In this Duke journalism class, failure was part of the assignment. It led to real AI tools for local news.
Students partnered with local newsrooms to solve real reporting problems and learned to start with the need, not the technology
When we began teaching our Duke University course about artificial intelligence tools for journalists, the first thing we had to address was how to make our students comfortable with failure.
We are fortunate to have talented students, but they are often perfectionists. They haven’t failed very often.
For the course we called the AI Journalism Lab, we needed to make the 14 students comfortable with building things that don’t necessarily work the first time (or the second time … or the third time …). They also needed to realize that ultimately their projects might not work. In the syllabus, we wrote that “failure IS an option. Some tools will work, others won’t. But you’ll learn from both.”
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