j’s scratchpad

Tonight’s class was possibly the best class I’ve guest lectured at. I knew it was going to be different when one of the students asked if we could get a pizza. I told him to ask the guest speaker, not the instructor, and I’d say yes. Then, they wouldn’t have to listen to me for a few moments while my mouth was full.

What made it really good is that the students had lots of great questions and participated in the talk. I feel like I really taught them something useful and very few of them seemed bored during the presentation. We got sidetracked a little bit, but they were good sidetracks. I think some of the students walked out of there with some new knowledge about doing research.

I have a slide in there about weblogs and someone asked what they were long before I got to the slide. With the professor’s permission, I took the class on a quick electronic field trip. Several people have e-mail addresses ending in harvard.edu, so I plugged Harvard’s blogs and showed them where to go to sign up and learn more. I also mentioned the Thursday night meetings and emphasized that they’re open to the public and for people at all stages of blogging: those who just want to learn more about it and those who have been blogging for a long time. There was even a blogger in the class.

To illustrate, I brought them to this blog. Everyone started laughing. I knew my blog was bad, but I didn’t think they’d laugh at it. The instructor said something about my tagline, which was “Tonight I talk to a journalism class. I’m bringing candy so they’ll like me.” I’m going to pretend that’s what made them laugh. (By the way, the candy didn’t crunch too much.) I then went to my original blog post about the talk where I had typed “Skip class. The presentation is on my Web site” earlier that afternoon. Then we went to Casa Walsh. I showed them the ResourceShelf earlier.

One student got us back to the presentation by asking how journalists could use weblogs, then someone else asked about how to get one outside of Harvard. I think I got more questions about weblogs than anything else I covered in my presentation. The instructor jokingly warned me that everyone would be asking me questions about blogging later. (Yes, they have my contact information. One student pointed out that they could contact me through my blog, too.)

I was only supposed to speak for 30 minutes, but I ended up being there for over an hour. It seemed like it was time well-spent.

Thanks so much to those of you who gave me suggestions about what to cover. I marketed my profession and forgot to mention Google Answers.

That student never did order the pizza.

Addendum 2/12: “The Secret Court of 1920″ by Amit R. Paley, which I used as an example of history lost in the archives a reporter discovered, is in the November 21, 2002 issue of Fifteen Minutes, The Harvard Crimson’s magazine. (Thanks, Jay, for the note about the bad link. It’s fixed now.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2004 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.