We're on our way to Web 2.0

Every dean dreams of helping put his or her school on the map. Our founding dean, Travis Linn, did more than that. Nearly 10 years ago, he put the Reynolds School of Journalism on the World Wide Web. That made us one of the first journalism schools to publish on the Web and offer a Web-based journalism course, JOUR 453, “Online Reporting and Editing,” which each spring semester produces the student online magazine Zephyr. With the launch of our new Web site, we are moving from what Web visionary Tim O’Reilly calls Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. For a journalism school, Web 1.0 is publishing as posting – putting text and images on the Web. Web 2.0 is publishing as participation – tapping the collective intelligence of faculty, students, professionals and citizens to create a Web site that’s smarter than any one group. We want to experiment with all kinds of interactive tools – blogs, wikis, Real Simple Syndication (RSS) etc. – to engage experts, journalists and ordinary people in a common conversation about what matters most. Right now, we think of this as Web 1.5 – still mostly publishing as posting, but with richer use of interactive and multimedia tools. Most of this site is still a brochure site, telling you the particulars of the Reynolds School of Journalism. We are posting student and faculty work on our home page and under the header Our Work, and we are beginning to use more multimedia tools such as Howard Goldbaum’s panoramic and virtual reality photography (for an example, click on the inset photo here). We want to keep moving toward Web 2.0, so that when you come to this site, it is virtually – in the computer sense of that word – like crossing the threshold of the school. We want you to encounter what our colleague Jean Trumbo calls “a beautiful noise” – the sounds of students, faculty and professional collaborators working together. The bottom line: We want our Web site to be a publishing platform that taps collective intelligence. Ultimately, we want to update it throughout each school day with contributions from faculty, students and collaborators. We want to fill it with interactive and multimedia features. We want to create a shared space for people – not just students and staff – to think together about our disciplines: print, broadcast and online news, advertising, public relations and other elements of integrated marketing communication. This will take us some time, not only to integrate the technological tools into our teaching, research, professional outreach and service, but also to adapt our culture so that we use the Web the way our students use it when they cross our threshold on their way into the world – as a central element of daily life and work. This Web site will work best when all our faculty and students think of it as theirs to produce as well as to consume. For now, I want to acknowledge the folks who have brought us this far. The design is based on the work of Alan Jacobson, a renowned print designer who has expanded into Web design through his company Brass Tacks Design. Our faculty colleague Larry Dailey, the Donald W. Reynolds Chair in Media Technology, turned the design into postable pages. Our founding managing editor is our faculty colleague Deidre Pike, and our founding photo editor is our faculty colleague Ira Gostin. Ira has counted on David Calvert, the president of our Photojournalism@Nevada student club, as our lead photographer. (You can see some of David’s work here.) Warren Lerude, Bob Felten and Rosemary McCarthy have provided much-appreciated initial copy-editing support. Graduate assistant Cristian Rojas Lazic of Political Science has provided technical support. The entire enterprise has been overseen by our technology committee, which includes Larry Dailey, Howard Goldbaum, Rosemary McCarthy, Jean Trumbo, Edward Lenert, and Donica Mensing. Let us know how we’re doing – and offer ideas as to how we can do it better.