From time to time, classes at Kansas University or Washburn will ask if they can use our Reader Blogs for their classes.

For instance, during the 2008 elections, a Washburn political science class used one of our blog groups to enable the students to publicly analyze and debate the election’s course. This week, we launched another blog group — this one for KU students in a journalism class.

These students are working on a multi-faceted project in coordination with The World Company. For about eight weeks, half the students will be working for our various media outlets. You might see their work right here on LJWorld.com. Or on our sister TV station, KTKA. Or their work could appear in the printed Journal-World, on 6News Lawrence or in our weekly newspapers.

The other half of the students, though, will be working on a project to get detailed, neighborhood-level information on Lawrence. They’ll be profiling neighborhood leaders and identifying what information someone new to Old West Lawrence or East Lawrence — among others, for example — would need to become integrated with the neighborhood. They’ll be posting a lot of that information to their blogs as they find it: videos of these neighborhoods, links to scheduled meetings and anything else that might be relevant.

Then, about half-way through this fall semester, the students in each group will switch, so you’ll see traditional work from each half — and neighborhood-level work from each.

Eventually, we’ll roll all that neighborhood information out in integrated, more comprehensive neighborhood sections, probably sometime around the first of the year.

Be sure to let me know what you think — and feel free to comment on the student’s blog entries. They’ll also be posting regular classwork, which is why some of you may have seen a series of reactions to an article out of Vanity Fair.

Thanks for reading.