Professor teaches, learns with blogs

By Jennifer Reed
J-School Web Reporter

photo by Tim Kupsick

Professor Dennis Swibold has been maintaining blogs for his Public Affairs, Reporting, and News Editing classes.

These days, J-school professor Dennis Swibold is giving his students something extra. A lot extra, actually, as he uses blogs to supplement his classes with helpful tips, links and interactive discussions.

Swibold uses blogs he created for four of the classes he teaches: Beginning Reporting, Public Affairs Reporting, News Editing I and Community News Service. He said he began using blogs for classes last year as a webpage to store links and class materials.

“It’s a nice way for me to archive stuff,” Swibold said.

For his Beginning Reporting and Public Affairs classes, Swibold calls his blogs Newzhound. The Beginning Reporting site, has links to sites such as Romenesko, New West and some Montana newspapers as well as postings on ethics and issues in the news.

The Public Affairs site, has all of the above plus links to Montana laws and Supreme Court decisions, daily incident and arrest reports and guides to covering different beats.

His News Editing class uses a blog named Rimratz, a reference to copy editors who sit around the rim of horseshoe-shaped copy desks. This blog has refreshers on concepts such as lay vs. lie and who vs. whom, guides to writing cutlines and links to Google maps, the UM Style Guide and Dow Jones internships.

The Community News Service site, “Montana Votes”, features student coverage of the 2006 state and local elections. The site was created as a way to help inform voters and to give student work more play, Swibold said. In addition to being posted on the blog, students’ stories were also available to about 35 regional news services, he said.

Swibold plans to create another blog for his Legislative Reporting class in the spring.

So far, Swibold said, the blog concept seems to be working. He said he frequently sees his editing students using Rimratz to guide them through projects or to participate in discussions.

“Students who were shy about commenting in class were not shy about commenting on the blogs,” he said. “For me, it’s just another vehicle for them to use.”

Marybeth Valentine said she doesn’t use Swibold’s editing-class blog as much as she did the one last semester for Beginning Reporting but said it was still helpful.

“It is useful to get assignments and stuff off of it so you don’t have to e-mail him,” she said.

The interactivity on the blogs also changes Swibold’s role as teacher a bit as students learn from each other.

“It helps students teach themselves and teach each other,” he said. “It encourages conversation that is hard to have in class.”

And, as it turns out, the blogs have been helpful to Swibold as well. Using do-it-yourself blog sites, he said, makes him learn about the technology and the new-media environment.

“It makes me think about how journalism is used on the web,” he said

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