give the 'net credit

I know the post title isn’t super creative, but I’ve been mired in a morass of grading the last week. Ohio University’s first quarter ends right before Thanksgiving, and we’re in finals week now. Before Tuesday, the last day of finals, I have more than 30 final projects to grade, plus 10 team projects.

Honestly, it’s time consuming. I try to give students as much feedback as I can. I figure at least they’ll get that out of my class. Despite the time commitment,  I don’t mind grading. If I’ve done my job correctly, it’s usually a validation of what I’ve been trying to teach all quarter long. I worried about this, my first quarter as an assistant professor, because I’ve been harried. Adjusting to academic life hasn’t been easy, but I was so impressed with the online journalism projects students in my J314/514 class turned in, that I felt pretty good about my first quarter at Ohio University. I could have listed all 17 projects, but in the interest of time and space, I’ve chosen the following:

Please, take a look. Click on the links below. I hope you’ll feel afterwards, as I do, that the future of journalism is in good hands.

• Australian Adventure: Alyse Kordenbrock used an interactive map and narrated slideshows to tell the story of one family’s journey in a revealing way.
• Ohio University Crime Map: A handful of violent crimes in a relatively short period of time made students fidget about their safety on and near campus. Jordan Valinsky turned a simple tool we’ve probably all used for directions into a powerful graphical representation of how much of a crime problem the university faces.
• Social Media in College: Adam Wagner looks at online social networking in a personal way and helped me understand why sites such as Facebook are important to university students.
• Around Athens: Sarah Beth Hensley’s blog offers insights on living in a small university town. She ramps her reportage up a notch with weekly video segments on what makes Athens unique. She even got a comment from the local pizza place.
• Athens Anew: Tyler Bell expands a magazine piece he did earlier on the Appalachia into a Web companion focusing on Athens. For someone new to the area, like me, I appreciated his lists of things to do.

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