Last week on Education Shift (a blog hosted by PBS MediaShift), Human Rights Channel Curator Madeleine Bair authored a two-part blog series on ways in which citizens and journalists can work together to capture and curate user-generated content and how these models and ideas can be better integrated into journalism education. Madeleine presented her thoughts while attending the annual conference of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) last week in Montreal, Canada.

In the first post, Madeleine highlights five projects that demonstrate how citizen video can be used to support new models of journalism. Everyday more and more user-generated content is uploaded to the internet. Raw and often lacking context, much of this footage is never seen by large audiences, regardless of what it portrays. In this new media environment, Bair discusses how journalists have embraced their potential roles as curators and produced exciting results. From a Greek prison hospital to the middle of the war in Syria, these five projects provide food for thought for anyone interested in citizen journalism and storytelling.

In the second post titled “Skills, Attitudes and Approaches for the Journalist as Curator” Madeleine focuses on how journalism education can be expanded to train journalists and citizens to be better curators and consumers of citizen content. She encourages journalism educators to challenge their students to engage with community correspondents, question what types of coverage are missing in the news media, and work to add value to citizen reports that may fill information gaps.

Upon return from the conference, Madeleine reports that she was excited to hear about the various ways that journalism schools are teaching their students about how to use citizen video. In addition to a number of new programs and classes emerging to address citizen-content, schools are teaching methodologies that use journalism as a civic engagement tool through models that amplify citizen storytelling with the aim of reaching key change maker audiences. More examples of interesting projects and new journalism degrees can be found in this blog post by journalist Josh Stearns.

Featured image courtesy of The Knight Foundation. This image was taken during a rally protesting violence towards journalists in Mexico City in 2010.

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