ftvmag

Every year the first year media students at Arcada take a Swedish course, where the projects are exercises in journalism. The students conduct interviews and transcribe them. They make investigations and report them. They attend events and review them.

The purpose of this is to make the compulsory language classes relevant to their main studies and Kaj Eklund has successfully turned this into a course that students want to do, and want to succeed at. I, on the other hand, have been considerably less successful at find a way to make this work public.

We have tried to create websites but have discovered that nobody views them, and they lie abandoned until one day they are taken offline and nobody notices. We have created ebooks, but the students chafed at the limitations imposed by the epub format. We have posted them onto Arcada’s own sites, but they have got lost in the clutter.

This year Daniel Patty decided to produce a customised Tumblr site, on his own, while a small team edited the contributions.

I was blown away when I first saw it. Not only does it work, and work very well, but it provides a very clean, very modern, and completely fluid experience. The javascript effects are extremely well implemented.

Importantly, for me at least, it also leverages the Tumblr community in a useful and imaginative way. This makes it the best attempt to make this work public that I have seen so far, and considerably better than any of the attempts that I led.