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Salons, Meetups, CoCourses

Lab experiments:

  • Learn what people need.
  • Teach us what works.
  • Start with small and cheap. Iterate fast.
  • Document and share everything.
  • Deliver a minimum lovable product.

Salon

Bring-in guests, remotely:

Christie Aschwanden FiveThirtyEight lead science writer

When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does.

“Science Isn’t Broken. It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for.”

Melody Kramer Wikimedia Foundation lead for audience growth

I work on some of the trickiest problems in the news and information ecosystem.

Poynter Institute weekly column

Angie Drobnic Holan PolitiFact editor

Today, I almost never have to spell our name, and the press secretaries know exactly why we’re calling. Even the politicians do. They don’t want to get PolitiFact-ed, they say. They’re phrasing their comments more carefully, and having aides scrutinize speeches to eliminate mistakes. (Most are, anyway.)

“10 years of fact-checking: It got easier — and harder”
“The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter: PolitiFact’s methodology for independent fact-checking”

  • Live Q&A (Like Reditt AMA).
  • Remote guest w/ local audience, connected by video.
  • Student run livestream w/ switching (video down from guest/audio up to guest).
  • Pre-event saturate student, staff, community with guest resources.
  • Lots of interest: Interim meetup?
  • Experiment w/ mixing in remote audio/video/twitter questions.
  • Later, publish student-edited version online.

Meetups

Student-centered sessions.

Meetups: Montana Programmers and Montana WordPress:

Memberships: ONA Local and Hack/Hackers (“future of news”)

  • Class project related meetups (ROI).
  • Present or (co)learn.
  • E.g., covering court: lawyer presents, co-learn numeracy.
  • Introduce new concepts and skills.
  • Test new course elements (do we want to teach X?).

Pass on knowledge to the next class, then the world.

CoCourses

Learn together, mostly free online courses, some with paid certification. Multicultural communities, on and off campus (goal: students, faculty, and citizens):