Those of you unfortunate enough to run into me often have heard me chirping about “a classroom without walls” for over more than a year now. My vision, simply, is this: In an age of YouTube, social media, and online degrees, the classroom of the future needs to go beyond the brick-and-mortar boundaries and take advantage of community both in the real world and online.

This is why I’m all over social media. It’s a tool my journalism and strategic communication students desperately need to know when they hit the job market even if they don’t quite understand it. But I also am active on and my blog (in addition to some excellent flash conversations on Facebook groups at times) because I consider the learning environment to be boundless. Sometimes I wonder whether older-style professors think I’m screwing around on Twitter instead of doing things related to my job; my view is that in many ways Twitter is my job, and that everything I do in that medium has a purpose.

So what do I do? I post articles from the news, particularly about things related to my field of journalism. I pass on good information from others. I post internship and job opportunities. All “work related” activities. But I think it’s important to model what the medium is about for my students so they see how regular folks (read: not journalism professor nerds) use it as well. So I crack jokes about what I’m watching on TV. I make fun of the University of Kansas a lot (it’s the Mizzou blood in me). I the other night. I retweet their comments. I reply to them. In general, I let what little hair I have down. For me, Twitter is a way to show that expertise in something doesn’t mean losing your personality. And all of this stuff helps teach them about the culture of the Web, and particularly of Twitter. Read more

A simple scenario:

Two reporters are assigned to cover a politician. They attend the same events and are in the room for the same interviews, thus building their stories off the same material. All things being equal, which would you choose: the reporter who (independent of their news stories themselves) keeps their opinions to themself, or a reporter who openly talks about what they think about the issues?

American journalism traditionally has preferred the former with the misguided belief that keeping it to yourself means lack of bias and that unattainable golden mean of objectivity. We saw this one on full display this past week when Juan Williams was fired by NPR for airing what could charitably be called unsavory views about Muslims. We don’t tolerate Reporters With Views very much in the industry; it opens journalists and news organizations to accusations of bias and favoritism.

Except we’re all biased as human beings, and it’s a switch that can’t be turned off. Naturally reporters should try to filter out bias as much as possible in their actual reporting, but if successful the result is fairness rather than a lack of a point of view. The process doesn’t eliminate bias, it only suppresses it. Read more

Well, we aren’t into full interactivity mode with the White House web site, but America at least got out of the early 1990s with a new feature the Obama adminstration added to WhiteHouse.gov.

Obama promised in the 2008 campaign to allow for public comment on legislation sent to his desk. This weekend we got a look at how it’ll happen, as the White House provided a link for citizens to share public comment on the economic recovery bill.

Granted, it’s one way communication. People can type in their thoughts and send it on to whoever’s reading everything (assuming they are; I harbor no illusions that it might not be going into a server landfill somewhere), but there is no talk of getting a reply back or even the ability to see what others are saying. Read more