#OpBART 6 poster by @exiledsurfer

Happy Monday, everyone!

#OpBART 6 is scheduled for 5 p.m., but where? I plan on checking in at Civic Center station at the usual time while monitoring the hashtag for updates.

If the theme of today’s protest really is to ride the trains, I wonder, Where will we be going? I guess we’ll find out.

Like previous #OpBART protests, I will be reporting and commenting about the event on Twitter. @ mention me if you plan to be there.

Thanks!

#OpBART 5 poster by @exiledsurfer

If you’re planning to be at #OpBART 5, please let me know on Twitter. Meeting time is the usual 5 p.m. at Civic Center and possibly other BART stations. Follow the #OpBART hashtag for live updates.

Meantime, I spoke with BART spokesperson Jim Allison on the phone this morning. Here are the highlights:

• Jim said he plans to ask the media if they’d be willing to stay in a designated area behind police tape at #OpBART 5 today and that the designated area would be set up so the media can see what’s going on, unlike the situation Thursday at #nofare.
• Jim is sorry about what happened to journalism students at #nofare. He offered to come to @sfstatedept and meet with us.
• One of the challenges, said Jim, is that many journos show up to #OpBART without creds, some with agendas. Said it’s the “new state of journalism.”
• Jim’s tone seemed to suggest he accepts that journalists with an agenda is part of the “new state of journalism.”
• Jim asked me to give him a heads up when @statejdept students plan to cover #OpBART. I said I would, whenever possible.
• When he visits @sfstatejdept, Jim will explain how students can file complaints with #BART police if they feel they were mistreated.
• Jim said @SFBART won’t limit access to #OpBART protests only to journos w/ credentials. He said @SFPD initiated cred check at #nofare.
• Jim agreed that it was scary at #nofare when @SFBART police forced media out, preventing us from seeing what was happening inside.

#OpBART 4 poster by @exiledsurfer

As I’ve done each week since #OpBART started, today I will be tweeting the latest installment of protests against BART police abuses, starting with a No Justice No BART press conference scheduled for 4:30 p.m.

Hope to see you at the Civic Center BART station! If you’re planning to go, tweet me @pixplz.

Although some of these questions are different from ones I asked last semester, I am noticing what might be some interesting trends: that more students now have smartphones, and that they’re using Twitter and RSS more often. Hopefully this pattern will continue.

Do you have a smartphone?

If you have a Twitter account, how often do you use it?

How often do you use an RSS reader such as Google Reader?

Where do you get your news?

I never would have guessed that more students would say they get their news from email newsletters than from TV!

#OpBART 3 poster by @exiledsurfer

Comrades: This is just to let you know that I’ll be tweeting the latest protest against police abuses and censorship by BART, beginning at around 5 p.m. today at the Civic Center station. Follow the #OpBART hashtag for more news, information and analysis. If you plan on going, let me know on Twitter. Hope to see you there!

Student survey

Course syllabus

Blog guidelines

Please follow the class Twitter list!

Information Resources

Google Crisis Response
Google Person Finder
Save Japan
Columbia University Journalism School “JapanQuake” information links

News Reports, Updates and Feeds

Nikkei.com earthquake news updates
New York Times satellite photographs
Scientific American article describing worst case scenario at Fukushima Power Plant

Live Video Feeds

NHK English feed
TV News Radio
TBStv

Donations

Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California Northern Japan Earthquake Relief Fund
Give2Asia Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Fund
Japanese American Citizens League Japan Relief and Recovery Fund
Associated Press listing of earthquake relief funds
Japan Society Earthquake Fund
American Red Cross fund for Japan
MercyCorps
Emebeddable, international list from Storify
CNN’s Impact Your World

Cellphone texting donation programs

text JAPAN to 50555 to donate $10 (GlobalGiving)
text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 (American Red Cross)
text MERCY to 25283 to donate $10 (Mercy Corps)
text JAPAN or TSUNAMI to 20222 to donate $10 (Save the Children)

Live tweets from publication class

Sometime around the fall of 2007, I visited a class taught by Jon Funabiki to talk about some of the various online experiments that I was working on at The Chronicle: stuff like podcasting, interactive maps, databases, and using this newish thing called Twitter, which was then a little over a year old.

The Chronicle had just launched an account to send breaking news alerts via text message. I asked the room of SF State students, about 60 or so of them in the lecture hall, if anyone had heard of Twitter. No one had.

Although The Chronicle eventually gave up on many of its multimedia efforts, its presence on Twitter grew. Meanwhile, the number of journalism students at SF State who are not only aware of Twitter but are using it daily has steadily gone up as well.

Here’s a snapshot of where we are in early 2011: the department’s fledgling Twitter account, which I help to maintain, has a list of more than 100 current and former SF State journalism students, many of whom are very active users.

On the first day of our Intro to Online Journalism class, students are required to sign up for a Twitter account if they don’t have one already, and then they must follow at least 100 new people. This is a crucial step: The idea is to get them listening to the conversation first. Without this, newbies will be left staring at a blank screen, wondering if it was all a bunch of hype, and feeling unsure what to tweet about. (Hat tip to Byron Philhour for this great idea.)

When other means didn't work, a student used Twitter to get the story

Educators have discovered that Twitter is an important teaching tool because it fosters engagement. Over the past year I’ve noticed a steady uptick in the number of students interacting on Twitter with me, with sources, with each other and with the course material, during class and between classes. What more could a teacher ask for than students tweeting links to the assigned reading?

Backchannels are emerging. Soon, perhaps, such backchannels will become the norm in journalism classes at SF State.

Yeah, the already shitty media landscape just got shittier. Here’s a handful of other important media stories from the past week that you might have missed:

Egyptian journalist dies after being shot in clashes [Romenesko]

Speak To Tweet gives voice to Egyptian protesters [Tech Chronicles]

NBC fires guy who posted “What is the Internet?” video [Salon]

More details emerge about street photog Vivian Maier [KobreChannel]

Miami Herald thinks its frozen iguana video is popular [Awl]

(Photo by Flickr user bisonblog)

Where do you get your news?

Do you use an RSS reader such as Google Reader?

Do you have a Twitter account?

How often do you use Twitter?

Nothing too surprising here, although it’s worth noting that one person included webcomics as a source of news, which I think is pretty cool (it’s too small to see in the word cloud). I’ll add that as an option in next semester’s poll. Also, plenty of students still read newspapers. What is up with that?