What color is your parachute? Or what will you make of your parachute?

 For the last three years, six semesters to be precise, I have co-taught a 400-level required journalism course with John Dille, the wise man in the video above.

John and I have made a great team.

We teach a course about the Business & Future of Journalism. John is awesome talking about 'Big B' Business. And I share lots of information about what newsrooms are doing these days to attempt to guarantee that they'll be around in the Future.

John had taught the class on his own for two semesters before I signed on. It didn't take long for us to get in step with each other, using some of what John had taught before and adding new wrinkles to the class syllabus. The topic is a moving target and we are constantly updating our class content. But even so, after six semesters together, we've gotten into a pretty smooth routine.

John and me at graduation 2014.

We were lucky to have each other. 

I was very lucky to teach with such a caring, passionate educator and journalist. And I think the best students leave our class understanding that too.

In the final minutes of the final day of each semester, we offer some last words of advice to our students. I tell tell them not to be afraid to change directions along the way and to remember that they are snowballs - always accumulating knowledge, experience, skills that will serve them well no matter what they do.

John tells them the story caught on video above.

Because Spring 2014 at the Cronkite School of Journalism has been our final semester (we're going to take a little break), I was moved to record the tale that John always shares during these last minutes that we still have the students' attention. It's a winner. Even graduating seniors stop and take note. You should watch it.

Our class from the Spring 2013 semester. They look extra-serious because they are taking a quiz.

Robin Phillips, Phoenix 

The inspiring shelf life of flying cars

I talked with a class of high school students this week at Cronkite School of Journalism. These were smart kids who chose to spend a few weeks in school this summer getting a taste of college life.

My talk was on the Future of Journalism.   We started in the Cronkite museum to get a taste of the past - historic newspapers, early hand-held TV cameras and a a 1984 Macintosh computer that amused them. "Look, they used the rainbow Apple logo!" one exclaimed.


I then told them that when I was a kid and we thought about what the future would bring, we thought it would include flying cars.

"Yeah," my friends and I thought, "It'll be 2005 and we'll definitely have flying cars."

I then showed the students this cool video of Google's self-driving car project from 2010 which was designed to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient. The video shows a blind man named Steve who took the hands-free car for a spin... ending up at Taco Bell for lunch.

I talked with the students about innovation with a purpose, new ideas that help make people's lives better.



And I then asked them:

"When you were kids, what did you think you'd see in the future?  What did you dream about that you just knew will be here when you're older?"

They looked at me.  Thinking.

And then one young man shot up his hand.

"Flying cars."  


Robin, Tempe