Now don’t get me wrong, I reeaaalllyyy appreciate the mention of Weblogg-ed as a “smart site” in the “Blog On” story in Edutopia’s new July issue. Really. But can anyone tell me why, in a magazine that is all about education, is the act of blogging represented by this picture:

Anyone? ANYONE?????????

And this definition of blogs:

Blogs, short for Weblogs, are online journals filled with personal thoughts and Web links. “Free thinking and linking” is what prominent education blogger (and former Knight-Ridder columnist) calls the increasingly popular mode of mass communication.

I give up.

I really do.

If the people in our own space don’t start getting this pretty soon, I think I’m just gonna get barefoot on the couch and work on my Xanga site all day.

As a journalism major in the 70s, Watergate was always central to my image of what it meant to be a journalist. Even in the 20 some odd years that I taught high school journalism, I pointed to the work of “Woodstein” at the Washington Post as a model of the Fourth Estate, the watchdog function of the press in action. After dozens of screenings of “All the President’s Men,” I still get almost mesmerized by the process those reporters used to help bring down the presidency, and I love that moment when Jason Robards looks at his two young reporters, after asking them if they could really trust this Deep Throat guy, and says “print that baby” referring to the story that ultimately connected Nixon to the break in. It’s like every journalist’s grand slam in the bottom of the ninth to win moment.

Jay Rosen’s deconstruction of the events of those times and the surrounding discussion of the “religion of journalism” takes some of the glimmer off of what he calls the “myth of Watergate” and rightfully so. But as I read his post and the accompanying notes and comments, I started thinking about two of my former students who are graduating in a couple of weeks and heading to U. of Iowa and Ohio U. (my alma mater) for journalism school. I wonder what their dream about journalism is. I wonder, in this very disruptive time for the profession, what it was that attracted them to it. We talk about how we can all be journalists now, about citizen journalism, about not having to have a degree or experience to participate. And I wonder what the role of reporter will be. (Jeff Jarvis has a great post on the changing nature of J-School that notes the challenges.) Their experience at school needs to be much different from mine, no doubt.

It will be interesting to see the answers. I know this, however, I learned more from Jay’s post than I would from the traditional sources. The amazing thing is reading his entry which, with commments, encompased more that 16,000 words, the equivalent of about 40 pages in a book, and realizing that this really is the new journalism, the collaborative effort to understand an event, to negotiate its significance, and to clarify its meaning. It’s a lot of work, much more than watching Fox. But it’s so worth it. If we could teach our kids to become parts of these conversations, to write about the things that mean something to them, they’d all greatly benefit, whether they became journalists or not.
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Another snippet to add to the board memo for schools who have banned the Read/Write Web. My reading in brackets:

According to Kathy Harris, group vice-president and specialist in applications manager analysis at technology research firm Gartner, knowledge workers are picking up new technologies on their own faster than enterprises [schools] can begin to understand them.

Employees [Students] have been using a lot of technologies such as instant messaging and blogs in their jobs [personal lives], but businesses [schools] are only just starting to invest in these technologies to drive up productivity, she said.

Examples of such technologies include blogs, instant messaging and wikis, which allow individuals to create content for Web pages or online forums that are then edited by other like-minded users.

In particular, Gartner predicts that wikis–such as the popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia–should become commonplace in at least 50 percent of enterprises worldwide within the next four years.

Because tools such as instant messaging and blogs allow people [students] to share ideas and resolve issues [learn collaboratively] quickly, managers [schools] who fail to capitalize on this trend will risk [deny] valuable intellectual property [learning opportunities] created by employees [teachers and students], Harris said.

Nah…let’s let ‘em learn that stuff in college…