It seems like just yesterday that students in the University of Miami School of Communication were editing camera footage on tapes the size of hardcover books and using chemicals in photography lab, not Photoshop. Few professors boasted their own Web pages, let alone podcasts and blogs. Less than a decade later, the School of Communication is a whole different animal. The miles of colored wires, massive plasma screens, and other digital doodads are only part of the picture. A sea change has taken place in the facilities and courses available to students, prompted by a metamorphosis in the way the world produces, receives, and uses media. Time magazine named “You” the 2006 Person of the Year. “It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace,” writes Time story author Lev Grossman. With sites like these, the layperson becomes the know-it-all, posting descriptions, product reviews, political commentary, entertainment, even garage-based science experiments for the world to view on the Web. Wikipedia, for example, lists user-generated encyclopedia entries on just about everything. The danger, of course, is that anyone can alter what is supposed to be trusted, factual information.

The School of Communication’s new Knight Center for International Media—a $10 million initiative funded primarily by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation—is investigating these “citizen media” Web tools as well as all aspects of contemporary communication and journalism practice. The mission of the center, says Sanjeev Chatterjee, executive director of the center and vice dean of the School of Communication, is to investigate and develop new media models to empower future leaders in the field, particularly across global boundaries. The center will support two new Knight chairs, one focusing on visual journalism and the other on cross-cultural communication.

An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Chatterjee also studies new multimedia platforms that are redefining the field of journalism. He recently discovered Secondlife.com, a virtual world where users create an avatar who can travel, buy property, take a for-credit class at Harvard, attend movie premieres not available in the real world, and do business with other avatars. Reuters even employs full-time journalists to cover news in SecondLife.com. Chatterjee describes the day his avatar went flying with someone whose real-life alter ego is an aerospace engineer. He clicked on an invitation she sent, and the screen teleported him to her island, which was filled with vintage airplanes.

“Five years ago I was probably thinking that virtual worlds would be something different from real life,” Chatterjee says. “The convergence of real life with virtual life and the graying of the line in between is very interesting.”

One of the greatest promises of Web-based media tools, Chatterjee explains, is the opportunity for everyday people to become powerful agents of change. Last semester Chatterjee and assistant professor Kim Grinfeder, A.B. ’94, taught a Digital Activism course in which students started a “wiki” (a user-generated public resource) called Mediaforchange.org, a glossary of people, blogs, Web sites, documentaries, literature, and organizations dedicated to activism. The class is part of the school’s Visual Journalism program.

“Mediaforchange, as a resource and mobilizer of social causes, is a great example of the infinite power of specialization, reach, and interactivity the Internet provides,” says Gaby Bruna, a student in the class who is now the homepage administrator for the site.

The Internet is a whole new venue for not only writers and activists but photographers as well. “Students still learn how to tell a story through images, but now they have the opportunity to share that story with people around the world,” says Visual Journalism dean Lelen Robert.

Robert is working on many online projects involving creative storytelling through photography. One such project is Photo Camp. Funded by National Geographic, Photo Camp gives teenagers in underprivileged communities photography equipment and basic instruction, which they use to create portraits of their own communities. UM faculty members teach workshops and serve as mentors. The students’ pictures are displayed at a local gallery as well as on the Internet. So far Robert has organized Photo Camps in Homestead and Little Haiti. “I think the most important aspect of photography is its ability to cross all borders and nationalities,” she says.

Less than a month after its launch, the Knight Center for International Media already demonstrated its commitment to helping photography cross borders. In February it sponsored and hosted the World Press Photo Exhibit for two weeks at the School of Communication and for two weeks at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. Housed in Amsterdam, the exhibit consists of 205 of the best photojournalistic images from around the world that were published in 2006.

Chatterjee and fellow communication professsor Leonardo Ferreira plan on doing a cross-cultural project for which they’ll travel to Bolivia and perhaps Peru to explore pre-colonial communication among indigenous peoples.

“We want to be able to look at global news that doesn’t stay in the headlines—topics of interest like culture, the global environment, and freedom of speech and press,” says Chatterjee. As such, the Knight Center for International Media is developing a program that would bring in a well-known photojournalist to help students create a prototype newspaper of the future.

Still, before students can create change on a global level, they’ve got to learn the basics. On a Wednesday afternoon, early in the semester, students in Grinfeder’s Web Site Building class are learning the code that allows a site viewer to go back to a previous page. The students seem comfortable with all the backspaces, colons, and commands. After all, most of them have built their own Web pages in one way or another already. “Our job is to teach them how to take what they already know—MySpace, PDAs, cell phones—and harness that knowledge,” says Grinfeder, “and to teach them to think in a different, more effective way, to look at things objectively.”

Grinfeder’s class is one of many digital-age additions to the curriculum, supported by the latest ooh-ahh gadgets. Within two new, state-of-the-art facilities—the Frances L. Wolfson Building and adjacent International Building—are digital editing and photography studios, an animation studio, all-digital broadcast cable studios, four computer labs (two Mac, two PC), and a fully equipped sound stage. The recently renovated Bill Cosford Cinema has put the campus moviegoing experience on par with the latest in audio-visual technology.

Keeping pace with the changing times ensures that students’ skills won’t be obsolete by the time they graduate. It also earns the School of Communication the honor of hosting many important conferences, including the third annual We Media conference, held in February.

“The conference highlighted the need for discussion about the relationship between the established news media industry and people who are commonly branded as ‘citizen journalists,’” Chatterjee says.

Grinfeder helps organize local gatherings like BarCamp and Refresh. BarCamp is a national, wiki-style “unconference” in which attendees share information on new Web technologies, and Refresh Miami is a monthly get-together during which Web developers and designers discuss everything from public relations on the Internet to fake blogs.

“Many of the local startups attend these meetings looking for people to hire and to learn from each other,” Grinfeder says. “A lot of students also have found internships here.”

Many UM students have already begun harnessing what they learn in their classes to get the ball rolling on their careers. Anthony Wojtkowiak, a film student who took the Digital Activism course, plans to post his resume and reel on his personal Web site, www.showufo.com, and he also is working on sites for music lovers and those in the automotive industry. He is intentionally vague to protect his ideas from theft. He notes that more than any other medium, the Internet is controlled by the people who use it.

“Broadcasting has the FCC, movies have the MPAA, even comic books had the CCA, but the Internet does not have a body that censors it,” Wojtkowiak says. “The Internet, as it stands, offers the best example we have of a free market economy. Many Web sites don’t even tax goods.”

At the same time, Wojtkowiak realizes the reach of the Web is not yet truly worldwide. “The poor in our country don’t have as much access to the Internet as many of us have, and many foreigners have no Internet access at all. As the Internet continues to grow, though, I think we’ll see it continue to change the way we think about the world.”

Jessica Sick, B.S.C.’00, is a freelance writer in Miami, Florida.