A couple of months ago, I had a chance to present to my fellow faculty and staff at the Missouri School of Journalism to talk about how I use social media inside and outside the classroom. Here’s a look at my slides:

I’ve found great success in using my classroom as a social experimental space. I also use it as a way to stay in contact with my current and former students. In the classroom, I encourage tweeting with the #jenclass hashtag. It gives my students a chance to share live notes with each other. Yes, there are times where the note taking turns into a completely off topic side conversation, but I follow the hashtag and can call the students out if they lose focus. I also use CoverItLive sometimes to let students practice the skill of live blogging. It’s a skill that is only done well if you practice. It’s tough to practice if you don’t have reasons to live blog!

I also make it clear to my students that it’s easier to reach me via social networks than leaving a voicemail. My class hashtag extends beyond class discussion. Current and former students share links and ideas throughout each week. (Right now the stream is quiet since I’m not teaching a class, just managing the newsroom at KOMU.)

I recommended experimenting with your comfort zone to the faculty and staff who attended my session. One person commented how I’m much braver than he is as a teacher. I said I’m lucky to have flexible students who are hungry to learn in this space. Each semester is different for me. I never teach my class the same way, so every semester I learn something that worked and something that didn’t work. Luckily, I ask for input throughout the semester and most of the time my students feel comfortable telling me when they feel they understand what’s going on and when they feel lost!

I loved having a chance to share some of my higher ed ideas to my peers. It’s something I don’t get to do often enough. It’s funny how so many of us are doing really great things, but we’re so busy working hard we don’t take enough time to share.

Five minutes.

I wish I could really summarize this experience in five minutes. But since I have five minutes, I’m going to focus on how I grew and changed my goals. I first focused on how newsrooms can collaborate. It’s still important… But I learned during this time that even if I find the most amazing way to bring multiple newsrooms together with the help of technology, it isn’t worth the effort if people don’t use the information. That’s why I moved to the most important word for my life as a journalist and as a journalism professor:

Community.

We need to find ways to teach our journalism students and our industry how to respect the process and work it takes to build community. This is crucial as more people turn to journalists for their personal skills and abilities – it’s very possible they aren’t going to them because of their newsroom. We need to be open, honest and connected. Hopefully I can search for ways to share this knowledge so we can all use the great skills of the journalism profession in this new socially connected world.

I think there are all kinds of different ways to use Twitter – I hope we can teach those who are interested the most efficient ways a newsroom and a journalist can use this tool.

What are ways you use Twitter for yourself as a journalist or for your newsroom/brand. I love hearing and knowing all of the many different ways. That helps me guide and teach future journalists how to think in as many directions as possible!

In honor of Las Vegas, I want to share a moment I experience on my flight as I arrived into town. One of our flight attendants happens to be an Elvis impersonator… And he and the rest of the crew put on a show. I was pretty far in the back of the plane – but I hope you can enjoy the fact that we got a performance and we lit up the aisle using the flight attendant alert lights.

UPDATE: The three hour presentation and one-on-one help time was awesome. I hope anyone who attended (or wish they had) will leave questions and comments here. The conversation doesn’t have to end with this session. To help with that, here’s the slides (and more that we never had time to show) from the presentation:

I loaded up the first half of the presentation… The second half included questions and answers and a little bit of show and tell. If you have questions or need some show and tell, leave a comment here and I’ll see if I can help get you started.

Here are the slides I used during the presentation just in case you’re curious. I ran through a few pretty quickly to get to the second half of the presentation.

All of my follow up notes to this presentation are a permanent link to the right of the blog called “Twitter Tips.” Please feel free to leave comments here if there are additional details that were missed.

UPDATE: You can go here to watch part 2 of the webcast.

Feel free to view my PowerPoint slideshow.

A slide from my presentation

Twitter isnt the end-all be-all for journalism, but I do see it as a growing news tool. The trick, you need to be in there to understand how it works. For the first time, I recommended to all of my students that they should join a few social networks and learn how they work. I started out in Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Motionbox, Vimeo (I could go on) for my personal needs online and I’ve transitioned that use into ways I can use them professionally. You cannot jump in and think you know how it works. That’s how you end up finding reports like this one. It is so easy to fall into a culture of fear. Journalists shouldn’t allow themselves to do that. I think we should act like journalists, investigate these tools and see how they can be helpful. People are using them. Let’s see how we can use them to our advantage to deliver better news to our markets.

Now I’ll try to stop ranting.