Phillip Smith

Knight-Mozilla learning lab heats up: lectures by @azaaza @burtherman @codepo8 @jeresig @jeffjarvis @evanatwired & many more.

Line-up for Knight-Mozilla learning labs

A serendipitous start to the week: I tuned into CBC’s Q today in time to catch Jian Ghomeshi interviewing Jeff Jarvis on why long-form reporting is a luxury in the age of twitter.

Jeff Jarvis is also speaking later this week at the MIT - Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston.

And, because good things always come in threes, I’m also happy to announce Jeff Jarvis has agreed to become a lecturer for the upcoming Knight-Mozilla learning lab.

Learning lab

The Knight-Mozilla learning lab will run from July 11th - August 5th, 2011. The lab will bring together sixty participants, two course leaders (including yours truly), three incredible curriculum advisors, several course shepherds, and an amazing line-up of mind-bending lectures from individuals that are pushing the boundaries of the Web and journalism.

The lab will generate a fire hose of new thinking about the nexus of software, journalism, and news – and it will graduate a cohort of individuals who will be better prepared to head out into the world and innovate.

The coursework will be anchored by the live lectures, and our lecture team is starting to heat up.

Confirmed lectures

Over the four weeks, we’re aiming to coordinate up to twelve lectures. Today, as the voting period for the challenge comes to a close, I’m excited to announce the individuals that have agreed to join the line-up so far (roughly in the order that they will be lecturing):

  • 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.

  • Burt Herman is an entrepreneurial journalist. He is the CEO of Storify and a co-founder of Hacks/Hackers.

  • 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.

  • Chris Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. In a previous life, he was responsible for delivering Yahoo Maps Europe and Yahoo Answers. He’s currently a Mozilla Developer Evangelist, focusing on all things open web, HTML5, and working open.

  • 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.

  • Evan Hansen is the Editor In Chief of Wired.com. Under his stewardship, Wired.com’s traffic has grown fourfold, reaching more than 10 million unique visitors a month. Hansen has won numerous awards for technology reporting and writing. Prior to joining Wired.com, Evan worked at CNET News.com.

Other lectures will be added over the coming days and weeks, and I’ll be sharing a bit more about the lab format, objectives, and assignments, so stay tuned.

About

Hi, I'm Phillip Smith, a veteran digital publishing consultant, online advocacy specialist, and strategic convener. If you enjoyed reading this, find me on Twitter and I'll keep you updated.

Related

Want to launch a local news business? Apply now for the journalism entrepreneurship boot camp

I’m excited to announce that applications are now open again for the journalism entrepreneurship boot camp. And I’m even more excited to ...… Continue reading