J-School planning for JRN 3.0 upgade to courses

A lot has been happening in this busy term at the J-School.

To start, our students have been winning in the Hearst Foundation Journalism Awards. Joseph Terry won a ninth place, $500 scholarship in the sports writing competition. Eighty-seven students from 52 universities and colleges competed.

Knight Center Associate Director Dave Poulson launched a new blog, CoverThePlanet.org. Dave is one of the big online innovator in the J-School. He started the Great Lakes wifi among other efforts. Karl Gude's student Susanna Tellschow for "How to Make a Paper Airplane" in Karl Gude's JRN 203 Info Graphics class Spring 2008. Her work is one of three College submission selected for the 2009 Design Re:view Exhibit opening April 23 at the Russell industrial Center in Detroit.

Gude just returned from conducting a workshop in San Jose for various groups on info graphics. He had rave reviews from participants. They about carried him off!

Cheryl Pell has been busy her usual 24/7 organizing today?s Michigan Interscholastic Press Association series of workshops attended by 70 plus students and advisers. The MIPA spring contest judging will be next weekend here on campus.

A Task Force of faculty, led by Darcy Greene, is putting the finishing touches on our reinvented undergraduate journalism curriculum with lots of focus on new media skills while retaining our core of teaching Journalism with a capital J. This will be the main topic of discussion at today's faculty meeting along with the MSU and Michigan budget issues.

Our proposed Master's degree in journalism education is nearing final (we hope!) approval stage. This will offer high school and middle school teachers an opportunity through online, off campus and intent week long summer courses to earn their graduate degree. We hope to officially launch this summer.

MLive editor/producer and adjunct J-School faculty member (and alum) Shawn Smith was the speaker at a faculty BYTE session today. I vow to get going on Twitter, tweets, networking sites and others. This is such a great time to be in journalism. There might be gloom and doom on the streets as newspapers hold (goodbye Rocky Mountain News) but the opportunities for entrepreneurial journalism and committing it in the very best ways are what our future is about. Shawn is one of those leading the way.