Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of
Next fall, a handful of students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism will convene weekly to learn about blogging from John Batelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, the school's new media program director.

Students will create a weblog devoted to copyright issues, from "deep-linking" to online music trading. They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?" said Grabowicz, who contributes to the Poynter Institute's online media blog.

The Berkeley class on blogging is the latest in a series of signs that the media establishment is starting to warm up to what was long seen as legitimate journalism's loud-mouthed kid sister.

For some in the mainstream press, … like the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, blogs are an "infinite echo chamber of self-regard," as he wrote in a recent column, "(a) medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outré, goes unpraised."

Despite this, a number of schools, including USC's Annenberg School for Communication, will include blogging in their online journalism classes in the fall. And senior bloggers, like Dave Winer and Ken Layne, have recently given talks both Cal and Stanford.

Teachers at every level from elementary school to MBA are trying to bring blogs into their classrooms. They're finding the most success when they use the blog as a "classroom management tool" ­-- a way to broadcast homework assignments, keep parents informed, and provide links to research materials, said Sarah Lohnes, an educational technology specialist at Middlebury College in Vermont.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52992,00.html