Over the summer I had to create a project using Web 1.0 tools. The project summary read:
Classes will read and analyze local newspaper coverage of global events. Students will gain an appreciation of the political, cultural, and religious factors that contribute to “media bias”.
The project will run from October 1 to May 1. Schools must register by September 25.
Twice a month the project coordinator will post a globally covered news event. Participating schools will then post links to their local coverage of the event. Classes will discuss the differences in the articles and speculate on the reasons behind them.
At the end of the project, each school will submit an article discussing their local paper including: how well it factually covers global news, to what extent the coverage bias reflects community values, factors that cause global issues to be covered minimally.
The stated plan was to set up a webpage with a discussion board. It could also be set up as a blog – with the facilitator making the news event a blog posting.
With a blog, students would have to be better at sorting and analyzing information as the comments would be lumped together. Students would have to spend more time deciding which areas were covered in a comment and figure out how to group them in a locally stored document to synthesize them.
In a discussion board, threads could be created for the comments with prompts for each of the areas looked at (bias, factual information, local factors that pushed the global event aside, etc). With the discussion organized, students could spend more time with the synthesis.
How well the tool suited the job would depend on what learning goals you had.
It is interesting to see what students choose to respond to when you post prompts. Their perspectives are often very different from ours.
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