In house, we’ll offer blogs for student and classroom use from a WordPress 3.0 multisite instance. On the main website, we’ll have a customized version of BuddyPress with groups, profiles, status updates, and activity streams to start, and courses, assignments, etc. later on. We also have a pretty extensive PBwiki site, and might possibly offer a hosted version of Etherpad.

The guide will offer a concise introduction to these tools, as there’s no use in reinventing the wheel. What I think is more important, though, is offering ideas of how the tools might be used and examples of related experiments at other universities.

For instance, students might use Etherpad to collaboratively take notes and share links during a class, and then publish those notes to the class blog at the end so that everyone has access to them for studying. Once published, those notes could be automatically pulled into the wiki page acting as the living course syllabus.

Other ideas that came to mind this morning:

• Students can write an introductory post at the beginning of the course detailing their background and what they hoped to learn in the coming semester. The class could use all of these to collaboratively develop the syllabus while also identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each human asset.
• Professor could post requirements for upcoming assignments and students can ask questions about it. The questions get answered once publicly, instead of a dozen times by email, and are stored in association with the assignment.
• Professors can use the blog to pull in learning materials from other sources and spark conversation on top of the content. Instead of duplicating efforts, they should focus on what they do best.
• Students can use the blog as an open research notebook, or for updates on a story in progress, and people both within the school and outside of the school can give feedback or offer suggestions.

Being able to point to examples, however, will be the secret sauce.

Howard Rheingold has a wiki for his Comm 182/183 classes that includes learning expectations, information on assignments, pages for each class session, and group project pages (behind an authentication wall).

Suzi Steffen’s J361 class uses a WordPress.com blog for posting assignment requirements, posting story ideas, posting updates on stories in progress (especially valuable: things learned along the way), posting completed assignments, and media analysis. They also use Twitter as a light-weight backchannel for the class:

Related to this, Clay Shirky held a public brainstorming session at the beginning of the year on designing college from scratch that generated several useful suggestions and is worth reading through for inspiration.

What ideas and examples are we missing?

Jay Rosen, who you should follow on Twitter if you don’t already, lays an excellent foundation:

Ryan Sholin breaks down the argument for linking into five parts. Basically, journalists should be responsible citizens of the web. They have responsibility to their readers to provide as much information as they can bring together, responsibility to build bridges between the different parts of their online community, and responsibility to point readers in the direction of the right information when the journalists don’t immediately have the answer.

One point I touched on and want to reiterate is linking is a process of showing your work. This is fundamentally a Good Thing. Both Sean Sullivan and Paul Balcerak agree. In the age of newspapers, buggies, and clapboard houses, the reader was forced to make the assumption that the publication fact-checked and caught all of their errors. Hyperlinking text inherently means that the reader can then go and check out what you’re linking to. If you’re writing a piece with facts you want to substantiate, you can link to the source of every one of those facts. In fact, I agree that it’s “suspect for journos not to link whenever possible.” Making the reporting process transparent builds trust between the publication and the reader, and trust builds brand.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of traditionally print publications that haven’t caught wind of this. A few days back, NYU Local, the upstart publication at NYU, accused the Washington Square News of pilfering their posts without attribution. They found five examples of where NYU Local originally reported the story, only to have Washington Square News rewrite the story and pass it off as their own. If you read through the comments, you’ll notice these examples aren’t necessarily where NYU Local had the scoop, but that shouldn’t get in the way of a critical point Lily is making:

Over the weekend, your former editor and current contributing writer Sergio Hernandez posted about “The Embittered Feud Between NYU’s Junior Journalists” on his personal blog. The post itself was worth reading, but part of Sergio’s response to the onslaught of NYU Local contributor comments was even more interesting and on-point. We complained about your shoddy linking and he dismissed it, saying that we are completely different beasts, and that your online presence is a mere formality. Because your primary medium is print, perhaps for you the web essentially serves as another vehicle to display that print content. Sergio was right in some ways: your paper and our blog are completely different beasts, but the fact remains that your website and NYU Local are not. When you translate content to the web, you need to adjust it to coincide with online ethics. And one basic tenet of those ethics is linking. As young, informed internet users, we assume you know all of this already, so why haven’t you acted on it?

I suppose this is more an argument of “shoulds” than realities. Because, in reality, it is all too easy for you to say that WSN behaves like a traditional newspaper, free of links, and leave it at that. The thing is, you spent the summer re-vamping your website (for the second time in less than two years). Why bother making your site more attractive if you couldn’t care less about advancing the level of your online content?

Not only that, but the “ethic of the link” is actually a more powerful tool, method, and ethos for journalism than anything that came before.

It’s a big, wild internets out there with many examples to illustrate my point. I’d like to share a few:

• The Money Meltdown – Matt Thompson’s response to the beginning of the global economic crisis offers original curation to provide context and background to one of the largest stories of our lifetime. His blog about the future of context in news is also a recommended read.
• UC walkout: Headlines, tweets and links – Nate Miller and Laurel Rosenhall also approach telling a story through a mixture of context and real-time curating.
• “What We’re Reading” on The New York Times Bits Blog – Journalists do a significant amount of reading as a part of the reporting process. A Publish2 widget in the right sidebar allows them to leverage that work and provide value to their readers.

Ultimately, linking provides tremendous value to your readers because it allows you to highlight the most authoritative voices in a story. At Publish2, we build the tools, including the one I used to add links in this post, to make this happen.