Saturday, July 27, 2002

I spoke yesterday by phone to Paul Grabowicz, who will be co-teaching UC-Berkeley's course called "CREATING A WEBLOG
ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES." The journalism course will cover "copyright issues, the battle over free music downloads and peer-to-peer networks, deep linking to Web sites, etc." and will feature a student-produced weblog that contains articles and other online documents, student's articles about relevant issues, and student commentary. Says Paul:

The course is symptomatic of increased interest in using a weblog as a journalistic vehicle. ... What is going on here is that there’s an interesting form of communicating and providing information that some journalists are seeing if we can adopt without destroying what already exists, with a more professional journalism approach.

One of reasons chose weblog for [this course] is that it seemed like a very interesting and ideal way to try to cover something that has constant breaking news, documents that are avail online such as court opinions or briefs that are being filed, resources you can point people to, and a lot of discussion, and a weblog combines a lot of that. ... We're trying to take some aspects of traditional journalism and blend them into things that have changed in journalism because of the Web and digital networks.

Are weblogs here to stay on campus? "I've seen a lot of other fads come and go," Paul says. "It's hard to say what the traction is. I think they will be around, but how good is it as a learning tool? I don't know."

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