I went for a day and ended up spending the weekend at the Online News Association 2010 conference in Washington last weekend.

Traveling on a super-austere budget, I trekked to DC on a Vamoose bus ($37), one of the many lines that have sprung up to compete with the Chinatown cheap buses on East Coast routes. The deciding factor, other than price was WiFi, which makes the trip seem faster. I had hoped to connect from the road but ended up sleeping most of the way on a crowded bus, tucked into an aisle seat amongst the mobile-yakkers. Even earplugs did nothing to silence people who talked for hours.

This bus didn’t go into the center of DC, but rather stopped in Bethesda and Arlington, where I got off and caught a Metro to DC's center. I wasn’t prepared with maps and schedules, but relied on my mobile Nokia N97 to get me to the right places and it worked well with Google Maps and its native map applications.

I got to the Renaissance Hotel, the site of the convention, and immediately started to visit the display spaces, talking to people and getting a feel of the place while keeping up with conference goings-on through the Twitter #ona10 hashtag.

I spent time connecting with a journalist I met this summer who is tooling up to create a hyperlocal non-profit news site in a Midwestern city. I grilled him and offered my insights into the late afternoon, and then we returned to the exposition space where we met up with a journalism professor and grabbed a table and started talking and sharing. There we were, three journalists engaged in a fun, no-holds-barred conversation. Another person came up and I thought I recognized her and invited her to join the conversation and we rolled for another couple of hours. It was crazy. We all got to know each other and bonded. Three of us have entrepreneurial projects going and we are all in the digital space.

Our new friend had served as a war correspondent in Iraq and has traveled the world as a reporter, while my other colleage has had vast international reporting experience. We could not stop talking but finally decided to pick up the conversation on Saturday.

My Midwest bud and I went in search of dinner. Out came the mobiles and we settled on a downstairs restaurant in Chinatown, which I have learned in New York, is a sign of a great place with reasonable prices. I was right.

Afterwards, my bud and I headed to a Maryland suburb, where we were splitting a Motel 6 room at $50 a night, about a mile or two off the Metro, which shuts down at midnight.

We got to the motel and made our way to the room, passing by a young man who was standing by the side of a stairwell, counting his money. He greeted us with a very cheery “How ya’ll doing?” In New York, he might have said something like “smoke?” We nodded at him, and made our way up to the room. I looked across the courtyard and saw an armed man with combat pants on and a t shirt that read "Police" on the front and the back. He was patrolling the grounds of the hotel.

My colleague and I grabbed the beds, after we plugged in our electronic devices for the nightly quenching of their electricity thirsts. We both had iPads and spent a moment or two browsing before sleep came crashing down hard.

In the morning, we packed up as our fourth friend from the evening before had invited us to stay in her guest rooms at her home in DC. We gladly said goodbye to the Motel 6 but not before having a conversation with a man outside the motel office. He said he was a truck driver from Erie, Pa., who came down for the day with his family to attend the Colbert-Stewart rally in DC. He said he wasn’t that neither interested in politics nor in making this third trip to DC that week but that his wife wanted to see the show.

My bud and I then took off for the Metro station, on a walk through a neighborhood of one-family house surrounded by fences and with bars on the windows. We were going to try to catch a bus but one never came. Breakfast was at the 7-11 store on the way, served by an South Asian man who described everything for sale as a corn dog. I got him to give me a kielbasa dog instead and a huge coffee.

We got to DC about 11, going through a pile of folks at each Metro station, there to attend the rally. Their signs were humorous and it being so close to Halloween, their costumes were too.

But, I was at the conference to learn and to meet folks and I was torn between staying in the convention site and getting out on a beautiful blue day in the nation’s capital. So, I compromised. With almost a quarter of a million people converged on the mall, there was no way to get there at midday, so I just walked around and looked to see what I could see. I saw a lot of people my age, and some young folks and mostly white. A lot of couples, families, all out to send a message, or perhaps to commune in a 21^st Century way.

I went back inside and talked to more folks and then, the moment I had really waited for, the gathering of academics.

We met in a back hall space, about 30 folks with a whiteboard. I got there five minutes late so I missed any introductions that were made but I looked around and saw a few familiar faces.

We talked about issues and what the ONA journalism academics could do. We brainstormed and put together a list of things that we might be able to do as a group.

Got a great bunch of suggestions but I have to say that I hope that this group of folks, pioneers all, will serve as a catalyst in journalism higher education. It will not be easy because being a college professor is a busy business. You have very little time when you are managing your classes, advising your students, producing research and publishing and serving your department, school and community.

And, it’s at this juncture that I hope I can step up as a connector as I have flown from my most recent academic tree but I still consider myself a part of the forest.

Part of this comes from collaborative tools. The only way to do this successfully connect all of these people is to have a simple tool that can collect the wisdom that the members of this group will, hopefully, share.

There is much work to be done in journalism higher education and there is no roadmap. The absolute essentials are ethics and writing and then, there is everything else new, and yet to be. The sages need to adopt, test, participate and share, I would say.

Looking around the room, only a couple of us were using devices to take notes and fewer were tweeting from the event. I will not judge and emphatically say that device use is not a measure of digital literacy but even in ad hoc gatherings the sharing of informed thought can be made better when it can be distributed beyond the four walls of a room, and even better, in real time.

I left the room determined to do what I can to help connect the 30 people in the room and see if that will help the evolution of the higher education of journalism.

The scene at the ONA Awards Banquet -- a full house of journalists in touch with the future.

After the meeting ended, I went to the evening’s award banquet where I sat between young journalists and technologists from The Associated Press and another group from National Public Radio. I was treated to hearing a definition of the Internet (anything you can do with software) to ideas about narrative structure -- in between a dinner of chicken and a chocolate confection for dessert. Inspirational, to be sure.

In fact, throughout the days at ONA, I heard folks talking about technology but, even more importantly, about the critically important things that journalism does – reporting the truth and being democracy’s watch dog. That’s assuring.

But my weekend wasn’t over yet and I made my way to my new friend’s home, on a hill overlooking Rock Creek Park. There I shared journalism stories and learned about conflict reporting from two amazing journalists until the small hours of the morning.

The next day, I was lucky enough to be invited to stick around for brunch with another group of really smart folks to talk about life and journalism and world affairs – only 8 minutes away from the White House.

In the afternoon, I headed back into DC to make my way home. I didn’t have a specific way to get there. First, I stopped at the Renaissance and was able to log onto the web with their WiFi and checked out Bolt and Megabus schedules to see if I could buy a ticket. Sold out. So, I walked a couple of blocks to where the buses actually pick up passengers. There I saw a dispatcher surrounded by people. She was clearly in charge and the message was clear. I’ll take your name and put you on the list but we are sold out entirely. Period. Don’t count on it.

I went back to the Renaissance and checked with the concierge of the hotel and got directions to Union Station (“20 minutes to the right, down Massachusetts Ave."). Off I went as the day warmed up. I got to the station and found Amtrak had seats on the 7 p.m. regional to New York for $147. Nope.

Then, I walked another five blocks to the Greyhound station, where a line snaked through the building. That was the line to New York-bound buses.  I got in line and learned from a Greyhound representative that the bus line was running continuously. As soon as they filled a bus up, off it would go. Express to NYC. I got a $37 ticket and got into a line.

The trip back to New York was slow as traffic was backed up all the way to Delaware, but I was able to get to New York in time to take a leisurely walk up 9^th Avenue and enjoy folks in their Halloween garb with many of them wearing their outfits under coats and scarfs as the weather had taken a turn for the cold.

I was warm because of an amazing weekend, when I plugged into the heartbeat of journalism and I’m optimistic about its future, and the future of journalism higher education.

Meantime, I've downloaded all tweets associated with #ONA10. This is entirely rich vein of information that will yield a great trove of links and topics pertaining to journalism. When I get done dredging out the links, I hope to be able to publish it here for folks to refer to.