"Opinion and the blogosphere"

It's Sunday night and I'm winding down after teaching the weekend seminar at Portland State mentioned in the post below.

We covered a lot of ground in 20 hours spread over three days. I anticipated feeling stressed out during the class and exhausted by the end of it. Instead, I think I paced myself pretty well and came away energized and encouraged.

In a class that brought together beginners and experienced bloggers, we spent time reviewing and critiquing professional (mostly journalism) blogs and personal blogs, collectively amazed at the incredible variety of topics, web page designs and visuals. We discussed ethical issues, citizen journalists and where we get our news, information and analysis.

Thanks to two guest speakers -- my co-workers Susan Nielsen and Rick Attig -- we also spent time on writing tips and the concept of the "third place."

According to Wikipedia: The third place is a term used in the concept of community building to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. In his influential book The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg (in photo, above) argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

During the last hour of class, I had each student talk about what he or she learned. I was gratified to see we filled up an entire whiteboard with their list. Now I await the next steps: Office hours on Wednesday; a final exam that's due on Friday (create a blog or write an opinion piece); grades due a week from Tuesday.

I go back to work tomorrow with a renewed commitment to explore the blogosphere and apply it to my work. It's a whole separate universe out there.