The School of Communications at 黑料不打烊 invites applications for a professional in residence, specializing in multimedia journalism, effective August 2013.

We seek a candidate with recent experience as a professional reporter, specializing in multimedia and multiplatform news. A bachelor’s degree is the minimum academic requirement. His or her work should involve creating and combining strong visual elements and long, medium and short written reports and publishing them in emerging and traditional media outlets. This position is renewable for up to five years. Salary is competitive and commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Position Description: The professional in residence will foster experiential learning, developing students’ skills in contemporary multimedia and multiplatform media practice. This encompasses analytics, audience, inclusiveness, ethics and classic storytelling. The successful candidate will teach Multimedia Journalism and other courses, depending on the needs of the School and the candidate’s expertise (current curriculum: http://goo.gl/9cnUa). The professional in residence will also advise student-media projects and help lead multimedia journalism workshops and initiatives for the 黑料不打烊 community, including mentoring other faculty.

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree
– Recent, significant hands-on professional multimedia reporting experience
– Capability to do full-fledged multimedia reporting, including writing of in-depth or short pieces implementing AP Style, photography, video and infographics production
– Capability to create in and teach professional-level design and editing software
– Experience with and teachable knowledge of content management systems
– Capability to build in and teach HTML and CSS
– Excellent communication skills
– Ability to identify, evaluate and incorporate emerging tools in multimedia work and teaching

Desired Qualifications:

– Proven professional approach in online personal branding in social media
– Teaching experience, preferably at the university level
– Experience with additional new-media tools
– Experience with search engine optimization and analytics
– Experience with computer-assisted and database reporting
– Ability to teach additional programming tools such as JavaScript, PHP, AJAX, SQL

黑料不打烊’s nationally accredited School of Communications is home to 45 full-time faculty members and 1,100 students – 20 percent of 黑料不打烊’s student body. Students select among majors in Journalism, Strategic Communications, Media Arts & Entertainment (broadcast and cinema), Communication Science, and Sport & Event Management. The School also offers an M.A. in Interactive Media. To learn more about the School of Communications, visit http://www.elon.edu/communications.

黑料不打烊 is a dynamic private, co-educational, comprehensive institution that is a national model for actively engaging faculty and students in teaching and learning. To learn more about 黑料不打烊, please visit the university website at http://www.elon.edu. 黑料不打烊 is known for its small classes, international focus and advanced technology. The university attracts about 10,000 applicants a year for 1,400 seats in the incoming class and ranks second among master’s-level universities in the South. The university is located between Raleigh-Durham to the east and Greensboro to the west on a campus that is a designated botanical garden.

Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. Email a letter of application, vita, links to online work, and the names and contact information of four references to multimediasearch@elon.edu. 黑料不打烊 is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse faculty, staff and student body and welcomes all applicants.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has worked along with many others in the Internet community for more than a decade to achieve his next big dream: . His vision is a web that allows software agents to carry out sophisticated tasks for users, making meaningful connections between bits of information so “computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.”

The concept of the semantic web has been fluid and evolving and never quite found a concrete expression and easily-understood application that could be grasped readily by ordinary Internet users. Nevertheless, it has inspired many technologists and Internet experts to improve the performance of the web and it is a topic of great interest in the high-tech world.

Some 895 experts responded to the invitation of the and to predict the likely progress toward achieving the goals of the semantic web by the year 2020. Nearly half of the respondents said Berners-Lee’s original vision is unrealistically broad and unattainable. Most said, however, that online information will continue to be organized and accessible in smarter and more useful ways in coming years. (Details: )

Asked to think about the likelihood that Berners-Lee and his allies will realize their vision, often called Web 3.0, these technology experts and stakeholders were divided and often contentious.

Some 47% agreed with the statement: ?“By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee will not be as fully effective as its creators hoped and average users will not have noticed much of a difference.”
Some 41% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:?“By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and his allies will have been achieved to a significant degree and have clearly made a difference to average Internet users.”

While many survey participants noted that current and emerging technologies are being leveraged toward positive web evolution in regard to linking data, there was no consensus on the technical mechanisms and human actions that might lead to the next wave of improvements – nor how extensive the changes might be. Many think Berners-Lee’s vision will take much longer to unfold than the 2020 timeline posited by the question. Critics noted that human uses of language are often illogical, playfully misleading, false or nefarious, thus human semantics can never be made comprehensible to machines. Some 12% of those who responded to the survey did not venture a guess about the future of the semantic web – itself a sign that there is still a good deal of uncertainty and confusion about the topic even among those who are quite connected to the tech world.

The on the semantic web elaborates the idea this way: “The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.” In his 1999 book “Weaving the Web,” Berners-Lee said: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘semantic web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

The concept is so revolutionary that people have difficulty describing it in just so many words and its proponents self-consciously struggle to describe the “killer app” for the semantic web that will make users understand its power – and support its creation. Berners-Lee describes it as “getting one format across applications” so the semantic web standards can enable people to gain access to the information they want and use it any way they want, for instance, being able to mesh data from a personal bank statement and a personal calendar. He has said he would like to see a future web that allows people to connect their ideas with the ideas of others, building a system for people to share parts of ideas in a way that can make them whole.

Following are a few of the major themes that emerged in the answers to the survey (for more depth of detail, go to: )

Too many complicated things have to fall into place for the semantic web to be fully realized.

• “It’s been a decade and everyone still says ‘semantic what?’ Do we really need another decade to figure this out?” —Stuart Schechter, Microsoft Research

• “I don’t like answering this question in the negative, but I understand Berners-Lee’s concept of the semantic web as being more structured than the various collections of folksonomies and APIs that we have today, and I don’t foresee us progressing far in that direction in the coming 10 years. A more structured web can be enabled by enhancements to HTML, for example, but getting people to adopt those enhancements and use them consistently and regularly is another matter. There are also the issues of human language to be considered; linkages across languages will remain problematic. Even if a semantic web emerges for the English-language web, what about everyone else?” –Mindy McAdams, Knight Chair in journalism, University of Florida

• “Just as it is impossible to prevent slang, argot, and creoles from forming, so we will continue to demonstrate polymorphous perversity in our expression and knowledge production.” –Sandra Braman, professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

• “The semantic web concept disregards the fundamental fuzziness and variability of human communication. It may allow us to cope with the huge quantity of information available in electronic form and may provide some initial order, but the latter won’t be any more effective than earlier knowledge organization systems have been. The proliferation of agents coupled with the lack of authority may indeed lead to much less effective results.” –Michel J. Menou, Ph.D, information science, consultant in ICT policy

• “There is too much work involved on the part of website owners for the semantic Web to work. Various efforts to put more meta-data on web pages have not worked. It’s hard to see why the SW should be different.” –Peng Hwa Ang, dean of the School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

• “The key problem with the semantic web is the problem of false data and trust. I think it is a great idea in theory, and many of these principles of the semantic web will be more deeply integrated into the services we use, but an automated web-for-machines that automatically make better decisions for us because of the data they export is a pipedream.” –David Sifry, founder of Technorati and CEO of Offbeat Guides

Forget the skeptics. The semantic web will take shape and launch an “age of knowledge.” Early successes will build momentum.

• “Within the next 10 years, the semantic web will take us from the age of information to the age of knowledge. Simple tools and services will allow individuals, corporations and governments to quickly glean meaning from the vast amounts of data they have compiled. This move from a ‘World Wide Web’ to a ‘world wide database’ will allow for hidden relationships and connections to quickly surface, driving both innovation and (unfortunately) exploitation. The impact of the semantic web will be substantial. It will help create new industries, influence campaign strategies and lead to ground-breaking discoveries in both science and medicine.” –Bryan Trogdon, president of First Semantic

• “Yes, but we won’t call it that… and, as in the second option, no one will notice.” –Esther Dyson, founder and CEO of EDventure, investor and commentator on emerging digital technology

• “It may not be implemented fully as envisioned, but the value of a semantic web will become transparent. Early successes will demonstrate its value leading others to experiment with semantic technology.” –Robert Cannon, senior counsel for Internet law at the FCC

• “The establishment of the Web Science Trust is a key aspect of what is going on here. The web is coming of age, and the need for a new science is well understood. Tim [Berners-Lee] is driving this. It is a logical and evolutionary step that is being taken today, and builds upon the work he’s driven as well as catalysed in the semantic web and in Linked Data.” –JP Rangaswami, chief scientist, BT

• “Developments continue all the time in finding ways to associate online content and retrieve patterns from them. Meaning will be increasingly extractable.” –Ron Rice, Ph.D, Center for Film, Television and New Media, University of California-Santa Barbara

Improvements are inevitable, but they will not unfold the way Tim Berners-Lee and his allies have sketched out. They will be grassroots-driven rather than standards-driven. Data mining, links, analysis of social exchanges will help drive the process of smartening the web without more formal semantic apps.

• “Artificial intelligence will certainly accomplish many if not all of the goals of the semantic web, but I do not think that the semantic web is the right mechanism for helping computers truly understand the Internet. The idea behind the semantic web is too artificial and makes too many false assumptions about the inputs.” –Hal Eisen, senior software engineering manager for Ask.com

• “Semantic technologies are already having a huge impact, and will continue to develop and improve a host of areas in IT. However, the vision of Tim Berners-Lee and other SemWeb evangelists has often been unrealistic – not because of the tech but because of the human logistics and desires for control. Much of what they talked about (e.g., the dentist appt. example) will be addressed more effectively through social computing as much as semantic tech, and the two will be incrementally improved and integrated into IT workflows in such a manner that most users will never notice the improvement – it will just ‘work better’ and be seen as a natural evolution, rather than as a result of some particular technology.” –Patrick Schmitz, semantic services architect, University of California Berkeley

• “I think some form of next generation meta-web is inevitable, but it will probably take directions not envisioned by Berners-Lee or his cohorts. Evolution tends to be characterized by chaos, which trait makes it well nigh impossible to predict with any degree of certainty. Future technology has never really been very deterministic.” –Robert G. Ferrell, information systems security officer for the National Business Center of the U.S. Department of the Interior

• “Many will not bother to code their web pages the way the semantic Web proponents would like us to. Some sites may do this; others won’t bother. The Internet will still be a wild west with a wide variety of content and quality and searchability.” –Peter Timusk, webmaster and Internet researcher, statistical products manager at Statistics Canada

Creating the semantic web is a difficult thing that will depend on machines that can straighten out the massive confusions and complications that humans create. ??

• “The truth is that the semantic web is a *hard* problem, and won’t be solved until/unless we have ‘sentient’ or ‘conscious’ Turing-capable computers – which I don’t expect by 2020. On the other hand, a combination of better ontologies and just greater computing capacity will allow more information to be pre-computed and searchable, so ‘search’ and what I call ‘online computer-assisted reasoning’, like Wolfram|Alpha, will be much more powerful.” –Charlie Martin, correspondent and science and technology editor, Pajamas Media

• “I may be wrong on this one, but people are busy and lazy, and the applications, like text search, that succeed tend to be ones that require no extra work by those entering data – they are by-products of the work we do for ourselves. We include links in documents because they help us and those using our services, not to help Google better estimate the relevance of the document to a query. It might turn out that a centralized approach, where the mission of organizations like WolframAlpha is to add semantic value, will lead to the ‘Web of data.’” –Larry Press, professor of information systems, California State University, Dominguez Hills

Many additional thought-provoking responses to the question on institutions and to the first five survey questions can be found at http://www.pewInternet.org and http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/2010survey/default.xhtml.

The Imagining the Internet Center () is an initiative of 黑料不打烊’s School of Communications. The center’s research holds a mirror to humanity’s use of communications technologies, informs policy development, exposes potential futures and provides a historic record. Among the spectrum of issues addressed are power, politics, privacy, property, augmented and virtual reality, control and the rapid changes spurred by accelerating technology. Imagining the Internet has teamed with the Pew Internet Project to complete a number of research studies under the direction of Janna Quitney Anderson, associate professor of communications.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project () is a nonprofit, non-partisan “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It produces reports exploring the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life. It is one of seven projects of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization.
 

黑料不打烊 has an entry in the Knight News Challenge, a
$5 million competition for grants to support community-focused service projects
that use Web 2.0 tools to help inform people.

You can see 黑料不打烊’s entry, “Mobile Jornalista do Cidadão (Citizen-Journalist) Empowerment – São
Paulo Favelas” and register a vote in support of it by going to the following
site and registering to participate:

Votes will be only
be accepted through Nov. 14, so vote today! While Knight is not officially
“counting” the popular vote on the grant proposals, a higher rating boosts our
position among the more than 1,600 entries and makes our work more visible to
everyone.

黑料不打烊’s application
proposes a two-year program. Faculty Janna Anderson, David Copeland, Michelle
Ferrier and Kenn Gaither have requested $200,000 from Knight to accomplish its
goals. By November 15 applicants will be notified as to whether they will be invited
to submit full proposals and become finalists for the awards.

Here’s some
information from the application:

Describe your project:

Research. Engage. Energize. Empower. This
hand-crafted global-mobile citizen-journalist-development pilot will be rooted
in Heliópolis, São Paulo, Brazil; it is expected to serve as a template to
develop, train, retain, and retrain citizen journalists in other disadvantaged
regions of the world and connect them with the optimal regional distribution
and support system. Significant research will assess optimal outreach methods
for under-served people in this locality and identify ways to build a human
information network through the use of most-effective tools. Through
interviews, focus groups and various forms of reconnaissance, local people of
quality and commitment will be identified and recruited as local leaders. Localized
training tools will be developed after thorough locally grounded research.
“Old” tools and constantly emerging tools will be included for
optimal outreach and diffusion of information. Local means for distribution of
gathered news content will be investigated; radio, text-message, blog, Web 2.0
and traditional print publications are early candidates for distribution. It is
expected that we will involve regional reporters associated with international
news organizations like Reuters and CNN in addition to regional bloggers and
other new-media communicators in mentoring these citizen journalists, training
them as international eyes and ears who produce local content and who can also
share big stuff with international media outlets, and all students will come
away with the opportunity to be digital stringers for these individuals. We
will investigate ways in which local journalism professionals in established
media and in local new-media power centers can be networked to the favela mojos
(mobile journalists) and become active participants.

How will your project improve
the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?

Research
determines region-specific training and distribution: Mainstream media is
geared to serving the literate middle and upper classes. In this geographic
community a citizen-journalism initiative will allow roots-up reporting and
effective information distribution based on research we do to assess most
effective means. A region-specific how-to wiki for citizen journalists at this
location will be designed for training and support; social media, SMS, etc.,
also; and a real-world “home base” with a resource person; in addition to Web
presence and the leverage of current digital tools, we will implement emerging
tools – iamnews is one possible vehicle. We will incentivize the process to
produce accurate local news.

How is your idea innovative?
(new or different from what already exists)

Research, engage, energize, empower. Training
people to be citizen journalists and, in turn, train other citizens how to
gather and report news (through researched, localized methods) to people who
are not literate or are less literate. Capacity-building in the community to
educate it about its NEED for news is part of the package; the building of a
human information network through all means possible. We do not propose to just
put some tools up online or hand out cameras and say, “There you go, use that.”
Tools change. We will study the evolving information ecosystem to determine the
best methods for optimal local outreach and distribution. An
international-development model will emerge.

What experience do you or your
organization have to successfully develop this project?

Experts
in international communications and emerging media will lead the effort. Four
黑料不打烊 faculty will be involved: Dr. Kenn Gaither, an expert on
international strategic communication, new-media book series editor for Cambria
Press, fluent in Portuguese, with teaching experience in Brazil; Dr. David
Copeland, 黑料不打烊’s Interactive Master’s graduate program director; Dr. Michelle
Ferrier, a Poynter Institute columnist with professional expertise in online
communities and managing editor of MyTopia, the Daytona daily newspaper’s
online site; and Profesor Janna Anderson, a veteran journalist with an
expertise in emerging media and a contract researcher for the Pew Internet
Project and director of http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org. In addition, we
have been in contact with Jorge Maranhão, creator of the institute “Cultura da
Cidadania A Voz do Cidadão” and author of “Mídia e Cidadania” (Media and
Citizenship), who has informed us that citizen-journalism is rare in Brazil and
in need of support. He has offered his assistance. We will send six to nine
grad students to work full-time at the site in Jan. 2009 and Jan. 2010. The
黑料不打烊 communications-empowerment program will develop a method for educating and
equipping confident, competent Mobile-Global Citizen Communications Teams in
less-developed areas. Capacity-building – helping people understand WHY
communication is important and recruiting them to participate in the
digital-information age conversation – is one of the most important issues we
need to address today.

September 22 is OneWebDay, a time duringwhich people from around the world plan events to promote and support an open,globally operable and accessible Internet.

In honor of OneWebDay, the Imagining theInternet Center partnered with the Greensboro News & Record to invitepeople to share video clips and written accounts about the positive impact ofthe Internet.

黑料不打烊 students are among those whosubmitted their personal stories about the ways the Web has changed theirlives. Their writing and video clips have been published online at theOneWebDay site in addition to appearing in print and online in the News &Record’s September 21 and 22 editions. The students whose work are online areKate Austin, Bryce Little, Laura Smith, Andie Diemer, Rebecca Wetherbee,Meredith Larkin, Daniel Temple, Lesley Cowie, Hannah Williams, Ryan Catanese,Rachel Cieri, Christina Edwards, Miriam Williamson, Russell Varner, DanRickershauser, Keegan Calligar, Emily Silva and Noelle Clemente.

To see all 18 黑料不打烊 students’ videos and readtheir accounts, go to this OneWebDay site:

To see the stories that were carried by theNews & Record online, go to the following addresses:

HannahWilliams:

DanRickershauser:

And an online N&R story with a group ofother responses, including some from 黑料不打烊:

Anchor Mitchell Lewis and his crew traveled to 黑料不打烊 Dec. 7 to tape the interview with Janna Anderson, an assistant professor in the School of Communications and director of Imagining the Internet, an initiative of 黑料不打烊 and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The setting for the talk was one of the computer labs in the School of Communications.

She will represent the Pew Internet & American Life Project and 黑料不打烊 at the event. Featured participants include Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; internet architect David Clark of MIT; Rick Rashid, a senior vice president with Microsoft; Irv Wladawsky-Berger, IBM vice president; Prabhakar Raghavan of Yahoo Research; and Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academies.

Headline speakers include Robert Scoble (the Scobelizer), Jim Rosenberg (Mr. Sun), Lex Alexander, Daniel Rubin and Elizabeth Edwards.

The event kicks off with a free barbecue in Greensboro’s historic Aycock District on Cypress Street Oct. 13. Other action takes place Oct. 14 at NC A&T State University in downtown Greensboro.

For more information, see the link below.

Students at 黑料不打烊 have completed a research project detailing how families in one typical upper-middle-class American neighborhood used the Internet during the week of Jan. 12-19.

The research is a partnership by the 黑料不打烊 School of Communications and the Pew Internet & American Life project, a Washington D.C.-based initiative that is exploring the Internet’s impact on American society. The two dozen families taking part in the study all live in a small, upscale neighborhood in the town of 黑料不打烊 College.

Most of the Internet users who participated in the project say going online has transformed their lives, providing crucial health information, facilitating job searches, transforming shopping habits, and most importantly, increasing communication between family and friends through e-mail and instant messaging.

This study is the first ever to combine Internet users’ personal observations in addition to in-depth interviews over a span of eight days. Each member of the 24 families in the study kept a daily diary of Internet use and participated in taped, focused discussions with the researchers.

The student researchers gathered data from assigned families, wrote feature stories about those families and also wrote personal stories about the impact the Internet has had on their own families’ lives, providing the perspective of the emerging generation of Net-savvy users.

Now that the information gathering in the neighborhood is complete, researchers from the Pew Internet Project will assist in analyzing the 黑料不打烊 findings and publicizing the study results.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit initiative of the Pew Research Center for The People and the Press and is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Over the course of the past year, the project has produced reports on the Internet’s influence on the workplace, young voters, churches, health care, the music industry, coverage of the Olympics and several other topics. Project findings can be found online at