It's unclear who knows more about the other: my wife, Mira, or my students. Each student in my Digital Journalism I (JOUR 1100) and Digital Journalism II (JOUR 1550) classes this semester follows her on Twitter (@miralowe) and she does likewise. All I know is there were smiles aplenty when "Mrs. Lowe" appeared in both classes yesterday.

In JOUR 1100, Mrs. Lowe focused on how journalism students can best present themselves to recruiters. "I'm going to talk a little and then you're going to work a little," she said. "That's the deal – I talk, you work." (That's how it goes at home, too, but I shall not digress.) She first urged everyone to have a LinkedIn account – and to check it every day – before introducing the class to vizualize.me, a compelling new way to showcase one's life experiences.

Next, Mrs. Lowe offered advice concerning print versus electronic clippings when applying for internships. "You're kind of in that middle of old-school and new-school (recruiters), and until the old-school retires, you're going to have to do both," she said. "Start out with digital and have paper ready." Then, she started showing off with cuttings.me, an amazing new digital-clipping tool for journalists, bloggers and writers. "Make sure those links work. It's very important," she said before borrowing my admonition: "Don't let someone else's mistake become your mistake."

She spent the rest of her time with JOUR 1100 focusing on the importance of grammar, spelling and punctuation and, more to the students' delight, offering a great deal of helpful tips for crafting successful cover letters.

Later, in JOUR 1550, Mrs. Lowe again presented vizualize.me and cuttings.me and warned against frustrating recruiters with broken links: "Make sure you have a copy of everything you've done. You want to take control of your work and get access to it." Then, more cool social media tools – Paper.li, The Tweeted Times and Klout – before ending her presentation with nine rules for writing online headlines that will top most search-engine lists.

Finally, as Mrs. Lowe was leaving to catch a cab to the Amtrak station, the inevitable praise from her newest fans, at my expense, of course: "She's much better than you." "She's definitely your better half." "When she said her name, I got really excited. I had to contain myself." "It was wonderful meeting your wife – best part of the semester."

Borrowing a favorite phrase my wife and I say often at home: "Just like I planned it."

Every semester, I send my Digital Journalism I (JOUR 1100) class to events on campus so it can practice its collective reporting skills in real-time exercises. Past occasions have featured Marquette University bestowing its highest award upon the revered Little Rock Nine in the Varsity Theatre; great journalism examples such as Gwen Ifill and Lisa Ling in the Weasler Auditorium, and various media- or business-related conferences. Once, I took a class off campus – to report on Bud Selig, commissioner of major league baseball and former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, when he was the featured speaker at a Marquette alumni event at the Pfister Hotel downtown.

Yesterday, I sent 13 students to cover a lunchtime panel discussion at the Alumni Memorial Union. Titled "The Theology of Work" – and among a slew of Entrepreneurship Week events offered by Marquette's Kohler Center for Entrepreneurship – the discussion was moderated by Lyle Dabney, associate professor of theology, and included two panelists: John Fontana, director of the Arrupe Program in Social Ethics for Business at Georgetown University, and the Rev. John Cusick, director of young adult ministry for the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Hopefully, the students soaked in the theologians' great advice as they practiced their journalism. Fontana took my two-types-of-students equation – those who want a grade and those who want a career – to a new level by focusing on three types of people: those who focus on their job, those who focus on their career, and those who focus on their life as a vocation. A job and career are both important, but a vocation is more likely to sustain us, Fontana said.

Cusick expressed concern that too many business leaders care more about maximizing profits than uplifting people. He also warned against leaving undesirable footprints in the Digital Age. "One of the most amazing things in the world to me is that people can be so intelligent and great leaders and yet be so stupid with technology," Cusick said.

This was the second time I dispatched a JOUR 1100 class to an Entrepreneurship Week event. The turnout for this year's occasion meant my aspiring journalists had the speakers all to themselves. Not a problem, said Tina Quealy, the Kohler Center's associate director, and who wisely suggested the discussion would be great for students.

"Though I was only able to observe them for a short period of time, your students are exceptional," she said. "They turned the panel discussion into a dialogue through their meaningful engagement of the panelists. Their follow up questions after the panel were also engaging and insightful. They made me proud to be part of the MU community."

Well said, Tina. Though they work my nerves from time to time – OK, too many times – I couldn't agree more.

Last night, after finally home in Chicago after another week in Milwaukee, I turned on the TV to watch the North Carolina vs. Michigan State basketball game amazingly contested on an active aircraft carrier. A moment into the broadcast, something amazed me and yet didn't surprise me at all: the inestimable Magic Johnson was all up in it.

"God has blessed me," Johnson, the Spartans' honorary captain, told ESPN's Andy Katz just before the game started, and hours after the Hall of Fame point guard had donated $1 million to his alma mater's athletic department. "This is a bucket-list moment for me. I am so happy to be a part of of this ..."

Twenty years ago, who believed Johnson would be crossing things off his bucket list in 2011? I still remember that news conference on Nov. 7, 1991 (see below), like it was yesterday – Johnson, then age 32, telling everyone he was HIV-positive and retiring from the Los Angeles Lakers immediately. A few years ago, ESPN ranked it as its seventh-most memorable moment of the previous quarter century. To me, only the USA hockey team beating the Russians in 1980 could rank higher. For sure, it's easily "the biggest press conference in the history of sports."

Later that week, in "Hitting Home: Magic's Plight Had An Impact On Us All" – an op/ed piece for The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger Star, the joint newspapers I worked for then – I wrote about how Johnson had forced me to take HIV and AIDS more seriously; and how in 1988 our brief encounter became a career highlight. "There's something else I'll never forget: Magic standing at a lectern ..." I also wrote in the piece, "I wanted to cry, but he wouldn't let me. I have never been more proud of anyone than I was of him for the way he handled himself."

Enjoyed reading ESPN.com recollections this week from J.A. Adande, Steve Springer and Dave McMenamin. They and others offering equally compelling perspectives remind us of, among other things, how difficult Johnson's circumstances were to comprehend back then, how much journalism has changed these past two decades, and how the basketball legend has become a successful entrepreneur, television commentator and source of inspiration.

I hope  for many years to come that Johnson continues to inspire, amaze and, yes, leave us all not surprised each time we see his trademark smile and enthusiasm appear on our television screens.

In August, I shared with pride that the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service had published my video about an urban beekeeper. Now, members of my Digital Journalism II class aim to match my milestone. Not once. Twice. Working in pairs, the students aim to produce a total of 16 short pieces for the news service by the semester's end.

Each student had written a blog post about the new service's website by the time its editor-in-chief, Sharon McGowan – a veteran reporter, writer, editor and teacher – visited our class on Thursday.

McGowan had read all of their posts and concluded three things: 1) Almost all of them wrote they had not known about the news service, even though it has been headquartered in our very own Diederich College of Communication for about a year; 2) "everybody liked the look of our site," and 3) "we don't do enough enterprise or in-depth stories." To that, she said, "I 100 percent agree. It's one of my goals."

Then, after explaining the challenges of trying to cover so much territory with limited staff, McGowan told the class, "I'm very excited about you guys working on this project. ... You're going to help me break into our neighborhoods." Each student pair has been assigned to produce two audio slideshows about a selected neighborhood nonprofit organization, one focusing on someone helping to provide a service or operate a program, the other on a beneficiary of those efforts. Both pieces are to be about two minutes long and come with a 500-word news story.

The students are to function as real journalists in communities requiring a bus ride from the Marquette campus. Indeed, the organizations have not been prepped that they will be calling. "Your job is to identify the person and to identify the story," McGowan told the students, who are mostly sophomores and juniors but all journalism majors.

The reward for high achievement will be having their multimedia journalism published on the news service's site. No sure thing, McGowan said while stressing that high-quality writing and storytelling is important. "I'm a stickler for AP Style because it shows that you care about being professional," she said.

As much a nurturer as as exacting editor, McGowan offered great advice while answering student questions. Concerning personal queries of neighborhood residents who have struggled or suffered more than most, she said: "You're a lot more sensitive about it than they are. You will be very surprised ... people do want to talk, especially if they have been through a lot." And: "The main thing that young reporters do wrong in my opinion is not doing enough work before they get to the story. You can't just look at the (organization's) website."

If all goes well, the news service will be publishing digital journalism about the following organizations: Our Next Generation (Sarah Butler and Tessa Fox), Art Works for Milwaukee (Andrea Anderson and Rebecca French), COA Youth and Family Centers (Elizabeth McGovern and Benjamin Sheehan), Neighborhood House of Milwaukee (Kyle Doubrava and Eric Oliver), Select Milwaukee (Erin Caughey and Heather Ronaldson), Habitat for Humanity (Sarah Hauer and Benjamin Stanley), Centro Legal (Kathleen Doherty and Allison Kruschke) and Next Door (Alec Brooks and Ryan Ellerbusch). Each pair considers itself the class "Dream Team." Let's hope so.

One of my 2011 goals was creating a digital product for mass distribution in Apple's iBookstore. This summer, I created an eBook that works on my iPhone and an iPad, though nothing to brag about just yet. However, Ed Madison, a graduate teaching fellow at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication, recently re-inspired me upon sharing what students and faculty there produced via the game-changing tablet.

Madison's "Creating Digital Student Publications on the iPad" (below) was among the best of the 14 Teach-a-Thon presentations at "Journalism Interactive: The Conference on Journalism Education and Digital Media." He explained that in spring 2010 "we made a bold move" and developed/offered a content development course that came out simultaneously with the iPad's launch. The school teamed 16 of its best seniors into four groups and, Madison said, "the results were quite phenomenal." Earlier this year, he continued, the school teamed with Adobe to allow the students to work with the next version of its digital publishing suite while still in its beta stage.

This video highlights the students' interaction and impressions from the course and is excerpted in Madison's demonstration, at 1:07:00 of the Teach-a-Thon, at the bottom of the conference website's video archives page.

I like that the Oregon students, as one of them put it, got to focus on doing something cutting edge both collaboratively and much more so as professionals – and not just for completing an assignment and a grade. Madison said the school's faculty and administrators achieved this success with a basic three-prong approach: empowering the students to be leaders, supporting them in building a team – then getting out of their way.

The video below also features faculty and professionals involved in the initiative. Take a moment to look at all three presentations. My Digital Journalism II students were inspired. I'm sure you, too, will be inspired.