Media training tips for trainers - part 1

For every course I teach in online journalism, social media and news tracking I create a highly targetted custom newswire. This a continuously updated website of topical news items and advice I think will be of interest to the people in the organisation I am training. It's a resource I continue to update long after my training session is over. Here's how I do it,

• use del.icio.us to bookmark news items
• set up a specific tag for the organisation you are training
• set up a tumblr for the client
• add the RSS feed of the tag from del.icio.us to the tumblr
• give the client the web address of the tumblr

Here's one example I created for Médecins Sans Frontières recently

• here's one of my del.icio.us accounts
• the specific tag for this particular session with Médecins Sans Frontières is MSF09
• the tumblr is at MSFnewstools

Very useful and easy to create and update, so long as you are in the habit of using del.icio.us and you remember to add the custom tag whenever you come across a suitable news item. I recommend pukka to bookmark in del.icio.us, especially if you run several del.icio.us accounts like me.

You could of course just give the client the del.icio.us tag address i.e. http://delicious.com/noodlepie/msf09 or send the RSS feed into Twitter or another site, which I have done for some clients. However, I find tumblr's are easier on the eye, have some great free templates, you can add as much or as little of your own contact information as you like and you can create a friendlier url i.e. http://msfnewstools.tumblr.com/

I'd be interested to hear from other trainers - do you work in a similar way? do you think I'm giving too much away for free? Are there better ways of doing this with other tools?

Photo: Very Long Cats, originally uploaded by Dunechaser.

Comments

[dv0rsky]

Hey, great tips, thanks a lot!

planning to use on my next trainings for new media & blogging.

[Graham]

Cheers. Let me know how you get on.

[marcus]

Thanks! Great post with a good idea. Actually i used tumblr and i used delicious with the same ideas, but i did not combine them.

I set up a tumblr for an online-training in macau --> http://macau09.tumblr.com. Not only a feed. But a TAG-feed could be implemented as an extra. Tumblr is my favourite tool for quick and easy good-looking solutions.

A bunch of journalists from the Deutsche Welle - germany´s international broadcaster - gather stuff with the TAG 4dw on delicious, that 4dw-feed is aggregated at http://twitter.com/4dw and that goes to our lab-blog (http://training.dw-world.de/lab)

I think giving away all that stuff for free makes sense. Don´t ask me why. It´s just a feeling...

[Graham]

Thanks for sharing what you do Marcus - very interesting. Like you, I like the simplicity of tumblr and how it so easy to set up whether in the way described above or in a blog like way which I'll probably come on to soon.

That's an interesting use of Twitter, does it get used much? Is it a useful resource? The beauty of it is, it's just there if you want it and it's easy to set up and manage.

For interesting ways to collaborate over Twitter, I ususally cite uses of splitweet such as Al Jazeera during the G20 protests

http://splitweet.com/

http://twitter.com/ajeg20

[Sarah Hartley]

Thanks for the info Graham. I do similar stuff with delicious but hadn't used tumblr like that - maybe I will now for the next course.
I have also been creating bespoke presentations that I put on slideshare with the secret URL so that only those on the course can view but with the advantage they can go through it again at their own pace at a later date.

[Graham]

I think it depends on who you are training and what they need, what their interests are as to how useful this is. Maybe none of them ever turn to it again...

I think for corporate clients this is an add-on service that is worth paying for, IMHO. And if I did it for corporates I do it in a less ad-hoc manner.

I use slidehsare in a similar way keeping my corporate presentations private, but allowing external embedding. I have thought of adding a audio talk over for those, but that is maybe taking it too far.

Thanks for your insight - this kind of work is often done in isolation, so it's good to hear how you approach these things.

I'll be adding a few more tips in due course. Hope something new in there too.

[Craig McGill]

What I'm trying to work out is why you use Tumblr? I rarely suggest that. Interesting...

[Graham]

It's simple. Simple. I don't suggest it to trainees at all, but I use it for back up and course notes for them.

[Murray Dick]

Hi Graham, that's a pretty progressive idea, and not one I've used before - I like it.

Only problem I can see down the line is, once you've got a load of bespoke tags on the go (going back to sessions over say 2 or 3 years) do you ever struggle to remember them all? Or does a point come where you get them involved in tagging stuff with the bespoke tag themselves, and just let them carry on with it?

My training tends to have less of a legacy, but then up until now I've only really done 1/2/3 hour classes on newsgathering, and time is often pressing.

My tried and tested trick is to create an OPML file of feeds I've gathered from a relevant field - have blogged on this before - RSS Amnesty.

I've done it for Greenpeace a couple of times, and its worked pretty well. I get everyone to import them, and get used to the interface rather than starting from scratch. Then I walk through 4 alternative ways (subject or source-based search in Google Reader, pulling RSS from a site not listed in GR's index, search results from an alternative index - say Twitter, and a scraped feed using page-2-RSS from a static page) to try and give a sense of how ubiquitous RSS is.

[Graham]

That's a very good point about looking 3 yrs hence and I'll readily admit I have not thought that far forward :)

I tend to make the effort for NGOs, just beacause. However, I have set up a lot of far more generic feeds that pull on tags i would regularly use such as: twitter, mediatraining, frontlinetraining

The MSF09 tag feed and similar are abit of a frilly add on. And all this chatter has encouraged me to get to them and others to see if they actually use it on a regular basis.

But I like the simplistic value add from something I would do anyway. I like the idea that I see something online and think of folk I worked with in Amsterdam or wherever and think, they should see this.

Of course, I could just email them :) but if the workshop was really effective my method would be better, IMO

[Graham]

Excuse shocking grammar in previous comment. I am commenting from one of 'those' phones.