We use them to help take out the Taliban’s leadership (with more or less accuracy) – but there is a more noble potential mission for the unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. Yes – drone journalism.

Get those radio-controlled suckers in the air and use their onboard cameras to help the fourth estate carry out its role to inform and serve the public.

It’s already happening – the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications is already expecting its first drone to practice highly targeted attack journalism at a range of targets.

Could this be the exciting future for hackery? Not probably for the kind of trade journalism you’ll see referred to in Freelance Unbound.

But I have to say, when I first saw the story I thought it was going to be about unmanned drones writing journalism. Which might improve the quality sometimes, I suppose…

She picked the post I used to say Whitney was an idiot for picking such an inappropriate post as her chosen vehicle for a plug for her – no doubt fictional – “online university site”.

I created an Online University site called [REDACTED]. It serves as a great resource for new students looking to find all the info they need on getting an online degree.

Would you be interested in accepting a guestpost from me on your page of http://www.freelanceunbound.com/2011/12/05/idiotic-spam-email-of-the-week/ ? I will be happy to write an article about any topic that you would like.  It will only be used on your website.

I would put my link at the bottom of the article so that regular readers of your site who enjoyed my article might follow the link back to my site and find it informative as well.

I would certainly appreciate any opportunity to write an article. Feel free to suggest an idea, or if you prefer I can just come up with one.

Thanks for your time!

Carrie Oakley

Yes – could you write me a guest post on why your automated spamming software could not pick a more suitable target “Carrie”?

It’s all going so meta that I can barely understand it myself. Back to some real media content soon…

Dear Freelance Unbound,

I just got done reading your “Bribery and corruption? Sadly, I think you have the wrong blog…” and I found it really interesting! Do you do advertising? I’m marketing out a few sites and can pay you $50 via PayPal to add a text link into one of your older posts. The link would go to an education site and I’d make sure the link relates to your post’s content.

Thanks and let me know if we can work something out!

Whitney Meyer

Of all the posts you could have chosen, Whitney, that one is the single most inappropriate. It almost makes me think you are being ironic in a kind-of post-modern meejah way.

Almost…

Nearly a century after the end of World War One, Farnham residents believe Poppy Day has as much relevance to them and their children as ever, while young British men and women fight abroad for their country.

Jack Keene reports for UCA Journalism News.

[NB: so, that Posterous syndication is still working, then. I thought I had turned it off. Test video embed for first year journalism students]

I have bad news. His letter is not that illiterate.

In fact, his writing has many qualities I wouldn’t mind seeing in my journalism undergraduates.

Dear victim

I dont no why Iam writing a letter to you! I have been forced to write this letter by ISSp. To be honest I’m not bothered or sorry about the fact that I burgled your house. Basicly it was your fault anyways. I’m going to run you through the dumb mistakes you made. Firstly you didn’t draw your curtains which most people now to do before they go to sleep. Secondly your dumb you live in Stainburns a high risk burglary area and your thick enough to leave your downstairs kitchen window open. I wouldnt do that in a million years. But anyways I dont feel sorry for you and Im not going to show any sympathy or remores.

Yours sincerly

• It’s clear – he makes his point directly and forcefully. You know what he’s getting at and the argument is sustained throughout.
• It’s well-constructed – the points are logical and well-made (if reprehensible)
• The sentences are short and to the point – just like journalism should be.
• It’s colourful and has personality. Though not, to be honest, one I would actually want to meet.
• There are two correct apostrophes and a capital letter used for the first-person singular.

Yes – plenty of spelling and grammar errors. But compare this to actual undergraduate journalism writing. Written by students who have A-Levels, and expect to get a degree in a language-based subject. Decent young men and women who, almost certainly, would not break in to your house if you left the kitchen window open (or at least would feel bad about doing so).

Here’s an extract considering the cultural and gender implications of eating certain kinds of confectionery:

Why is a piece of candy, or in the Queens English, a lolly-pop, considered to be a feminine treat?

For some reason, society and culture has persuaded our views towards certain items being considered more manly than others…

The pertcular Lolly that I chose was a drumstick. A chewy, suckulent and tasty option. But to a large chunk of the british population, having a stick hanging out of your mouth whilst shaking a cosmopolitian is rather homosexual.

It is unfair that men should have to refrain from eating certain things inorder to protect their image. They taste good, so eat them. Britain, sort yourselfs out and realise that this is the 21st Century!

Admirable sentiments – but plenty of the kind of spelling and grammar errors that would get the Daily Mail in a twist.

As for a recent assignment that sent students out into the streets of Middle England to film vox pops of local attitudes to Poppy Day – I have never seen so many variant spellings: “Rememberance day”; “Remberance day”; “Remeberance Sunday” – they’re all there.

So if you’re looking for an easy target for your righteous disapproval of the underclass, steer clear of educational attainment.

The depressing truth is that the level of grammar and spelling achieved by our young criminal is about par for the course for school leavers these days…

Oh dear – journalism undergraduate workies at the BBC? Or maybe just someone under 30 editing the Radio 4 programme pages.

From the current Woman’s Hour Drama page, a classic “who’s/whose” muddle. Why, oh why, oh why, BBC…

I never knew there was this much maths in the world...

Another big gap in posting on Freelance Unbound in October (and, indeed, November) is not simply a sign that I am working too hard at my day job. No – the new university semester is drowning me as a learner, as well as a teacher.

This October saw me take on my dark nemesis – maths. And despite all my best intentions, my arch-foe looks like defeating me again.

Maths was my undoing at school. I did fine up to O-Level Elementary Maths – but then took on something called Additional Maths, which flummoxed me completely. Suddenly, equations had things like exclamation marks in them – what on earth was that about?

And I had no idea what any of it was for. Integration? Differentiation? I could understand trigonometry, and things like simultaneous equations. But this new material was bewildering. So I quietly gave up and moved on to English Literature and Economics.

This has always bothered me. So during my Open University science degree I’ve been determined to beat maths into submission. After all – I’m an adult now. I’m motivated and wise. Mature and methodical. Maths can’t defeat me again.

Oh dear. My first science unit with the OU was a gentle romp. I even understood basic quantum mechanics. But this maths unit (MST121 – Using Mathematics: a “broad, enjoyable introduction to university-level mathematics”) is made of sterner stuff.

Depressingly, I’ve pretty much hit a brick wall with it, just as I’ve reached the crossover between what I achieved successfully at school and the material that defeated me. All that stuff about being more mature and motivated seems not to be helping at all.

Maybe the truth is that I can’t do it. I am actually a failure at maths beyond the basics.

It’s a blow. I had really wanted to specialise in physics for my OU degree. Just like that chirpy Brian Cox, I wanted to probe the mysteries of the cosmos and delve into the subatomic structures of matter.

But it looks like I may have to have a backup plan. Still – chemistry is pretty interesting. And I hear there is actually quite a bit of work in the field these days too…

Not badly, actually. Here are the pros and cons. Cons first.

Cons

That Posterous redesign that happened in September. Oh, how that sucked. There’s a pretty good account here of what went wrong with the redesign – basically Posterous rolled it out before it was ready and didn’t tell any of its users about it.

The redesign certainly caught me on the hop. Having spent some time preparing to show students how Posterous worked, I went away and did other things for a few weeks and then only opened up the site on the morning they were all going to sign up. Big mistake.

Everything was different – including the name (Posterous Spaces? Say what?) and none of the features, or even the help and tutorial pages, were where they were supposed to be. In fact there are now two help areas on Posterous – the old one, which is the best, and the new one, which is missing key information and tools. See below.

Key lesson: check your online tool is working like you think it should the night before your first workshop with your students.

Site admin was a nightmare. Where was the link to change up your blog’s settings? No, not my user profile settings, the actual blog settings. Oh, I found it. No, I lost it again. Oh, I’m clicking through half a dozen screens and going round in circles. Jesus – what a terrible user experience.

It’s getting a bit better – and Posterous has put in some rollover text that tell you what the buttons do when your mouse is hovering over them. But it’s still too much of a palaver. Luckily most students seem to have got used to it.

Posting by email is a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, it’s a great thing, allowing spontaneous uploads using your phone, or whatever. You don’t have to be logged in to Posterous to do it, and the site handles everything for you, including formatting. But when it doesn’t it sucks – so you have to recreate or paste in the content of your email to your site. If you can be bothered.

Syndication is a bit shaky, too. It generally works, but not always – so some updates go through to Twitter and Facebook, while others don’t. To be honest, once we’ve got Tweetdeck installed on the department Macs, I’ll be focusing on that as a social media dashboard.

It doesn’t help that students haven’t really got to grips with the idea that their social media presence is important professionally. One student updated his Facebook profile with a warning to his friends that he would be posting journalism type stuff from his course blog “just in case they thought it was weird or boring”. So, not quite ready to think of himself as a journalist then.

Uploading video directly simply doesn’t work. “Students can all shoot video on their phones and email it to their site easily and quickly,” I thought. “They can all be instant, mobile, multimedia journalists.” Yeah, right.

Apart from the grinding slowness of uploading video via 3G mobile, Posterous has a limit on the size of video that you can upload. Even a three-minute iPhone video was too big to accept.

So – it was back to YouTube and embedding, just like most other blogging sites. On the plus side, video embedding is seamless and intuitive. So much so that some students couldn’t figure out how to do it, as there is nothing to actually do apart from pasting in the video URL.

One click reblogging – uh, where’s that Posterous bookmarklet again? During the redesign, Posterous moved its help pages to a new URL. But it didn’t move all the content. So that really useful bookmarklet that you can use to grab content from the web to reblog and comment on went missing. Luckily, the redesign is such a dog’s dinner that the bookmarklet is still available on the old help page. I had to use Google to find it though.

Pros

Having said all that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of the new features of Posterous.

Social networking works surprisingly well. The move to the social Spaces idea sounds terrible, but is in fact really good for a group that knows each other through social media.

Posterous allows you to look for people you know on Facebook or Twitter and easily follow them on Posterous, with email updates only a click away. As all our first-years either know each other on Facebook, or are linked to our department Facebook profile, they quickly started following each other.

This has meant much more interaction online – with more commenting on each other’s updates than we ever saw on Blogger. It’s such an easy communications medium that I’ve been using the comments facility to email feedback to students.

Students have even been using Posterous to update their Facebook profiles with messages to their friends. Which, given their incoherence on Facebook, is a mixed blessing. But you can never have too much interaction in my book.

Audio embeds do work really well – and students have been impressing me by doing ad hoc interviews using their mobile phones and uploading the files to their site, without even being asked to.

True, the sound is a bit rubbish, but that’s because they are doing this before we’ve even covered audio recording in the unit. It’s a terrific feature, and one that seems to be encouraging experimentation.

One-click reblogging also works really well. Once you’ve actually found the browser tool to do it. Quite a few students are using it quite often to clip relevant stories from the web to their site. And anything that encourages posting frequency has to be applauded.

Lack of design features has been generally a good thing. Some students have customised their site nicely, but they generally haven’t spent too much time on it.

This is just as I had hoped – if there aren’t endless opportunities to fiddle about with a site’s look and feel, motivated students will focus on uploading stories and content. Unmotivated students will do nothing, of course – but it was ever thus, and there’s only so much I can do about that.

Tutor oversight is also much easier. Remember how easy it is to follow other people’s Posterous Spaces by looking up your Facebook friends? That makes it really easy to keep track of how much work your students are doing, and what sort of quality it is.

Try keeping track of nearly 60 Blogger blogs and you’d quickly see the difference. The controversial move by Posterous into the social space is actually a godsend for this kind of educational use.

Verdict

Four out of five, probably. The fact that some features don’t work as well as advertised or expected is outweighed by the unexpected benefits. And more planning will probably make even better use of Posterous as a teaching tool.

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that Posterous will have changed beyond recognition by next year, or even have disappeared altogether, in the way that cloud computing services tend to.

Sadly – unlike, say, teaching history of art – teaching online journalism requires almost real-time updating of your syllabus and teaching tools. Stay tuned for inevitable updates…

Sadly, if unsurprisingly, wiser heads prevailed and the head was quickly changed.

I don’t know why, but the second headline just doesn’t seem mucky – even though it uses the “p” word. Is that just me? 

Actually, don’t answer that…