Joining Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab

This past week I was accepted into the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership's Learning Lab, an initiative to demystify the internet for journalists and open news rooms to a few geeks from the open source community.

The Learning Lab part is an online class where we'll hear from experts, write, and put together projects.  http://www.phillipadsmith.com/2011/06/learning-lab-update-invitations-to-go-out-tomorrow-jjg-mohamed-confirmed-to-lecture.html

When volunteering with One Laptop per Child, we often discuss difficulties teachers face in adapting to new technology. For journalists, there's the added threat that paper newspapers and investigative journalism have taken a serious hit from the expansion of the internet.  The more that people get their celeb headlines from Gawker, their breaking news from Twitter, and their Twitter updates from CNN, the fewer resources a journalist has to respond, research, and print.

We've got to counter that somehow. Actually, a few newspapers have responded brilliantly in the past few years and have a reputation for their great online coverage. I'll be writing about both sides of this story over the next couple of months.