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November 18, 2004
Belleville's where it's at
I'm sitting in at Loyalist College today. Their e-journalism program rocks compared to Ryerson's one online journalism class where we learned the basics - how to repurpose, use dreamweaver and update breaking news. This is so different. The profs, and Rob Washburn in particular, are so enthusiastic about what they do. He's so chilled out, smiling from ear to ear at 9 in the a.m. Way too early for me after going to sleep at 2:30 waking up at 6:30 and driving for almost 3 hours to get here.
But enough about me. Washburn teaches blogging in the classroom because he sees a vision of the future that most of us ignore.
When I'm in an old folks home eating porridge, this is what you'll be doing. We're not used to communicating on a heartfelt level with people we don't know, but the internet is teaching us how.
He teaches his students how to tell a story in an age where the possibilities are endless.
We have 250 years of people banging away at this, creating forms for us to use - like the inverted triangle or hourglass model. It's like the evolution from Ms. Pacman to Halo 2. We tell stories in a much richer way now, engaging our audience like never before.
He spoke of blogs as a powerful democratic tool, a topic that will be up for discussion tonight when I go to Trent University to hear Darin Barney, Prometheus Wired author, speak.
What a great tool they are. No longer are we the elite. We trust the wisdom of the people. They have questions and they want answers, so we help them ask their questions. We're being journalists and helping the democratic process at the same time.
More to come...
Posted by Samantha Israel at November 18, 2004 12:32 PM
Comments
Damn, that sounds like a fun field trip. Well, it'd be a field trip for me, but I guess it's more of a business/research trip for you.
Posted by: Andrea Chiu at November 18, 2004 10:12 PM
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