MUNCIE, Ind. -- If 1,800 high school students took a field trip together, how many buses would they need?

Not a single bus, thanks to the distance learning technology employed by Ball State University.

Using university telecommunications resources, the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities and the Department of Journalism recently treated more than 1,800 high school newspaper and yearbook staff members to a live, interactive electronic field trip to the Freedom Forum's Newseum in Arlington, Va. The students were on campus for the annual High School Journalism Day.

Media professionals, including Gene Policinski, special projects chairman of the Newseum and Ball State alumnus, conducted a tour of the first museum devoted to news and reporting while students in Virginia and at Ball State asked questions.

Mark Kornmann, the director of outreach, and the Academy Outreach Office have taken thousands of students on electronic field trips to places like the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The Department of Journalism saw the possibilities an electronic field trip might open up for its own programs.

"Last year we took several thousand high school students to the Walsworth Publishing yearbook plant in Missouri," said Dan Waechter, technology resources coordinator for the department. "It's something that couldn't be done during a traditional field trip."

Changing traditional methods includes rethinking how the department recruits and teaches future journalists. Instead of relying on the tight schedules and tighter budgets of bringing professionals to campus, journalism students can count on meeting many of their mentors remotely.

During a Society of News Design conference held a few weeksago, instructors Michael Price and Larry Riley used an Internet connection, a video camera and a monitor to bring Deborah Withey, the design director for The Detroit Free Press, onto the campus.

"It's a very good use of the technology," Riley said. "To bring someone in remotely, it costs absolutely nothing. You could never bring all these people in routinely. It would be far too expensive. And even bringing someone up from Indianapolis takes up most of their day."

Riley also said the visual part of a remote interview is important to the act of communication.

"It brings in much of the communication process that is not verbal," he said. "Thinking back to Journalism 101, if 90 percent of communication is not verbal, it adds a lot more of that."

Price, Waechter and Riley spent the past year working on The Tribune Project, a series of interactive sessions with the staff of the Chicago Tribune sponsored by a grant from the Corporation for Educational Communications.

During one session the newspaper staff at Muncie Central High School shared a split screen with two other high schools and the Tribune staff who gave the young journalists career advice. In a later phase of the project Ball State journalism students create front page layouts for the Tribune and are critiqued by professional editors. High school students observe the process and take part in editorial meetings and the critique.

"I think the students gain a sense of realness from it," said Terry Nelson, publications adviser for Muncie Central and a Ball State journalism graduate. "Also a sense of excitement. With  the Chicago Tribune being one of the major newspapers in the nation, this is definitely an opportunity for us."

Riley thinks it is important for students to have access to technology and the World Wide Web now to be marketable later.

"No one knows how to make money from the Web yet--except pornographers and gamblers--but it's a tremendous tool and the media don't want to be left behind," he said. "They want to keep exploring how to use it."

As students graduate into professional jobs, the department is recognized more often in using technology in journalism education.

Price said the department is a national leader in the technology they use and in using it to the most potential. "Ball State has made a charge for technology," he said. "When we use technology, we deliver content."