us.
[Reply]
Thank you Tim! I entirely forgot to reply to this wonderful comment - I have been busy. Agreed with all points - and especially about using wordpress as a CMS (even if they don’t end up using wordpress, it teaches students how to negotiate this type of user interface/system)> So it’s all good. Of course, I’m going to say GO WORDPRESS! :)
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