Outline due: noon, Monday, March 30
First draft due: noon, Monday, April 6
Final deadline: noon, Monday, April 20
At the end of the semester you will complete an individual online report using multiple media related to this semester’s topic, Hong Kong’s heritage. It will be published on the Hong Kong Stories website.
Your work will combine text, links, pictures and/or graphics and audio, as appropriate. The written text is not supposed to be too long, the point is to show that you know how to tell a story in an innovative way by combining visuals, text, and audio. Weeks 9-12 will focus on learning and practising the skills you’ll need to complete this project and publish it on the content management system used for the class website.
Specific requirements:
- Your final story will be ONE Joomla document, separated into 2-3 sub-pages (depending on the nature and size of the media elements that you are using), using Joomla’s “page continuation” function. (This will be explained in class.)
- Text should NOT EXCEED 800 words, but can be as little as 3-400 if you are relying on strong visual, graphic, and audio elements to tell your story. This is NOT a term paper or newspaper story.
- Make coherent use of multiple media elements to tell the story you have chosen. That includes photos, audio clips, charts and graphs when appropriate, maps when appropriate, and possibly photo galleries or slideshows. (We will talk more about multiple media vs. multimedia in Week 9)
- You WILL be evaluated on whether you tell a story clearly and journalistically, in a way that a member of the public (i.e., somebody who is neither your teacher or your relative who is not obsessed with your topic) would actually want to spend time reading/watching/listening. The longest and most complicated story will NOT necessarily get the best grade – less is often more when you are trying to tell a compelling story to a general audience.
- This website is in English for an English-speaking audience. Assume that you are working for a news organization whose editors and audience cannot read or understand Chinese. Therefore your work must be comprehensible to non-Chinese speakers as well as to people who do not live in Hong Kong.
- Professional standards of language usage, grammar, punctuation, and spelling apply to your web work in the same way that they apply to your print stories.
Examples of coherent use of multiple media by students in Spring 2008:
Residents Suffer from Traffic Noise Pollution by Xie Yuan
Dead Bird Ignites Nature Reserve Controversy by Bong Miquiabas
Tourism Supports Hong Kong’s Organic Farms by Xie Rui
