Community Journalism/Project Description/One Pager

Building Community Journalism Capacity
We aim to foster the collaborative development of a sustainable Open Education Resource (OER) ecosystem for Community Journalist (Educators?) (and prospective Community Journalists) to create, share, repurpose and reuse digital content in support of learning, skill development and the craft/profession. This is a project developed by journalists for journalists focusing on the 'Long Tail of Journalism' with the following themes:
 * 1) Community Journalism capability and community development
 * 2) Software and tools development to improve the usability and interoperability of the technology for newcomers to collaborative online authoring and content integration with appropriate technology platforms.
 * 3) Seeding OER content development for use in community journalism locally, nationally and internationally.
 * 4) Journalism education research projects.
 * 5) Experiential learning environments, i.e guided apprenticeships within the WikiEducator community.

Journalism schools can gradually adapt face-to-face / online courses and modules to provide learners / students with access to ongoing peer and expert social and informal learning opportunities, with online mentoring support, in a socially networked Learning Community.

Journalism Leadership and Collaboration
New and mainstream journalists can collaborate in online journalism courses (i.e., citizen journalism in a mobile world; use of newly-available databases and resources - locally, nationally and globally) to increase their leadership and skill development and explore innovative, participatory, and interdisciplinary models for greater (citizen) engagement for:
 * News / feature writing and reporting - locally, nationally, and internationally;
 * Online journalism publications (i.e.different community publications for diverse markets, e.g.OER New Zealand & OER NZ Newspaper);
 * Online competency development (i.e., co-ops, internships, coaching and mentoring at a distance). This can include: (i.e., news reporting on WikiEducator's community; sectoral reporting in agriculture, local government; public health, environment, resources, etc; supporting NGO's in Africa, such as Regional AIDS Network in Kenya, Community Media in South Africa and Tanzania, etc.), and mentoring and coaching from news professionals at a major city newspaper) and community service learning;
 * Sharing best practices, knowledge translation and intercultural learning;
 * Journalism education and interdisciplinary research.

Community Journalism Learning Community
A pilot project approach could support the development of a Community Journalism Learning Community using social media, which:
 * is strategically-designed and aligned to organizational vision, mission and culture
 * is an inclusive and participatory action-oriented model for continuous engagement across time and distance
 * is designed with appropriate curricula and pedagogic capacities, with key stakeholder champions and influencers who are engaged, coached and mentored to lead within the larger community and sub-communities to sustain innovation, change and growth;
 * sustainably and scalably evolves existing face-to-face and elearning training into ongoing global networked conversations and facilitate competency development and leadership behaviour, and
 * leverages WikiEducator's successful Learning4Content wiki skills initiative,which has trained 3500 learners in 110+ countries in 18 months, by incorporating journalism content into a proven delivery package to reach hundreds and thousands of new and community journalists in Canada and around the globe;
 * incorporates a research and evaluation piece to disseminate and implement the latest evidence for improving Community Journalism as a professional field of interest.