Brazilian professors take Knight Center online course, ‘Journalism 2.0’

Brazilian journalist and professor Carlos Castilho knows that in today’s Information Age, journalism instructors often feel pressured from students born in a digital era, and from academic structures that many times are pre-digital.

As such, Castilho is teaching the Knight Center for Journalism in the America’s new online course, “Journalism 2.0 for Instructors,” which he said will “help teachers to confront this double pressure.”

“The main goal of this course is to raise among the participants a concern for the changes that the Internet and the Web are provoking in the practice of journalism, and how these changes affect the education of new professionals,” said Castilho, who translated into Portuguese the book by U.S. journalist Mark Briggs: Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive: A Digital Literacy Guide for the Information Age.

The four-week Portuguese-language course for journalism instructors began April 5. This is the first time the Knight Center has offered this course, which aims at helping instructors teach online journalism.

For more course details, see the Course Information Sheet.

“This course attempts to create a space for the exchange of ideas and experiences among online journalism professors,” Castilho said. “This is an area of work where the concepts, techniques and processes still are under construction due to constant innovation. Since there are no established truths, the best tool is to exchange experiences…The course will not distribute formulas or recipes, but launch questions and promote the exchange of ideas.”

Throughout the course, participants will learn about the challenges of teaching online journalism, instructing techniques, online journalism tools, and controversial themes related to the transition from traditional to online journalism.

Castilho, a professional journalist with 35 years of experience in newspapers, radio stations, and news agencies, currently teaches university courses in online journalism in Brazil. He has worked as a TV news director, and was a foreign correspondent for Brazilian and European publications. Since 1995 he has been dedicated to the production of journalistic content for the Web.

“The course will seek to lay the foundation for participants to create communities of teachers in online journalism to continue exchanging experiences and knowledge, even after the end of the last module,” Castilho said.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin was launched in 2002 by professor Rosental Calmon Alves. Thanks to generous grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the center has assisted thousands of journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean. For more information, contact the Knight Center’s program manager, Jennifer Potter-Miller at jpotterandreu@mail.utexas.edu or +1 512 471-1391.