Читать книгу Rethinking Digital Native Comunicators Training - Cristina Pulido Rodriguez - Страница 6

SANTIAGO TEJEDOR, CRISTINA PULIDO

The communicators’ training is one the fields with more updates due to constant changes faced every year. Therefore, digital native students have competencies developed in an informal way that become a natural bridge to reinforce the professional competencies needed.

The educational environment has undergone profound transformations in recent decades: specifically offering undergraduate and graduate courses in communication, as it faces new and rapidly evolving challenges.

On the one hand, the training of future professionals in the field of communication and journalism has been directly affected by the technological changes introduced by cyberspace and the successive developments of the network: web 2.0 or social web, web 3.0 or semantic web and web 4.0 or the “internet of things”.

On the other hand, 20th-century teaching methods and 21st-century technology represent a generation gap like no other. Our students are digital natives. They grew up with computers and internet access and smartphones, social media and mobile devices and are not interested in traditional passive learning.

Therefore, the role of communication and journalism education is not only to provide future journalists or communicators with new technological skills. Nevertheless, primarily to prepare them to adapt to a fast-moving world. Things can change almost month by month as the interface between humans, and the digital world gets closer and closer.

This book collects the contributions of different university teachers of communication and journalism studies around Europe on the last challenges in this topic: a unique opportunity to be updated with a European overview.

We have classified the contributions in three main topics: a) Teaching of automated journalism and information algorithms, the application of Artificial Intelligence, b) Teaching experiences, innovation in theory and practice and, c) New emerging professional profiles and diverse challenges.

There are four chapters under the section of Teaching of automated journalism and information algorithms applying Artificial Intelligence. The first one Marcel France analyses how AI should be more a tool for solving tedious work but not to replace journalists. Nerveless, it is a crucial point to teach students to manage AI in the newsroom workflow. The second one, led by Lara van Dievoet et colleagues, presents a teaching experiment designed to lead journalism students to apprehend the influence of social network algorithms on news distribution. Pilar Sánchez et colleagues led the third chapter focused on the study on the level of implementation of AI in Spanish Universities. The content analysis of the 40 journalism programs shows a lack of Teaching on this topic and the need to reinforce the innovation on these programs for facing the current challenges in the media industry. Georgeta Drula leads the last chapter of this first section analyses the implications of the AI and automated process in the Journalistic Practices into the Romanian professional profile. AI software and tools work to automate different categories of content, annotate it, or increase readers’ real attention to content. The use of AI tools and software in the newsroom can help journalists make good work decisions. The difficulties and possibilities for including them in the newsroom are also shared.

Regarding the section Teaching experiences: innovation in theory and practice, there are five chapters for analysing innovation. The first chapter written by Max Cotter and colleagues explore these questions How do we build an empathetic, accessible classroom that fosters identification between students, teaching staff and curriculum? The reflections about implementing a concrete course explore the answers that could be transferred to other practices. The second chapter, led by Marc Compte and Joan Cuenca, explores the role of digital communication training for communication managers and if it is included in master’s degrees offered in Spain to evaluate their suitability. The third chapter, written by Beñat Flores et colleagues, explores how the promotion and assessment of student Creative Self-Efficacy (CSE) has become a topic of interest within creativity research in education. The authors present the results of implementing a 15-week university program aimed at helping students develop their CSE (namely “Innovative Audiovisual Contents and Formats”, or IACF). The fourth chapter led by Santiago Tejedor and colleagues share the results of two descriptive studies analysing the curricula in Communication and Journalism of the best-ranked universities in Europe and Worldwide QS World University Rankings. One of the contributions focused on overcoming the old debate between theory and practice; Universities should adapt to the technological changes without losing the traditional journalism ethics and values. The last chapter of this section is a comparative study of the new skills for nowadays journalists in Germany, Hungary, Portugal and Romania written by Ana Pinto and colleagues. There is a common point with observing the growing importance of data journalism and visualisation, cross-border collaborative journalism, entrepreneurial journalism, new business models, and how to teach journalistic ethics in the digital age.

The last section, New emerging professional profiles and diverse challenges, contains four chapters. The first one focused on educational innovation for new professional profiles in journalism studies led by Carmen García-Galera et colleagues, concluding that universities should support innovation. The second chapter explores the inclusive training and labour market focused on how to help students with disabilities to ensure their inclusion led by Jesus Angel Pérez Dasilva et colleagues. The analysis of the company internships selected that include students with disabilities is the focus of this contribution, concluding that students’ learning ability is recorded as excellent. The third chapter, led by Susanne Kirchhof explore the link between new trends and old values; the chapter examines the education discourse along with three key elements: journalistic competencies, the relationship with the media industry and innovative teaching methods. Furthermore, the last chapter of this section is focused on Employing eCommerce product filtering to discern suitable visual forms for journalistic storytelling written by Inge Beekmans. The author reflects on how choosing appropriate storytelling tools and interactive visual forms should be addressed as part of a broader discussion about visual and interactive literacy amongst journalists and their audiences within digital environments.

We invite you to read these contributions and explore new ones to improve the excellence of innovation in communication and journalism studies. Our students deserve this commitment.