Tonight I am headed to the Founders Day dinner from the Society of Professional Journalists Central Ohio Chapter, where we will have dinner, listen to former journalist-turned-legislator Mike Curtin, and engage in a silent auction to benefit the chapter, which has shrinking membership and struggles to stay relevant in today’s media.

Tomorrow I will move from student to veteran as part of the next iTunesU Boot Camp being put on by Ohio State’s Digital First initiative.

I am still immersed in iTunes U, as I get ready to flip my Comm 2221 News Writing classroom and am in the midst of creating an iBook to support all of my classes that utilize interviewing (which is all of my classes). I am also anxiously awaiting word on a grant for which I have applied to put iPads in that News Writing classroom, so students can report, record, shoot and edit all on the iPad platform. The more writing I do, the more I see the iPad as my greatest single tool, and the more I believe it can and will transform how we teach our students.

When I join the SPJ endeavors, I see dedicated journalists who are striving to maintain their place in the ever-changing world, and I admire them more than I can write.

When I join my Digital First friends, I see the new frontier, as we use technology to boldly go where we need to go now–digitally, immediately, creatively.

What we need to see is how to join both worlds–successfully–together.

He recently had a surprisingly significant impact on one Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

It seems one of Cory’s articles in the Sun Star-Courier about the Strongsville teachers’ strike came to the attention of Connie Schultz, a legendary Cleveland reporter who won journalism’s highest prize for column writing and is married to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Schultz, who I enjoy following on Facebook (especially the varied photos of her dog, Franklin), criticized the story to her 113,000+ Facebook followers for simply quoting people who criticized the teachers and not including responses from the teachers. She called the article “unacceptable,” and many of her commenters agreed.

All except Cory, who responded in the thread with his own comment:

“Hi Ms. Schultz, I am the reporter who wrote this story, and I absolutely respect your comments, but would like to point out a few things I think they failed to acknowledge.

“I’ve written at least one – sometimes more – story per day about the teachers’ strike since the teachers issued the 10-day intent to strike Feb. 21. I’ve written stories about the run-up to the strike, going back to 2008, when teachers took $500,000 in concessions, in 2010 when they took more than $2 million in salary freezes and lost planning time. I’ve detailed the proposals from each side, as well as articles about the funding cuts the district has faced from the state government. Since the first day of the strike alone, I’ve written 18 posts – some short, some long – detailing arguments on both sides, and I even wrote a 25 inch article March 8 quoting former governor Strickland, SEA president and a representative from Sen. Brown’s office at length – and I’ve done all this while continuing to cover city government, police, features and business news in a city of 45,000 people.

“I know from being on the ground in Strongsville day after day that there are a significant people who do not support the teachers’ strike, and until Friday they had not shown up as a group. I don’t treat every article on this issue like it’s the end-all, be-all of the coverage – in its eighth day with no sign of ending, this is going to be an issue for a long time. I hope my coverage is taken as a collective, and all sides are equally represented in the coverage as a whole.

“Your comments about failing to get a quote from a teachers union representative is well taken. I’m in my first year as a professional journalist out of undergrad and sometimes I goof up….”

The exchange led Schultz to call Cory to a) apologize, b) offer advice from her decades in the trenches, and c) post again on Facebook–this time about the thoughtful young man from whom she had just experienced her own life lesson.

“Had our roles been reversed, I would not have been as gracious as Cory,” Schultz wrote. “Clearly, I, too, must continue to learn from my mistakes.”

The dialogue led to a piece March 14 on the Columbia Journalism Review site under the headline, “Friend-Me Journalism,” and led Cory to send me a tweet at 11:50 a.m.: “You never stop learning. Thanks for all you guys taught me.”

As Connie Schultz can no doubt attest, it is often our students who teach us far more than we ever realize, and it is a gift to us who share their lives for such a relatively short time that it never ends.

Thanks, Cory.

The challenge truly is finding the time.

Teaching four classes is invigorating, and my students inspire me every day. And I consider myself lucky every day I get to read their writing and see how far they advance with every new sentence.

But between editing their stories, preparing  for classes, prepping for a new (fifth) class I start teaching next week, preparing for a visit from The New York Times’ David Carr (for our Stewart Lecture Series), helping to select undergrad award recipients for our annual School of Comm honors, posting materials for my Media Law & Ethics  iTunes U course (11,000 subscribers), editing a friend’s book, and a variety of speaking engagements, blogging and writing have been pushed to the back burning.

I refuse, however, to be one of those people who teaches advice I won’t take myself, so I am getting back in the writing saddle, as it were.

I recently found out I won’t be teaching a summer session course this year, and after my wave of disappointment crested, I rode the next wave toward writing inspiration and reached out to two of my favorite editors to let them know I am ready to start planning for summer stories. And the idea file is out and ready to be filled up with ideas and magazines.

I’m so grateful for the whirling dervish who is Cheryl Harrison for prompting me to write on Drink Up Columbus (and not taking no for an answer). I am grateful also for editors who keep reaching out and asking me to write (Julann Hohbach, you know I’m talking about you). And to those out there with story ideas, lay them on me!

No, writer’s block is not my problem–making more hours in the day is.

One of the class goals was to present for them a weekly Ethical Challenge, whereby they would be faced with an ethical issues from the real world, and have to talk out what thy would do and why they would do it. I had a whole list put together of potential topics–Stephen Glass style fabrication to the News of the World phone hacking to accepting gifts in the newsroom to taking nude princess pictures.

What I did not count on was the explosion of ethical challenges–some would say screw ups–that would confront us seemingly every day from the news itself.

• Sandy Hook’s quantity and quality of misinformation. Check.
• Publishing names and addresses of gun permit holders. Got it.
• Running a cover shot of a man seconds away from being killed by a subway. Got that one, too.
• The ongoing saga of Manti Te’o and the why-the-hell-didn’t-Sports Illustrated-realize-that-not-being-able-to-find-a-single-person-who-had-met-his-”girlfriend”-is-a-huge-problem conundrum that shows confirming your reporting is just as important as the reporting itself. That was a good one.

The semester is not even a month old, and the news media has been the gift that keeps on giving.

Ethics are funny things, as they change through time and space and situations. What was unacceptable 20, 30, 40  years ago may be common place today. And the reasons why journalists do what they do–even under the best of circumstances or with the best of intentions is sometimes hard for non-reporters to digest.

My class is a mix of journalism and non-journalism majors, and I can tell the non-reporters among them waver between fascination and disgust with the issues we have discussed.

Last week’s discussion of R. Umar Abbasi Post photo centered around if–and when–an ethical collapse occurred:

1. Was it with the shooting of the image?
2. Was it when Abbasi sold it to the Post?
3. Was it the Post buying it?
4. Was it the Post running the photo at all?
5. Was it putting it on the cover with the headline, “Doomed.”

Many of the non-journalists said the photo should not have been taken. Save the man or spend those precious seconds it took to frame and take that image trying to save him.

And I’m not sure what they thought of me when I shared with them that when I was in Hawaii on my honeymoon and a naked man jumped off a building about 20 feet away from us, landing with slick and sickening thud that silenced that October night, my first move was to grab my camera and take a photo. That’s what journalists do–we record the news.

Admittedly, there was nothing I could do to save him, but putting that viewfinder up to my eye was as much an involuntary action as breathing.

The journalism majors were thinking along those lines. They felt the ethics didn’t break down until the photo hit the Post cover. There was, for just about everyone I overheard discussing it our class groups, no excuse for running that image that publicly and with that headline.

I hope they remember their convictions, and the logic they use for justifying those convictions, when they are on deadline or faced with declining circulation numbers, or simply trying to give the public they serve what it needs and what it wants.

There is no telling what ethical scenarios the next 13 weeks will bring. I only hope the reporters, editors and publishing our future fodder for ethical discussion are as thoughtful in their deliberations as my students.

If you want to learn more about Media Law and Ethics at The Ohio State University, please check us out at iTunes U and on Facebook.

Related articles

• New York Post Publishes Photo of a Man Seconds Before Death – Would You? (kraftofwriting.com)

Part 1 was a look at how shockingly easily a college education can be falsified through online classes at for-profit colleges, or even the simple purchase of a diploma (for $180 I can get a degree from Columbia—who knew?).

Part 2, however, was one to which all of us in academia should have a listen.

The segment revolved around whether or not a college education really pays off for students and the parents who invest both time and money.

Students had mixed views. One said he thought that a bunch of people could sit around a park and talk over big ideas and accomplish far more than they did in college. Another said the current economics means a college might not lead to the best-paying job. Yet another said a college degree is what high school diploma was years ago.

And one student said it simply wasn’t worth it.

Admittedly, four years is a long time to devote to the pursuit of knowledge. Some classes and majors prepare students more thoroughly than others for the “real” world, and some students are more suited than others to academic life.

I was one of those students who knew what I wanted to be and found college to be a waste of productive working years. I became a reporter at age 18, and went to school at night to fulfill classes that would let me do the same job I was already doing during the day.

I was obsessed with grades, sure I was smarter than a lot of my professors, and did not really care what classes I took so long as they fulfilled a requirement and fit my schedule.

Now I can barely name any of my undergraduate professors and they probably can’t name me.

Hey students—sound familiar?

Now that I am a professor, my tune has changed dramatically, and I finally see college for what it is. Yes, it’s a change to learn and explore. Absolutely it will help focus your interests and teach help you craft a career. No doubt you learn subjects you didn’t even before know existed.

But one of the most important roles of college is as a venue to grow up—and screw up.

You slacked off and did barely any work in class. In college, it’s a bad grade. In the real world: fired. You talked behind your roommate’s back she found out? Better work that out as you have an entire semester yet to live together.

Partied instead of studying and now need an extension on a project. A lot of professors will hear you out and tell you why or why not your argument is sound. In the real world—the job goes to someone else and you just got derailed from the fast track.

At 18, 19 or even 20 years of age, few of us are ready to tackle the real world and make adult decisions that will impact the rest of our lives. We have to learn how to be wrong—and how to be right. We have to realize how to take and give constructive criticism. We need to learn how to learn from our mistakes without life-long ramifications.

Take chances. Screw up. Argue a point in which you believe, even if you have little basis for your opinion. That’s what college is for. And depending on your success or failure, little pieces of your childhood facade will be chipped away, until you are left with the adult that embarks on life with real chance for success.

It was only after returning for graduate school at The Ohio State University that I embraced this idea of college—a chance to learn how to learn, to stretch and expand your mind in directions you didn’t even know it could go, and to make mistakes with a safety net to catch you.

It’s a chance to challenge that which you thought you knew and opinions that you may have long held.

It’s a chance to become, rather than just be.

Welcome, my students, to Spring Semester 2013. I look forward to learning with you.

I sat amid 20 intelligent and inspiring colleagues, most of whom I had only met two days earlier and now considered friends and comrades. We had been selected for the experience of a lifetime–a trip to Apple’s headquarters ( located on the appropriately named Infinite Loop) where the tech company’s brightest educational minds sought to train us to make courses for the online educational platform known as iTunes U.

Haven’t heard of it? Don’t worry, you will.

iTunes U is a tablet-based (OK, yes it has to be an iPad) repository of free, self-paced classes on a list of topics seem to grow by the second. The can be as simple as providing an organized storage site of content for students or reaching beyond time and space to help lifelong learners immerse in new topics and broad ideas.

And for those of us at Ohio State, it will likely be part of our future classroom experiences.

Those of us gathered had applied for our spots based on a commitment to such learning opportunities and our ideas for classes that could be adapted or created for the platform.

We represented such diverse environments as the medical school and social work, English and music, as well as political science; evolution, ecology and organismal studies; and women’s, gender and sexuality studies. And, of course, communication.

My course idea was media law and ethics, the convergence of two key frames for journalistic pursuit and understanding. Building the course from scratch to teach for the first time gave me the opportunity to build the materials in a format that would be customizable to iTunes U.

The course will also feature live re-enactments of the U.S. Supreme Court as it decides real and mock cases, which I hoped would provide strong video content.

I must have sold it well, because an Oct. 19 email revealed I had made the cut. I’m pretty sure when I read it I screamed aloud for joy.

Our hosts for the voyage were the men of Digital First, Ohio State’s new initiative that promises to use technology to reinvent the educational experience.

The effort is led, as we were, by Mike Hofherr, who has recently–and no doubt deservedly–been promoted to associate vice president of eLearning and Distance Education. His support staff of Steve Lieb, Cory Tressler and Matt Stoltzfus (our iTunes rock god by virtue of his much admired chemistry course), were our hand-holders, mentors, travel agents and cruise directors.

We came from all over campus, with different roles and responsibilities in our “real life.” We eyed each other curiously in the Columbus airport before our 6:20 am flight, trying to figure out who was who and teaching what. But by the time we got to California and sat down for lunch at a little Vietnamese joint sniffed out by my new academic soul mate, Mark Rubinstein, all lines of college, rank or responsibility were wiped out.

We simply became Ohio State of the Silicon Valley.

That role was reinforced even more when we arrived that afternoon at Apple headquarters, where were told repeatedly that the vision of Mike and our administrators had positioned Ohio State at the forefront of the tablet teaching technology. Indeed, the future was being written now, and the Buckeyes were holding one of the mightiest pens.

Then we set to work.

We learned about outlines and media, and content curation from iBooks, apps, websites and original media. We organized and edited, collected and connected. The hours seemed to evaporate in the pure intellectual heat generated in the conference room in Apple’s Executive Learning Center.

I have never been, nor imagined I would be, in a room of so many brilliant people bringing so many creative concepts to life. Framed by true Apple geniuses–the people who invent and perfect the technology we use every day–each conversation overheard or interacted with was on a bullet-like train of thought, one that caused my brain to swirl with learning opportunity.

I’d love to share all we were told or shown, but Apple is quite proprietary about that which leads the technological world. Mike signed a non-disclosure agreement for all of us. There were no photos allowed inside the offices; it took all of our self-control not to tweet, Instagram or Facebook.

But such seclusion made us join together even tighter, this extraordinary experience appreciable only by the Buckeye brethren with whom we crafted courses for the next generation of learners.

We marked our final dinner with a winding trek flanked by giant redwoods to the longtime area favorite Alice’s Restaurant, where we laughed and ate and toasted our experience, and thought of even better ways to sculpt our classes. An unwillingness to let the night end led us to spend more hours at the hotel bar than maybe we should have, but through every hour we kept coming back to new technological philosophies and opportunities.

By the next morning, our last few hours at Apple, we were winding down physically but still ramping up emotionally for all that we had done, and all that we would do.

When, with Corey’s help, I hit the “publish” button and “Media Law and Ethics on iTunes U” went live, I felt like I had given birth–and in a way I had and, at the same time, been born. I had created an entity of which I was ever so proud and had immersed myself in a technology and educational belief system that changed me, and changed the teaching direction my future will take.

By afternoon, we were ensconced back on a Southwest plane. My other new soul mate and fellow iTunes U publisher, the incredible Cindy Selfe, sat behind me (“I’ve got your back, sister,” she told me before we took off). Surgeon Dave Renton, who brought us as close to laparoscopic surgery as most of us wish to be, looked as gleeful as a 6-year-old when the flight attendant provided him vanilla sandwich cookies before he plugged his earphones into “The Avengers” on–what else–his iPad.

Behind us, Corey and Matt huddled together discussing technology most of could barely pronounce, let alone understand.

We were headed back to our individual colleges and departments, students and courses, but we will remain connected in our shared experience and the promise that a new educational wave is coming.

In true California fashion, we are ready to ride it.

Check out Media Law and Ethics on iTunes U!

Other iTunes U links:

Ohio State iTunes U
Media Law & Ethics Course
Cindy Selfe’s Documenting Community Literacies Course

You see a man who has been pushed onto tracks as a subway nears, certain to crush him to death.

Do you take a photo?

And if you shoot it, does it get run on the front page of a newspaper?

The New York Post said yes to both of those questions yesterday when it ran the photo from R. Umar Abbasi, a freelance photographer, taken seconds before 58-year-old Ki-Suk Han was trapped and crushed to death by the subway.

Should the photographer have taken the shot? Should he have tried to save Han? If he does get the shot, should it be published? On the front page?

This is not the first time journalism has struggled with such questions, and it won’t be the last.

Photojournalist Frank Fournier’s image of 13-year-old Omayra Sánchez, who after an earthquake was trapped for three days in water, concrete and other debris before she died drew considerable fire, as did Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer winning image of a vulture seeming to await the death of a Sudanese child.

Both brought much needed attention to atrocities most of the world would never otherwise see or begin to comprehend. Both burn deep into the psyche of many who see them. Many see them as exploitative.

This photo is, of course, far different from those shot by Fournier and Carter. There was no natural disaster here, no region-wide epidemic of starvation and abuse to which the world might otherwise be blind.

This is one man alone in the face of an unspeakable,  nightmare–one of which could have involved anyone on that platform–and he appears abandoned only so far as human compassion and assistance, not voyeurism.

Photographer Abbasi is described today on the Post website as “anguished,” and says he was too far away to help. Carter was adamant that the child in his image survived and made it to a relief station. But Carter also committed suicide three months after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his photo

In journalism, we chronicle the news of world for others to see and experience, but what happens when that experiences crosses the boundary of acceptability for those who view it?

Is this keeping the public informed?

Is this horrific exploitation?

Is this why journalists now rank near the bottom of respectable professions?

Now decide: Would you have run the photo?

On Dec. 12 I head west to Cupertino, Calif., for two fun-packed days at Apple’s main headquarters to create an iTunes U course with 11 of my Ohio State colleagues.

I still can’t believe I was one of only a dozen people chosen for this iTunes Boot Camp, which will have us spending two days on the Apple campus to put together our course shell and populate it with as much content as we have completed. The plan is to make the courses live in January for our students and the world.

My focus has been the new Media Law & Ethics course that I am teaching this spring, which has meant getting the syllabus, power points, and supporting materials together, as well as creating a sampling of videos to introduce different concepts. I will then add videos as we go through our course work, especially the lecture audio and the class highlight–recreations of key legal cases from history and the future. (Intriguing I know!)

Here is a sampling of one of our videos. I’ll let you know when the course launches so you, too, can be a student at iTunes U!

Rene Rast was bumped and forced “to the back of the pack” during the Porsche Carrera Cup in Hockenheim, but rallied for the win.

Michael Waltrip waited at the “back of the pack” for most of the Good Sam Roadside Assistance 500 before making a move on the leaders that ended in a crash.

But where exactly is “the back of the pack”?

The question became pertinent after a headline in The Lantern, Ohio State’s student newspaper, proclaimed that then men’s and women’s cross-country teams finished “in back of pack” at the Wisconsin Adidas Invitational last week. The women finished 33rd out of more than 40 entrants, and the men were 39th out of 45.

If you clicked on the link, you will no longer find the words “back of pack” in the headline, so inflammatory were they for some involved in the team, who took the phrase to mean last. And that is where my dilemma lies.

I don’t know if it does mean finishing last.

There is no listing for “back of the pack” in my Slang and euphemism Dictionary, and I could find nary a listing online. When I asked some of my most accomplished students their perspective, I got answers like “back third of the field,” “back quarter of the field,” and “last place.”

If you apply the first definition, the men’s and women’s teams fit the bill. With the second definition only the men would qualify. On the third, neither one.

When J.R. Hildebrand qualified 17th out of 27 cars for the Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma, the Marin Independent Journal proclaimed he was “in back of pack”. But when Thoroughbred Gemologist faded from first to last–literally the final horse to cross the wire–in the Haskell Memorial, NJ.com said he faded “from first to back of pack”.

So which is it?

No one likes to have their failings pointed out, and in sport it is truly a matter of semantics to negotiate what euphemism is more or less accurate when it comes to losing. A loss is a loss–and it feels like crap.

But in English, words have meaning and those meanings have power to shape thought.

So how far back are you in the back of the pack?