As for what I’m taking from CollegeJourn last night, I think that the biggest take home point for me was getting the newsroom to get out there and experience how to create online content. It got discussed a lot, and I know that our newsroom here at Whitman really likes writing for print, but for whatever reason avoids online anything (blogs, Twitter, etc.).

To that end I’m meeting with the editors today so I’ll be pitching ideas like incorporating Publish2 links onto our site and inviting the newsroom to it. We already have a Twitter account (@whitmanpio) but perhaps I can get more people posting to it.

Since we don’t have a Journalism major (or even classes) here I’m kind of stuck to the newsroom, but we’ll see what happens.

To add to what she said in the comment above, Cover it Live was the best medium. I know it sucked that some comments didn’t get through and that there was a lag, but people were complaining when it went too fast as well. No matter how we formatted it, someone was always unhappy. We threw a poll in there to ask if moderating or live was preferred and I’m pretty sure about 70+ percent said moderating was the preference.

But beyond technical limitations, I too was truly impressed with the great ideas students, professionals and educators brought to the table. We were shocked at the sheer volume of participants and comments.

So, now, Andrew, a question for you: What do you plan to take back to your classroom/school/ newsroom after watching the chat?

This week was an all-out blitz.

We purposefully said no to a Twitter hashtag for tonight’s chat because we would be inviting professors who weren’t familiar with how to use Twitter. We’ve also broke away from hashtags early on in the game because to be honest, Twitter isn’t set up to be a chatroom, even coupled with TweetChat, and many of us have followers who don’t appreciate being flooded with crazy hashtags. #journchat does it, but there’s so many people complaining about #journchat that we decided to do things differently. The little Meebo room works just fine for most weeks.

But will definitely take your suggestion for a 2-hour chat into consideration. Some nights we all stay even later than 3 hours, but I think it’s probably time to cut it a little short.

Thanks for the feedback, and hope to see you next Sunday!