Post-Gazette Covers SHU Blogging

In today's Christmas edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, staff writer Bill Schackner published Freedom of speech redefined by blogs. It's a hefty article that takes a look at how blogs are affecting higher learning, and how blog posts are further reaching that one might think.

I had a great time talking to Mr. Schackner over the phone about blogging, my theories behind blog conduct, and my own experiences through "Tranquility Lost."

The article is too long to just post on my blog, but below are a few excerpts. I definitely recommend reading the whole article. It not only praises Dr. Jerz's efforts (rightfully so!) but also shows SHU as a national leader in the blogosphere.

My incident with the football team is mentioned in the third paragraph of the article:

Junior Mike Rubino got a more extreme lesson about free speech in the blogosphere. His "10 reasons why Seton Hill doesn't need a football team," including a claim that "jocks" would bring more drugs, alcohol and fights to campus, irked arriving players who found his Internet posting months later.

"I even got calls to my room," he said. "They talked to my roommate, thinking it was me, saying things like they're going to kick my butt."

Awkward encounters? Sure. But instances such as these are providing teachable moments for faculty at a growing number of colleges nationwide, including Seton Hill. There, a professor and his prolific community of student bloggers are exploring the good and the ugly about a rough-and-tumble form of Internet discourse whose popularity has exploded.

Later on in the story, Jerz has an excellent quote about how blogs are shaping the World Wide Web:

Students find that their musings on topics from Plato to video games have been discovered by a parent back home who typed their name into a search engine such as Google. Or they'll discover their homework was incorporated hundreds of miles away into a stranger's Internet research.

"In another generation, these students would have simply been users of a computer," Dr. Jerz said. "Now, they are co-creators of the Internet."

And finally, Mr. Schackner mentions my post one more time, towards the end of the article...

The humor can be biting. The fact that Seton Hill would play its inaugural football season at a high school field wasn't lost on Mr. Rubino, 20, a junior from Monaca, as he panned the whole idea. "Hey," he wrote. "Doesn't having a football team require, oh I don't know, a football FIELD?"

Students can easily get blogging tips from Dr. Jerz, a thin man with a rapid delivery who, in one class, stopped mid-speech to tell his students apologetically: "Not everyone is as excited about blogs as I am."