BY ARNOLD ZEITLIN

Zeitlin is a consultant and teaches in an English-language journalism program at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, China. He first joined the AP in 1955 before leaving to work for a Pittsburgh newspaper. He was with the first U.S. Peace Corps group sent abroad to Ghana, West Africa in 1961. He returned to the AP in New York in 1964 and served as correspondent in West Africa, bureau chief in Pakistan, and bureau chief in the Philippines (1973-1976) before the Marcoses ejected him for being a "national security risk" for his reporting. Zeitlin finished out his AP career in the Boston bureau, retiring in 1987. He went on to be UPI vice president and general manager in the Asia-Pacific region (1990-93), and director of the Asian Center of the Freedom Forum in Hong Kong (1998-2001). He is a graduate of Columbia University's Journalism School and held international fellowships at Columbia and the Knight Foundation.

The fall term of 2003 was a break-through semester at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Several weeks ago, for the first time, students of the English-language journalism program were able to sit in a news lab classroom in front of PCs and write keyboard copy on deadline.

In a sense, the students moved from the 19th century -- they had been writing news copy in long hand -- into the beginning of the 21st century. The achievement is small but extremely satisfying. My main challenge now is getting my journalism students to function under practical and realistic circumstances. To this end, I've urged the journalism program at Guangdong U. since last year to provide more realistic and practical facilities for the students.

When I arrived at the university last October, the students in my news-reporting and writing class were assigned at my insistence to an underused news lab, a two-room suite with about 24 PCs in each room. None of the PCs was connected to the Internet or had e-mail software. It took a month or so to get connected. Now the students write with keyboards. In fact, I no longer accept handwritten work, and I am able to assign exercises and monitor the action in class while the students write copy to a deadline of an hour or less.

A news-reporting and writing class taught by a former AP colleague, Peggy Simpson, at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., employs software called Blackboard, which allows students to file their keyboard copy right into the instructor’s e-mailbox.

Guangdong U. does not have this system, although I was surprised and pleased to learn the administration is looking into getting similar software. Instead, I set up a Hotmail file for each of the two classes I taught, and my students use their own e-mail addresses to file stories there. I edit and grade their work, and e-mail the results back to them. The system, such as it is, expands the classroom and allows for queries and comments freely outside class hours.

Of course, other classes still use standard, PC-less classrooms and produce copy in long hand. I feel if I were not to return, my Hotmail system would wither, and classes would return to long-hand reporting. We'll see what happens when I return for the spring semester.

For its part, the university has installed broadband facilities in all student dorms. It also maintains a large computer lab and just opened what is the largest campus library equipped with a room filled with PCs in the province. No excuse exists for not having access to a computer.

They may be poorer overall than American students, but many Chinese students possess the trappings of our middle class. Mobile phones are ubiquitous. Some students even have their own laptops. When I asked about buying Chinese pop CDs as gifts for friends in the United States, students advised me that they no longer buy CDs; they burn them from Internet downloads.