The Learning Technologies & Consulting Group of Instructional Support Services is hosting a website development workshop for this year’s cohort of the Knight-Wallace Fellows.
The Fellows represent a number of media organizations from around the world in a unique program that “…recognizes exceptional journalists for their work, leadership, and potential with a unique opportunity: an academic year of study, developing new perspectives and networks, and achieving both professional and personal growth at the University of Michigan.”
Knight-Wallace Fellows spend an academic year pursuing individual study plans and engaging in collaborative learning through fellowship seminars, training workshops, and travel. Fellows engage with visiting journalists, eminent scholars, and creative thinkers from a range of fields. See a full list of this year’s Fellows.
The ISS web workshops focus on helping the participating Fellows create and customize their own websites and portfolios. Some participants already had websites they wanted to improve; others wanted to start from scratch.
Consultants from Instructional Support services created a Canvas course for the workshops and prepared lessons in Wordpress for the journalists. The workshops are custom-designed to meet the needs of the diverse group of professionals. Some topics covered include various web-based applications such as Piktochart and Wordpress plugins for the social media tools Twitter and Instagram.
One Fellow, Lois Parshley (an independent writer and photographer from Portland, Oregon) was instrumental in setting up the workshops for herself and her colleagues. Lois already had a Wordpress website, but wanted to refine it for a more up-to-date appearance.
Each Fellow has a slightly different need for their own web projects. Chitrangada Choudhury, (independent journalist from Orissa, India) requested an overview of HTML5 principles after reading a job description that included those skills.
Even though the journalists in the Fellows program are working professionals, their needs are not unlike those of most students in that their job prospects improve as they develop certain skills. The requirement by many employers is that the candidate have a carefully curated portfolio, web-presence, and social media profile. By participating in technology workshops, the Knight-Wallace Fellows are keeping their professional profiles relevant.
LSA Instructional Support Services can help instructors for traditional U of M courses work with their students to help them begin to develop their online presence and multimodal writting skills. For more infomation, please contact ISS-LTC at [email protected] or (734) 615-0099.
