Interview about social media and journalism

Few weeks ago, this interview with me appeared in UVV-info where I suggest that mainstream journalists and amateurs should collaborate more. Sorry it is in Dutch!

Print-alike online magazine

Few days ago, I received this online magazine in my mailbox, and I kept reading and watching for at least 10 minutes (and that means a lot). Not as much because I like gossips and other non-news, but because I liked the way the news is presented in this print-alike online magazine. Nice work!

Media4[ME] Den Haag

Last week, I was in Den Haag at the first Media4[ME] conference. During my talk, I presented the first preliminary results of my computer and eye tracking experiments that I conducted about one month ago. During the next two-three months, I will further analyse all the data I gathered during these experiments in a way to provide an answer on the question 'do multimedia, interactivity and hypertext benefit the learning process and knowledge outcome during and after online news consumption?'. I let you know if the results are there!

ICA Montreal

Two weeks ago, I was in Montreal for the annual ICA conference. I presented two papers, the first one about parental mediation of television viewing throughout adolescence, the second one was titled redefining multimedia: the (dis)integrated use of media and modalities.

The latter presentation discussed an important part of my Ph.D. research about the concept of multimedia. I question the use of the concept multimedia when speaking of the combined use of text, video, pictures and audio on for example news websites. In this paper I suggest that it is better to use the concept of multimodality instead of multimedia.
I received a lot of interesting questions and suggestions during and after my presentation. Especially the notes of my respondent, prof. dr. Singer (U.K) were very valuable for me, for which I want to thank her again. During the next two weeks, I try to rewrite this paper into an article for publication.

Apart from the conference, I just fell in love with Montreal! Great city, nice athmosphere, friendly people, beautiful hotels, ... this trip made me get charged up again.

Read aloud modality

When I was looking for some news coverage about the tragedy of the Belgian soccer player Francois Sterchele who died this morning in a car crash, I discovered a great modality of interactivity. On the Dutch news site of NOS.nl, one can click on the 'read aloud' button so that a gentle woman reads the message aloud. Apart from some pronounciation problems (clearly it is a a computer software program who transfers the written text into voice so that for example names aren't well pronounced), this feature can be a great help for people with hearing problems!

I haven't seen this feature on another website, if someone of you knows another example of this innovative feature, please email me!