Arming The Students

Here is a story from NPR on the newspaper industry. The story discusses how the circulation of urban newspapers are falling, and how small town papers circulation is growing. If you listen carefully, you will hear this is partly due to lack of access to technology in rural areas.
Why am I linking to this story?

In the future (heck right now) anyone with a computer and an internet connection can become a publisher.
If Blogs and Online media are the next big thing in journalism, then we should train our students in the use of this emerging medium.
We should train them in the following areas:

1. How to discriminate between facts and opinions


2. How to think critically about what they are reading


3. finally, train them to become an effective online journalists reporting about the world around them

They are already reporting about their emotional world using the internet on site such as MySpace. Our job should be to arm them with the ability to discriminate facts from opinions, how to analyze those facts, and finally give them the tools needed to report about their surrounding based on facts.