We spend our days sitting in relatively well furnished buildings dispensing the building blocks of information to the generation that is going to fix the mess we have made.

But as a rule we academics do very little when it comes to actually practicing what we teach!

Do we get beyond a dusty journal when it comes to sharing what we are doing with the greater community?

Do we take our ideas to the street or only to obscure conferences?

Do we even practice what it is we are teaching?

The sad and sorry truth is not usually.

Sure there are exceptions to the rule and so far an between that you can probably name the culprits who are breaking the pattern on one hand.

That is the sad thing about the evolution of modern academia, we are not asked to actually get out there and do.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP!

I live by that mantra.

I teach communication by day at Zayed University and by night I am a broadcast journalist on Dubai Eye 103.8FM.

My hope is that my students see, well hear, me not only teaching ideas but putting them into practice.

This year I was offered a rare opportunity to put my classroom exercises to the ultimate test, I also teach public speaking and presentation courses, to present at TEDxDubai.

Giorgio Ungania and Natascia Radice, the curators of TEDxDubai, presented me with the ultimate challenge do what I do in the classroom to a critical public audience and in only 18 minutes.

Put up or shut up in the real.

I agonized over my presentation.

Hours were invested in formatting the story and practicing the pitch, because my talk was a pitch to think about ideas.

And I will confess here and now I was more nervous than I have ever been, mostly because several of my students volunteered at TEDxDubai and made a point of telling me that it was their turn to grade me!

Well, I am here to report that the talk happened.

The story worked and I think people took home a nugget or 2.

You be the judge.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19470467[/vimeo]

One thing is for sure what I did was exactly what I teach my students and a shining example of putting up and eventually leaving the stage!

Yes we need more local coverage of ideas and issues, maybe that means we need more journalists.

But I dare say the journalist of yesterday and the journalist of today are 2 very different people.

The tools are different, the distribution is changing, the context has changed and the associations and links in the news are new!

And smoking and swearing in public are almost totally outlawed!

The journalist of yesterday is a content curator today!

Yes our curators will write and disseminate original work product.

But the information curator of today will also gather, sort and contextualize the vast amount of information for others!

Here is a piece of the Robin Good post on the idea of media curators today.

What is content curation and why is it so important for the future of web content publishers? The content curator is the next emerging disruptive role in the content creation and distribution chain. In a world submerged by a flood of information, content curators may provide in the coming months and years a new, tremendously valuable service to anyone looking for quality information online: a personalized, qualified selection of the best and most relevant content and resources on a very specific topic or theme.

Photo credit: Luna Vandoorne Vallejo

In other words, a content curator is someone “who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online“. The most important component of this job is the word “continually.”In the real-time world of the Internet, this is critical.

This is how marketing expert Rohit Bhargava defines what he thinks is one of the key emerging online editorial roles of the future.

What the web needs to become even more useful and meaningful again (like in the old times, where only few websites existed) is a specialized middle layer of editors that gather, filter and distribute relevant information on specific niches of interest.

I have written and discussed at length of something very similar
since 2004, when I started writing about the concept of newsradars and newsmastering:

[...] the emerging newsmaster, is not just like the typical passionate Twitterer who shares all kinds of valuable information she finds. Her value, as I see it, emerges from focusing only on one, very specific topic, and acting as an always-on radar. Its unique value is not just in the ability to capture everything being said, written and published on a specific topic, but very much into her ability to filter, select and editorially curate (titling, sequencing, grouping, commenting, etc.) the flow of information she manages.

Mastering how to create niche-targeted compilations of content is indeed one of the key lifesaving strategies that wise-minded online publishers can adopt to offer greater value, even at a price, to those interested in it.

In a world where attention has become so scarce to become as valuable as currency, and where quality information on a specific topic requires ever more time and attention to be found, the value that could provide those who have the ability to organize, select, compile and edit the most valuable information on anyone topic is incommensurable.

Link: http://www.masternewmedia.org/content-curation-why-is-the-content-curator-the-key-emerging-online-editorial-role-of-the-future/#ixzz147mbYel7

Listen

One of the toughest parts of working in education is knowing that you are teaching a group of students of which some will go into careers that at this exact moment do not exist.

So, the question has to be, am I giving them the skills they need?

Unfortunately, and I do mean unfortunately, there are many academics around the world who really truly have no clue and are prepared to teach what they have been teaching the same way they have been teaching it for the last 2 decades with no care in the world for how their students might use, apply or think about that content.

Of course part of the problem is rapid application change of technology.

Technology itself is not really changing that fast but the way we use and apply it is strapped to a rocket heading for orbit.

So what do our teachers and professors need to do?

Look and listen more actively to their environment, oh and dare to try something newer.

I am particularly interested in the changes coming about in journalism and really see the trade having gone full circle back to the personalized niche content it was way back when.

I stumbled, quite literally, upon the Dalton Camp lecture on journalism being delivered by Sue Gardner executive director of the Wikimedia foundation.

For me, anyway, this talk helps me understand how the study of technology and the application of it might be refocused in the classroom and beyond to at least hint at how students might use old and new tools being delivered in academia for their future.

The lecture was broadcast on Ideas a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program.

I would love to read your comments!

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/audio.html is where you can hear more Ideas programs.

Here are the details of the Camp lecture.

November 26
THE 2009 DALTON CAMP LECTURE IN JOURNALISM

Listen

Journalism is facing new challenges as it evolves in the context of online environments. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation delivers the Dalton Camp Lecture at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.

I wonder why it is we send students on internships YET we do not see professors going on yearly internships themselves?

It is great that professors write papers BUT what about every professor spending 10 weeks a year in industry?

This professor internship could be amazing for the academy and amazing for business.

So why is this not the norm?

Just tossing it out there.