You might ask…I’ve been lax at blogging here, not because I don’t want to or like to. But, I’ve just been swamped.  I’m teaching my two Web design courses (Web Design and Publishing for undergrads and Multimedia Production for grad students). They are working on their third project, really the second complete Web site (first site encompasses Projects 1 &2). They are making a site for a hobby or organization from scratch.  We have Mass Comm Week coming up, and I created the blog for that and am getting my students ready to write previews and cover the event. Plus, I’ve been doing some testing of Ustream.tv , because I want to live stream some of the panels, particularly the keynote with Scott McClellan.  I found that you need a pretty good laptop mainly for the part where you record and archive the event. Good thing I’m doing lots of testing. I will attempt to live stream my friend Paul’s show at Hole in the Wall this Friday at 8pm at onthatnote.com. Tune in!

ACL Fest was big fun, and I’ve got lots of coverage at onthatnote.com. Plus, I’ve been doing the online newsletter for Texas Music magazine. It’s keeping me very busy, but it’s fun.  I have to find a way to have it take less of my time and still be good.  I keep getting all these good ideas for it, but it’s just a sideline, basically a hobby, so I don’t have much time to dedicate to improvements.

And, I’ve got this research project going. One of my grad students, Jon Zmikly is helping me. We’ve gotten a slow start on coding, but I hope to have some time for that over the next week. I also turned in an REP grant proposal. It’s an internal grant at my university, for summer research funding. I hope to study this idea of the programmer/journalist, maybe visit with the NY Times to see what they are doing.  I know there are research topics as well as curriculum issues around this area.

BTW, Jon and Lewis Knight will be helping me with the live stream for Mass Comm Week. It is great to have such enthusiastic and talented grad students.

And, if that’s not enough, we, as a school, are trying to work on curriculum issues and that includes technology, facilities and faculty headcount.  I’ve been part of a few meetings on this topic. These things are slow moving at the university level, but I think we are in a good place, with some good people, to move ahead.  We have an accreditation visit in November, so I assume some comments in regard to the multimedia/interactive elements in our curriculum will be highlighted. So, hopefully that will give us some justification for our direction.

Lots of fun things in the news. Apple’s new Macbook/Macbook Pro line is out. I’m interested to see how this lack of firewire issue will be resolved. This article on MediaShift talked about the need for hiring tech types, definitely something I’m interested in. And, a couple of articles on who to blame and why for the downturn in the news business: Buzz Machine and The Digital Journalist.