• Political Reporting
• Health and Environmental Reporting
• Race, Gender and the News
• News Games
• Interactive Storytelling
• Interactive Journalism
• Blogging and Social Media
• Media Ethics
• Computer Assisted Reporting (Now Data Journalism)
• Future of the News
• Topics in Professional Writing: Online Magazine Editing and Production
• Rhetoric of Race
• Reporting Education
• Feature Writing
• Technical Writing - I designed this class for the Interactive Multimedia curriculum, but do not teach it.

• Introduction to Professional Writing (now Writing for Interactive Multimedia)
• Topics in Professional Writing (typically taught as a PR strategies course)
• Magazine Writing
• Advanced Writing
• Athens to New York (interdiscplinary humanities "cities and civilization" class taught at TCNJ during the 1990s. I typically chose themes revolving around the nature of American identity.)
• The Writings of W.E.B. DuBois (undergraduate and graduate level)
• First Seminar: Trenton Makes Music

I came to academia in 1990 with a background in magazine writing and corporate public relations. My goal at that time was two-fold: to create learning environments that gave undergraduate students realistic experiences of how writing is used in newsroom and professional settings to solve real-world problems and to help budding media professionals become reflective, ethical practitioners capable of adapting as the industry evolved. From a academic perspective, I was guided by the research of Dr. Teresa Redd demonstrating that students who write for specific audiences demonstrate increased levels of engagement with the assignment, and produce texts more likely to be seen as effective by members of that particular audience.

Consequently, from 1990-1996, my professional writing classes operated as a communications consulting firm providing creative and project management services to real clients. My magazine writing students not only wrote and pitched freelance articles, they worked on the business plan and sample issues for a magazine start-up, College Money, which we created with the help of alumni and my art department colleague, Elizabeth Mackie. Prof. Mackie and I also worked closely with Terry Byrne in the communication studies department to have students work in cross-disciplinary teams to create multimedia advertising campaigns.

In 1996, students in my magazine writing class and Prof. Mackie’s graphic design class created Unbound, and online news magazine. Unbound ran as a lab publication in my magazine writing class for a number of years, giving journalism students practical experience running an online news operation, including working in html, flash and javascript. Students also developed a site manual and code of ethics. In 2001-2, we experimented with extending the unbound platform to the pre-college level by creating an online magazine activity as an enhancement to TCNJ’s Collegebound program.

By 2003, our curriculum evolved to reflect the changing needs and practices of the communications industries. I co-founded TCNJ’s Interactive Multimedia major with Phil Sanders and Ursula Wolz. We also revamped the journalism/professional writing curriculum to include a required course in computer-assisted reporting.

Since 2003, I’ve been teaching classes related to online journalism and new media and exploring the growing impact of social media, gaming and computer science on journalism and related communications fields. This work is described in more detail on the research pages.

In 2000, I was named New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.