Full Description [July 5, 2011, 8:30 p.m.]
Welcome to the Knight-Mozilla learning lab!
We’re Phillip Smith and Alexandra Samur – organizers of this lab. Together with our advisors, Emily Bell, Sarah Cohen and Rich Gordon, we’ve created an exciting course that will introduce you to new thinking at the nexus of software, journalism and news. Over the next four weeks, you’ll be working on your own ideas to help shape the future of the industry that we’ll invite you to pitch.
We’ll be facilitating this lab with assistance from Jacob Caggiano, Lingsha Hu, Kate Hudson and Pippin Lee, who’ll be helping us moderate comments on the P2PU course and provide feedback on your assignments.
There are 60 of you from around the world, who’ll be taking this course and we hope to get to know you better in the upcoming weeks -- being a peer-to-peer course -- we need your involvement to make the course a success.
Webinars
The Knight-Mozilla learning lab blends learning and training via eight live webinars on Mondays and Wednesdays from July 11 to August 5, 2011 via Big Blue Button (more info on the schedule below). Each week the course will focus on a different topic, and each week the participants will be joined by a different subject-matter expert from the field of news innovation.
The webinars, online participation and assignments are expected to require roughly five to ten hours per week.
The webinars will explore four broad themes:
- Design thinking and product development;
- New capabilities in the browser and new ways of building community;
- Technology and new challenges in the newsroom;
- The future of journalism.
Additional Friday webinars will focus on the nuts and bolts you need to know about working in a newsroom and taking your big idea from concept to business. See full schedule below.
All webinars will be recorded and available on P2PU publicly (to everyone on the Internet) as soon as we can get them posted. We’re hoping for video, audio and slides, but it may just be audio with a link to the visual information that was presented.
For more information on the Big Blue Button platform visit:
Attendance
If you’re in the lab, you’ll be expected to attend weekly live webinars on Mondays and Wednesdays (unless you live very, very far east). These mandatory webinars will be the subject of the weekly blog assignments you’re required to complete. We also have live webinars on Fridays which we encourage all participants to attend but are optional.
If you can't attend a lecture please let us know by posting a comment on the weekly webinar posted on the Task List. We have lots of people hoping to get a spot so if you have to miss more than two lectures we'll ask that you give up your seat to an invidividual on our waiting list.
Course materials and communication
There are no assigned readings for this course but we encourage you to follow and keep up to date with the external links provided in the sidebar.
We welcome you to respond to the course, assignments, share resources and ideas, or start discussions on the course "Activity Wall."
We also encourage you to share your thoughts and help us spread the word about the learning lab to your peers (and the rest of the world!) via your social networks using the hashtag #MozNewsLab
Assignments
Over the four week Learning Lab (from July 11 to August 5), you’ll be required to keep a regular blogging schedule. And, you’ll have a final project to submit at the end of the course. Full assignment descriptions are included in the “Task List” in the sidebar of this course. We advise you to keep an eye out on this section for ongoing tasks required.
Peer-to-peer participation
The learning lab is a peer-to-peer course and we need your involvement to make the course a success. We'll be looking for you to engage with us and your peers by posting comments here on P2PU, the Big Blue Button, on your classmates’ blogs and at #MozNewsLab via your social media networks.
Schedule
Attendance at Monday and Wednesday webinars is mandatory. Fridays are optional but attendance is encouraged. All times are listed in Pacific Time (if you live in another time zone, you can use this handy time-zone converter)
The proposed schedule is below. The order and nature of the topics is subject to change.
Week 1 - Design thinking and product development
July 11 - 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Speaker: Aza Raskin is a renowned interface designer who recently held the position of Creative Lead for Firefox. He is currently the co-founder of Massive Health, and probably up to many other design-meets-entrepreneurial things.
July 13 - 9:00 to 10:30 a.m.
Speaker: Burt Herman is an entrepreneurial journalist. He is the CEO of Storify and a co-founder of Hacks/Hackers.
July 15 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Speaker: Neil Raskin
Week 2 - New capabilities in the browser and new ways of building community
July 18 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
July 20 - 10:00 to 11:30 a.m.
Speaker: John Resig is a programmer and entrepreneur. He’s the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, and has had his hands in more interesting open source projects that you can shake a stick at. Until recently, John was the JavaScript Evangelist at Mozilla. He’s currently the Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at Khan Academy.
July 22 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Speaker: Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, is one of the world's most widely recognized technology product designers.
Week 3 - Technology and new challenges in the newsroom
July 25 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
July 27 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Speaker: Mohamed Nanabhay, is an internet entrepreneur and Head of New Media at the AlJazeera Network based in Doha, Qatar.
July 29 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Week 4 - The future of journalism
August 1 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
August 3 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Speaker: Jeff Jarvis is the author of What Would Google Do? He blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.
August 5 - 8:00 to 9:30 a.m.