Geek dinner details

Geek dinner today at 6pm is a mashup!
This evening Cynthia McCune, JMC webmaster and I are having a Geek Dinner at Tony Sopranos on San Fernando Street in San Jose. This dinner is a mashup with students, faculty and staff from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University mixing with folks from other departments at SJSU and hopefully the area blogging community being invited. In other words, if you can read these words you are invited.

There is a topic for the event. We are planning to be teaching a new course, J132, in the Fall focusing on new media in journalism. By this we mean using new technologies like blogging, podcasting, videocasting to report the news. I don't want to say much more than that for fear that it will taint the conversation.

Following the meal there will be an extended conversation which we intend to record and release as a podcast. Professor McCune and I have drawn up some questions to get the conversation rolling. Here they are:

• What is your vision of what a new media class is?
  • What would you like it to be when it grows up?
  • What are you looking and hoping for?
  • What are you hoping will be the outcomes of the class?
  • What are you hoping to get out of the class?
  • What do you think the class should not cover?
• What specific concepts and technologies do you think the course should cover or not cover?
  • Print and/or traditional mass media
  • HTML
  • Web Design
  • Web 2.0 and Ajax
  • XML
  • RSS
  • Blogging
  • Audio and/or video podcasting
  • OPML
  • Disruptive Technology
  • Mobile devices, cell phone cameras and Moblogging
• Who would you like to see as guest speakers in the course?

The items in the above are presented for the sake of getting the conversation started. While they certainly reflect some of the issues Professor McCune and I have been discussing, their inclusion in this list does not mean these will all be included in the curriculum. That is what this conversation is all about. Folks there will be invited to pose other questions and present ideas. This is intended to be an open conversation. If you are interested in more info on these topics they can be Googled.

Updated info!
If you are not familiar with some, or a lot of the items in this list, do not let that scare you away! These are just things being thrown against the wall to see if they will stick and perhaps spark some ideas. Late things to add to list for pondering:

• Open Source, principles and software
• The Long Tail
• Tagging, folksonomies and taxonomies
• Attention Metadata
• Craig's List
• User Hacks
• Mashups
• OS Platform Issues (Mac vs. Wintel vs. Linux)

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