End of semester links for students who follow my blogs

For Web design or  journalism students getting interested in programming, or programmers getting interested in journalism, see my bookmarks tagged with the keywords “Journalism” and “Programming” at delicious.com.

For Portrayal of the Journalist in Popular Culture students who need one more story for their comparison papers, check the films-adapted-for-radio posts at JHeroes.com.

For journalism or Web design students trying WordPress for the first time, see the “WP Tips” tab at the top of this page and my “Not a blog” site, demonstrating that WordPress isn’t just for blogs these days.

For news writing students — or anyone — following the shooting story at Virginia Tech, try my list of New River Valley journalists using Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep/nrvj

Included are individual reporters at Roanoke and New River Valley area newspapers and television stations, and a few dedicated news-watchers who post useful updates.

The staff of the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech did a terrific job, making extensive use of personal Twitter accounts covering both the breaking news of the shooting and the community support following it.  As I pointed out to my students on Friday, during a big story, “beat” definitions go out the window and everyone pitches in to get the story covered — hence some “sports” Twitter feeds passing along timely information about an event that was far from their usual upbeat Hokie news.

AEJMC conferencing via blog and tweet

While some ear troubles made me sensitive about flying to St. Louis, I still “made it to…” the AEJMC journalism educators’ conference there this past week by hanging out with my laptop and phone tuned to a Twitter “hashtag” of #aejmc11.

And, since I’m Web editor for the AEJMC Newspaper Division, I logged in and posted a list of the tweets that looked to be of the most interest to members of that division, updating the links a couple of times a day.

The division officially changes its name to “Newspaper & Online News Division” in a couple of months, so my page-of-tweets from the AEJMC conference should be timely. If nothing else, it’s a place where division members can find each other’s Twitter handles.

In the spirit of “walking the walk” of “Online,” I also did a little e-mail campaigning to invite other division officers to use the division blog to post news from the conference, and Rutgers University’s Susan Keith, teaching standards co-chair and past head of the division, came through in a big way. She posted several items after the division’s business meeting, including annual award-winners.

As for the tweets list, although it was a “blog post,” I returned to it several times during the weekend and finally had posted about 40 Twitter handles and links provided by conference goers, including conference papers, reports and slide presentations.

It was so much like being in St. Louis that I’m tempted to go out and buy a $5 Budweiser! (You have to read the list of tweets to get the reference.)