UM to host Native American students
in online journalism course

By Adam Weinacker
J-School Web Reporter

AN EXPERIMENTAL ONLINE CLASS designed to excite Native American students about journalism starts this month, the J-school’s first foray into distance learning.

"We're entering new territory," said Denny McAuliffe Jr., the J-School's Native American journalist in residence.

The pilot class will include a dozen Native students from Montana, Kansas, Michigan, South Dakota, Wisconsin and New Mexico, who will study in a virtual classroom that originates at the J-School.

The 12 students will begin their class with an evening flight to Missoula Feb. 13 to meet Professor Michael Downs before the online class begins. They will spend two days getting to know their classmates, so when they go home they won’t have to communicate with never-before-seen "electronic ghosts," Downs said.

McAuliffe	Downs

"I thought it would be great to get people here so they could see me," he said, "so they don’t think they are communicating with someone on Mars."

Downs admits the gathering is also for his benefit. He wants to establish a connection with his students before they go home to their laptops and PC’s.

The two-credit class is an effort to spur interest in journalism in the Native American community, said McAuliffe, a member of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe. Often, tribal colleges don’t have enough student interest to start school papers or offer journalism classes, he said.

"The state of Native journalism is such that there may be only one Native student interested in journalism [at a tribal college]," he said. The UM class will put those students into a virtual classroom of people curious about the profession.

Downs has four goals for teaching the course: for the students to become enthusiastic about journalism, to learn journalistic principles, to appreciate the practice of journalism and to understand the profession’s history, particularly concerning Native Americans. It’s a crash course in understanding what journalism is all about.

While in Missoula, the students will attend panel presentations at UM. Four panel topics will be presented: "Covering Campus," "Internships," "What it Means to be an Indian and a Journalist" and "Covering the Reservation."

Downs said the panels will include three recent Native American J-School grads who are working at newspapers in Oregon and Montana, as well as other professional reporters.

Students will also tour the UM campus and the Missoulian. A chili dinner is on the menu at Downs’ house, and they will all attend a men’s basketball game.

After the Missoula visit, students will return to their schools and communicate with Downs and each other through online discussion boards and chats. Downs will be able to post photos, discussion questions and timed reading quizzes for his class, but he said he is not sure how the class will evolve because he has never done anything like it before.

"I’ll be going back and forth to sort of see … what students respond to," he said.

From April 22-24, the class will reconvene at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota for the Native American Newspaper Career Conference . The conference is sponsored by the Freedom Forum Neuharth Center , the South Dakota Newspaper Association and the journalism schools of South Dakota State University and the University of South Dakota.

Class tuition and travel expenses are funded through reznet, an online publication run by McAuliffe and staffed by 20 Native American college students. McAuliffe said he hopes students in the new online class will later join reznet and continue working as journalists.

Reznet runs on a two-year, $250,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that offers students a way to publish articles about Native issues and gain journalism experience. The foundation is described on its Web site as dedicated to furthering "ideals of service to community, to the highest standards of journalistic excellence and to the defense of a free press."

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