"And as we all get to know each other, I envision this group of people feeling as though they have a stake in what I write, wanting me to get it right, and helping me to go in a direction that pushes issues forward."

The Beat: Education Week’s Digital Directions. Covering technology in the K-12 classroom.

Reporter: Michelle Davis, staff writer Education Week’s Digital Directions.

Description: From Kevin Bushweller, Executive Editor Education Week writes….

Education Week has been searching for ways to use social networking
to improve the quality of our news gathering. We have followed what
others have been doing, but we were waiting for the right opportunity
and approach to get started. Your project gives us a great opportunity
to jump-start this new approach to journalism.

Our plan is to set up a social networking site for Education Week’s
Digital Directions, our ed. tech. magazine. We like the idea of using a
"network" of  well-connected experts, tech savvy administrators and
principals, innovative teachers, ed. tech. industry players, and
others, initially, to identify the top 10 ed. tech. problems schools
are facing and how they should go about tackling those problems. Our
vision is that the network would evolve to include other features.

The lessons we learn from doing this for Digital Directions are
likely to be invaluable to the Education Week newsroom. And if the
project for Digital Directions is successful, we hope to expand our use
of social networking to gather news and help our readers work together
to solve problems.

It’s worth noting that we have support from the top for this
project. Ginny Edwards, president of Editorial Projects in Education,
the publisher of Education Week and Digital Directions, has been
encouraging reporters and editors to look for innovative ways to use
Web 2.0 technologies to improve the news-gathering process. We have
talked with her about this project and she believes it has a lot of
potential.

The timing of this project also coincides with our plans to
implement full-blown social networking throughout edweek.org. We are
working with a company called Pluck to deploy those social-networking
tools. It is likely that the work we are doing with Pluck will feed us
ideas for the work we would do in partnership with you on Digital
Directions.

The Education Week Team

1) Kevin Bushweller, assistant managing editor for online news at edweek.org.
2)  Jeanne McCann, the managing editor of edweek.org.
3)  Michelle Davis, a longtime federal beat writer for Education Week who is now the primary writer for Digital Directions.

More: Michelle Davis writes…

When
Kevin proposed the beat blogging project to me, I began thinking about
the way I write a story and the sources I go to. I’m no techie, but I
am keenly interested in how technology connects people and enables
information and ideas to travel.

There are a few things I hope to get out of the project. It will
provide me with a greater depth of knowledge on my beat, which is still
fairly new to me. I’m still learning about information technology and
education and this will provide me with an instant and evolving primer
on the issues. In addition to direct access to sources, and suggestions
for new ones, I envision this social networking site providing me with
more depth on any topic discussed for future stories, as I watch
experts in the field dissect the issue of the day.

Cleary it will be a key source for story ideas as well. I anticipate
that a developing network would place me firmly on the cutting edge, as
these are the people who are working in school districts every day. And
as we all get to know each other, I envision this group of people
feeling as though they have a stake in what I write, wanting me to get
it right, and helping me to go in a direction that pushes issues
forward.

I also see the site as a way for all of these experts to communicate
with each other, trading ideas and information. The idea that district
information technology directors might try new projects they picked up
from our online discussion—and be able to bypass pitfalls using advice
from others on the site—is something I’d love to see happen.