Presentation
For students by students: Publishing DITonline, the Durban Institute of Technology's daily news website, collaboratively.
Tara Turkington Department of Journalism Durban Institute of Technology
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| Paper (11 pages) |
In August 2003, the Durban Institute of Technology’s Journalism Department launched DITonline (http://olcweb.dit.ac.za/ditonline), a daily-updated news website with the motto, “for students, by students”. The project has a two-fold mission: to provide student journalists with a training ground that is authentic and real, and to provide the wider DIT community with an independent, reliable news source.
The backbone of our site is hard news, along with features, opinion, photo galleries and reviews. Content is produced collaboratively by first to fourth year students, and to date we have published about 500 articles, produced by about 70 different students.
At present, anybody can publish on the site on a voluntary basis – subject to quality control by the editorial team. In addition to this, students in second, third and fourth year are encouraged to publish through class assignments. The engine of the site is presently a third year online journalism class of about 20 students, which operates in a blended, collaborative environment.
The paper will discuss the development of the site, looking specifically at how it has grown in terms of student involvement, through blended, collaborative teaching and learning, from an initial core of a few volunteers, into a project with which almost every DIT journalism student has interacted. The paper will also discuss how the website has broken down traditional barriers, and allowed students from different years to inter-relate and mentor one another. It will also anticipate new challenges, including envisaged cross-curricula collaboration with different departments within the technikon.