(iverson's) currentbuzz: Journalism education stalls as professors rush to look through rear-view mirror.

There might be pockets of resistance or some innovative projects here and there, but overall the focus of students is to follow in the same footsteps as their professors: Start your career at a podunk daily newspaper and work your way up to the big metro papers, and end up in academia.

Source: pbs.org

These schools ought to know better. If I was in charge of creating a curriculum for today, I would first make all the teachers study McLuhan. Secondly, I would make them all use only computer and internet for about 6 weeks. I consistently hear," but they need to learn how to read and write.." as an excuse why interactive multimedia and digital tools can't be introduced into any journalism class on earth.

What does a medium have to do with reading and writing? It nuances both the authoring and delivery, but certainly reading and writing are allied to thinking, and all three of these can be taught effectively without pencil and paper or without any resort to paper. A couple of my colleagues and I are using a social networking/wiki/blog software called Near-time.net and we have found students can write a story, learn to add links and images to the story, and get editing tips back from the teacher without any of the copy being printed on paper.

You can't understand writing or reporting without doing it. You can't really have a good idea how to converge a curriculum if you don't work consistently online.