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I'm going to offer the logic of my picks in reverse order, based on what I think they're building to at WrestleMania.

What I think will be the WrestleMania card:

Undertaker vs. Shawn Michaels for the World Heavyweight Championship -- I don't think WWE would tease this going back to the Slammy's without the payoff of an actual match. But why for the title? Why not have Taker lose tonight, especially if Shawn Michaels can do a run-in to cost him said title?

Well, because logically the Dead Man would use his rematch clause for WrestleMania if he were to lose tonight. So that means one of two things: Either 'Taker retains and Shawn gets his title shot, or Shawn takes out one of the competitors for tonight and wins the title. If Shawn is going to go heel, like has been hinted at, look for him to jack John Morrison and his already-tender ankle to get into the match, no doubt with some help from Vickie Guerro since Teddy Long is still seemingly pissed about the superkick to the face a couple of weeks ago (he's such a spoilsport like that).

The other reason I think it will be Shawn-Taker II for the title this time: I think they're setting up a Greatest Series Ever as a way to say goodbye to both men when their times finally do come to retire (we're not talking about two particularly young guys here). Remember how awesome the Stone Cold-Rock series at WrestleMania was? That's what they're trying to build, and in this case I think it actually does make sense to include the title -- it gives the series that little extra bit of prestige, just like you had with the Stone Cold-Rock series.

That leaves Edge open to challenge the winner of the Raw match, which I think will be Sheamus. I think tonight is the night they finally get behind the guy and give him some type of impressive victory instead of all these DQ wins that have marked his career thus far. I don't think they would have invested in him as champion the way they have unless they wanted to get him to WrestleMania. An Edge-Sheamus matchup is at least fresh, and if anyone can carry a feud both in the ring and on the stick, it's Edge.

Besides, I think everyone else in the Raw Chamber has other WrestleMania matches already hinted at: Randy and Ted are likely on course for some kind of Legacy implosion match at WrestleMania (which may or may not yet see Kofi Kingston play some type of role), and Cena and Batista are seemingly on a collission course. That just leaves Triple H as the wild card, and my secondary prediction is that Sheamus loses the belt but invokes his rematch for WrestleMania while Edge still uses his Royal Rumble shot to make it a triple threat.

As for the rest of the WrestleMania card, I think we'll see the Punk-Mysterio program continue tonight, and we could very well see the makings for a Jericho-R-Truth encounter at the big show next month, which could be a show-stealer if Jericho can antagonize Truth the same way he did Mysterio and Shawn Michaels.

As for the rest of the undercard for tonight, I don't think Kane is the one to end Drew McIntyre's streak, so keep your money on him. This is just to build him to something bigger at WrestleMania. Maryse likely takes the Divas crown to better highlight her new schtick of being nice in English and a witch in French.

Don't be surprised to get a surprise Tag Title match tonight with MVP and Mark Henry, although I don't see them winning the straps off of ShowMiz yet. And I'm fine with that -- the longer the Miz is a triple-champion, the more awesome he becomes.

They may also add a Batista-Edge interaction of some sort tonight, but don't look for a clean win from either man as both need to be kept looking strong heading into WrestleMania.

I've been working on writing my teaching philosophy for several weeks now. It's probably the hardest thing I've ever written. I've learned so much from so many people, to boil it down into a philosophical statement was something I found really difficult. Eh, maybe I'm just having a bit of writer's block right now.

Anyway, I finally got it into a place where I'm comfortable sharing it with the world. I'd love any and all feedback:

My teaching philosophy can best be summarized in two words: direct engagement.

Ever since my first teaching opportunity, I’ve found that a direct, interpersonal approach to students will help them succeed. The trick is finding the best approach for each student and figuring out how much time to devote to each one.

I take this approach in the classroom, during review sessions, and especially in the newsroom. The more involved, the more engaged the student, the easier it is for he or she to ask intelligent questions and absorb the material.

My first teaching opportunity came as an undergraduate at the University of Wyoming. I was a teaching assistant in the photo lab, where I would show students in the photo class how to process film and make black and white prints. At the end of the week, the TA’s would meet with our professor to critique and grade the students’ work. We would then type up the critiques to give back to the students.

I began noticing that some of the students in my lab were making the same mistakes over and over – usually it was something that was easy to fix with a little more darkroom care, like spotty or muddy prints. I would point this out on the critique, but each week the same problems were there.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that either they weren’t reading the critiques, or they didn’t really understand how to fix the problem. So instead of waiting for the students to ask me for help when it was my turn to watch the lab, I sought them out. A little hands-on instruction helped them learn how to print photos better and improve their overall grades.

The Missouri Method was a big selling point for me when I applied for my position at the Missouri School of Journalism. In terms of direct engagement, the only thing better than learning by doing is learning by doing it on a one-on-one basis. It also meant I got to combine my two professional loves, teaching and journalism, on a full-time basis.

The Missouri Method is relatively simple to apply in the newsroom. Reporters learn by reporting, editors learn by editing, designers learn by designing. We do this across multiple platforms, which requires my colleagues and I to be as up to date on the latest technology and delivery methods as possible.  It also requires us to be accessible, knowledgeable of the community and committed to the success of our students.

Direct engagement is also my primary strategy in the classroom. I don’t lecture, I lead conversations. In-class assignments encourage collaboration and idea exchange. Homework assignments that are not for publication mirror those assignments that are meant for publication, but the student is left to make the decisions.

My general goals as a teacher are to see our students graduate with these skills:

•  Critical thinking: The ability to investigate, ask tough questions and connect the dots has been at the heart of journalism’s finest moments. If our students are to learn to report the news fairly and accurately, they must be able to disseminate information logically and thoughtfully. 
• Strong work ethic: Journalism is not for the lazy. It requires commitment and effort to gather and deliver the news. It also requires a certain nimbleness, an ability to find a way to get the news out when unpleasant surprises, like a technological failure, crop up. 
• Technologically unafraid: Fact is, you don’t have to be a programming genius to be a tech-savvy journalist. As digital delivery evolves, it will only get easier to push content to our readers. Journalists don’t need to invent the mechanism, just use it to its full ability.
• Prepared to enter the work force: The Missouri School of Journalism has an outstanding reputation for how well our graduates are prepared when they accept their first job or internship. This means our graduates are well-versed in their particular emphasis area, confident enough to do the work, and mature enough to succeed in a professional environment.

In conclusion, the most important aspect of the direct engagement philosophy is leadership. I ask a lot of our students, but I also offer a lot back as well. I strive to be a newsroom leader by modeling a professional, ambitious demeanor that accentuates the positives and coaches the negatives.

The race for California governor is going to be fun:

  

We've been having some interesting discussions at the Columbia Missourian the past couple of weeks on the importance of immediacy vs. accuracy. Two events have spurred these discussions: The hostage situation that wasn't (I wrote a column about it here) and the announcement that Missouri would play in the Texas Bowl this year.

In both cases, Twitter was at the root of the controversy. Here's some quick background:

In the hostage situation that wasn't, there was an errant report of someone taking another person hostage in an office building in Jefferson City. The rumor mill spun out of control, and by the time the dust settled, it turned out just about everything that had been reported that day was false. There was no hostage. There were no shots fired. Nothing happened.

In the Texas Bowl flap, one of the Mizzou players, Sean Weatherspoon, tweeted that the Tigers had accepted the Texas Bowl bid a good three hours before the scheduled 6 p.m. announcement. The sports writer in charge of the Missourian's sports account (@CoMoSports), Andrew Astleford, saw the tweet and re-tweeted it. About 40 minutes later, once the Texas Bowl had announced Missouri on its Web site, the Missourian posted its first story confirming the bid.

The question of the budget meeting became: Should we have published a story faster on our site? Or should we have waited to tweet anything until we had a more reliable source?

In my mind, there is no question that the source was reliable in this instance. If the senior captain of the defense and a likely first-round NFL draft pick doesn't know where he's playing his last collegiate football game ... Why wouldn't you trust him as a source?

The counterargument: How do we know that was Weatherspoon?

The counter-counterargument: We know it's his account. We've verified that. In my mind, a tweet from that account is every bit as good as a call from the man himself telling us where the team will play.

Next argument: Someone could have hijacked his account.

Counterargument: While I acknowledge the possibility, it's highly unlikely. And if it did happen that way, isn't the fact that said future first-round NFL draft pick had his account hacked also news?

Now, that's not to say every Twitter account can be trusted. And it's not to say that the reporting ends there. If you don't know the Twitter account, you CAN'T trust it. And if you think a re-tweet is all there is to reporting, you should probably find a new profession now. A re-tweet has value, but it's hardly the end value.

The pushback I got today from other editors and students centered around accuracy. We can't be so quick to report things we don't know to be true, they said. And they're absolutely right.

What bothers me about the way the conversation went was that most everyone kept arguing that accuracy and immediacy don't mix. Nothing can be reported until all the facts are known. While I appreciate the concern over accuracy (and I don't mean to downplay it at all), I don't think we as a newsroom put enough of an emphasis on immediacy.. And that troubles me.

The best news organizations are the ones that are fast AND right. We had correct information in this situation, it just came from a more unusual source (an actual player instead of the athletic department, a rarity considering how much your average college athletic department insists on controlling every piece of information to come out of a program) and a non-traditional channel. Had Weatherspoon phoned Astleford and told me about it, we'd have had a story on the site within moments. But because it's Twitter, we were tentative.

If the Missourian can demonstrate an ability to be consistently fast and correct, we'll grow our readership. If we're always a few minutes behind, why would anyone want to come to us? News "ages" very quickly in the online world. If we're not willing to be aggressive and ambitous, then we really are just a "learning lab" and not a news organization.

On the flip side, during the hostage situation that wasn't, there were all sorts of bogus reports flying around the Twittersphere. Shots were reportedly fired. Hostages were reportedly taken. Neither was true, and we were sure not to report that information on any of our mediums because we had not verified it.

As my colleage Katherine Reed said at a couple of points during today's discussion, every breaking news situation is different. She's absolutely right.

In the hostage situation that wasn't, the only reliable sources we had on Twitter were our own reporters on the scene. We only retweeted what they could verify. But we could have worked harder to debunk the rumors.

In the Texas Bowl situation, we had a reliable source fall into our lap because Aastleford was paying attention. But that news tip, like all other news tips, was only a start. We needed to aggressively look for corroborating sources to back up Weatherspoon's tweet. But while the reporters did that, couldn't the Missourian have simply said in its story "Sean Weatherspoon is reporting via Twitter that the MU football team has been invited to the Texas Bowl." Once confirmation came from the Texas Bowl (or from the athletic department), you update with the latest.

TV stations have been covering breaking news like this for years. Some do it better than others, of course. But what's so wrong with telling readers what you know, what you don't know, and that you're working to confirm more information?

One other little pet peeve: For as much lip service as we pay to the importance of accuracy, it's certainly not reflected in our corrections count as of late. If only we'd remember how much we're in love with accuracy on the more mundane stories as we are on breaking news.

So, for those wondering why I was sporting a mustache earlier today ...

The Missourian recently ran a story on how mustaches are coming back into style. During the design critique this week, as we discussed our play of the story, we got off on a bit of a side conversation about whether mustaches really were coming back in style. The class was very anti-mustache, saying that it reminded them of child molesters and porn stars.

I decided to stand up for mustachioed men everywhere and protested. This led to me saying that I would show up for class on Friday with a mustache. And I did:




That is so not for me. I shaved it off right after work:

 

Most everyone else agreed that I'm no Tom Selleck. I did have a few nice compliments from a handful of folks who agree with me on the 'stache, but even I have to say -- I felt uncomfortable with it all day. I couldn't wait to get it off my face.

I waited to shave off my goatee until after Jenny went to work, so she didn't see it until the end of the day. She gave it a sound thumbs-down. Audrey, on the other hand, didn't seem to care one way or the other. I'm still just her wacky daddy, facial hair or no facial hair.