Mo Krochmal's Digital Dashboard/Site Matrix

Content
    Enabled hyperlocal, in-depth, investigative journalism, produced with converged multimedia (web and video), delivered time-shifted and/or live over the Internet.

Tools
    Leverage cutting-edge Web 2.0 applications and services to support students' learning by lowering barriers and streamlining the production of new storytelling forms and channels of distribution.

Educational Value
    In a rapidly changing world of journalism, students can leave the curriculum familiar with emerging methods and able to demonstrate the work processes they have learned without being tethered to expensive desktop applications. Newbies to video can quickly learn how to shoot and edit and can get experience in multimedia storytelling. Additionally, students learn how to evaluate and integrate new technologies onto the foundational values they learn in the curriculum.

The pace of change and the introduction of new technologies  is fierce. New tools flood the market every financial quarter. The evergreen skill that is needed to work in this environment is to be able to quickly evaluate and learn the operational basics of the technologies, understand the cultures these things engender and get to the storytelling built on old fashioned shoe-leather reporting, decision making, news judgment and writing skills and to be able to do it remotely or collaboratively.

Danger, Cognitive Overload

I teach on a project/assignment based philosophy, building a scaffold of skills and knowledge as the semester progresses and culminating in a complex project that engages the students in a subject they have picked individually and allows them to create their communications vehicles -- from the tools available. At the end of the course, they have a portfolio project that demonstrates their ability to synthesize knowledge and skills from their learning and an evaluation of their progress.

Service Learning

My curriculum for the undergraduate JRNL 80 (Online Journalism) offering and previously, the graduate JRNL 215 (Journalism and the Web) offering, has a service learning component, requiring the students to produce long-form multimedia news articles that examine and report on critical issues in the minority-majority communities surrounding Hofstra University -- the Village of Hempstead, as well as Uniondale and Roosevelt.

Over the past two semesters, the students have produced nearly 100 in-depth pieces that address and explore important and controversial community issues such as hunger, poverty, development, energy, economics and immigration, to name just a few.

This activity requires the students to escape the boundaries of the campus and not only speak to community leaders, but also the people that are affected by these issues. Increasingly, the students will have to find ways to propel interaction and provide platforms for enabling a more robust conversation and for Nassau News readers to create their own communities of interest, which is seen as an important role for journalism to play in the emerging online arena.