Today, my Digital Journalism II students begin focusing on how to use photography to enhance their multimedia storytelling. So the excellent daylong training session that five of my Diederich College colleagues and I attended yesterday could not have been more timely – or helpful in terms of revealing relevant mobile resources and tips.

More than 75 people – many of them working journalists – joined us at the "Smart Phones, Smart Journalism Workshop," presented by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) and the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel hosted the event and Val Hoeppner, the institute's director of education and a multimedia guru, led the way by masterfully teaching how to use mobile technology better and faster.

Hoeppner showed us how to extend our smartphone's capabilities through apps for capturing and editing images, video and audio, as well as for note taking, utilities, geolocation and live streaming. Her Top 10 apps for journalists include Evernote, Dropbox, Photoshop Express, Camera+ and Free WiFi Finder. Evernote helped me take great notes from the presentation to share with my colleagues afterward – and one of my journalism students, Becca French, later pointed out that you can tweet selected copy from within the app after right-clicking your mouse.

Our guru stressed using an iPhone instead of Android and said that, as far as tablets go, news consumption is the No. 1 use of the iPad. Apple may have developers and consumers over a barrel, but its products work, she said.

Of course, tweeting and other social meeting was a primary concern. "It really behooves you as a journalist to get on with it and tweet," Hoeppner said, before adding "shame on you" to those covering beats and not using RSS feeds. Happy to report that our #mobilemedia11 hashtag had enough activity to trend on Twitter in Milwaukee. A shout-out to those of my #JOUR1550 students who retweeted many of my live tweets from the workshop.

Hoeppner implored everyone in the room to become better media curators. Her dream, she said, is that news companies will better enable online users to engage with their web offerings. Saying readers want more and want to share more, Hoeppner said these companies should assign #hashtags to content and use tools like Storify to curate tweeted, reposted or emailed stories, photos and videos. She also shared the Indianapolis Star's Faces of War: Hoosiers Veterans project as an example of how the media can excel via print, online, television and video.

All in all, a day well spent. Really great to learn so much that will help me and my students tell better stories – for as Hoeppner said, "Visual storytelling is more important than ever and storytelling is more important than ever." 

Being a former criminal courts reporter, it's amazing to consider live tweeting from inside a courtroom during a major trial – but that's what Natasha Korecki does while covering federal court for the Chicago Sun-Times. "It is exhausting because you're putting things out all day long," Korecki said of how social media – especially Twitter – has changed journalism. "But you are reaching another audience. You are reaching a wider audience."

Korecki and other panelists discussed "Journalism in the Age of the Tweet" today as part of Social Media Week, the huge international undertaking that, according to its website, "brings hundreds of thousands of people together every year through learning experiences that aim to advance our understanding of social media's role in society."

About 100 people attended the journalism panel at the Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago. The moderator, Bill Adee, vice president of digital at the Chicago Tribune, said 5.1 million people function online in the metropolitan area, and that 80 percent are on Facebook and 17 percent are on Twitter. Four out of every five people in the room raised a hand when Adee asked who had tweeted at least once today. For those wondering what to tweet, he offered this good advice: one-third personal, one-third business or professional, one-third informational.

Trib Nation Manager James Janega; Frank Sennett, Time Out Chicago's president and editor in chief, and Matt Carmichael, director of information projects at Advertising Age, joined Korecki on the panel. Janega offered this truism concerning the age-old question of how to make pitches to journalists: Twitter is a great way to maintain a relationship, but not so good for starting one. Asked what other social media Ad Age employs, Carmichael said: "I think the action for us right now is Twitter. Whether that's true a year from now, who knows?"

While acknowledging "the world we live in now is immediate feedback," Sennett also spoke of the danger that social media poses for journalists. "The danger of how it has changed us ... is that you chase the page views." By that, he means, newsroom managers must be wary of focusing on what they think the public wants at the expense of what it needs to maintain a functional democracy and a safe and informed community. Very good point.

In September 2006, I wrote my "9/11 Chronicle" in hopes of having my 3,600-word personal experience published as a Flash presentation during the five-year anniversary of the terrorists attacks against the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. My skills and passion as a multimedia journalist were just beginning and so my 9/11 package did not develop in time for that commemoration. Five years later, as the world reflected on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, my experience on that fateful day earned me a media grand slam: coverage in print, radio, television and online.

For sure, the advent of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, helps any individual share his or her personal story. But it also helped to have the valuable assistance of the Marquette University Office of Marketing and Communication, which handled media inquiries after posting a 9/11-related news release on August 16.

The first query came from Mitch Teich, executive director of "Lake Effect," the locally produced weekday magazine program on WUWM-FM in Milwaukee. Here's the radio interview he did with me and my Diederich College colleague, Danielle Beverly, about our 9/11 experiences. Below is the other coverage stemming from my "9/11 Chronicle."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an abridged version of my "9/11 Chronicle" as an op-ed piece in its Crossroads section on Sunday. I edited the complete 3,600-word text to 1,600 words. No small feat, I'll tell you.

Here's the video of anchor/reporter Tom Murray interviewing me about my 9/11 experience on "Live at Daybreak" on WTMJ-TV (Milwaukee) at 6:45 a.m. on Sunday. My first live TV interview since 2005 in Rochester, N.Y. Enjoyed getting an email from one of my former students right after he later saw the segment on the 11 p.m. newscast.

Here is a video, "Flashback 9/11: Herbert Lowe," that one of my Marquette journalism students, Katie Doherty from Chicago, produced as a companion piece to her story, "After ten years, effects of 9/11 still felt in U.S.," for The Marquette Tribune on Thursday. The video, Katie's first ever, is at the bottom of the page containing her article. 

Last, but not least, this posting I wrote for Communi8, the Diederich College of Communication blog, last Tuesday.

The Poynter Institute's e-learning project, News University, was among the first places I turned to before starting my first semester as a journalism educator in January 2010. (I found great syllabi to pull ideas from at NewsU's syllabus exchange and recommend it to all beginning journalism educators.) Recently, I called Vicki Krueger at NewsU to learn more about how my two digital journalism courses could best employ its offerings this semester. That conversation and subsequent ones with Howard Finberg at NewsU and Diederich College Dean Lori Bergen and journalism department chairwoman Karen Slattery have in a two-week span led to something phenomenal.

Here's what I wrote in my syllabi for my Digital Journalism I and Digital Journalism II courses: "As part of an experimental effort between the Diederich College of Communication and the Poynter Institute’s News University, students in this course will have the chance to earn, along with a grade, a certificate from the nation’s premiere journalism think tank. Poynter says its NewsU certificates help the instructor supplement other teaching material and evaluate each student’s understanding of essential journalism skills and best practices. The custom certificate created by the college and Poynter consists of seven online modules. To earn a certificate, each student must pass the assessments for each of those modules. Poynter describes the assessments as rigorous and designed to test comprehension and not memorization. Earning this certificate will be of immediate value to each student, as it will look great on a LinkedIn profile, especially when time to apply for internships and or that first job after graduation."

My students know a good thing when they see it and are excited about the certificate opportunity. In each class, the initiative is required and accounts for 15 percent of the final grade. While each course will have seven modules formally accessed, I'll also use several other NewsU modules as interactive learning guides during class time. Essentially, the modules serve as textbooks; I lead the class discussion same as with any other online resource.

On Tuesday, both classes engaged in our first module, "Handling Race and Ethnicity." We looked at how we view these critical matters, how and when they should appear in news stories, and describing suspect identification and the way people look. I found it interesting that so many of my students consider themselves German; I wouldn't have suspected the number would be so high just by looking at them – that's part of the lesson, for whomever engages the module, no matter their level of journalism or life experience. What did not surprise me is how seriously my students took to what the module offered, as they definitely seem to care about diversity and portraying people accurately.

I hope to write about this certificate experience in this blog through the semester. Another lesson: don't have the students look at a module on their classroom computers while I'm doing the same from the projector. At least a couple of them will move ahead of the lesson and know the correct answer before I ask for it. Students!

The cross-country trek wasn't the longest of my life. That happened in the late-1980s when my mother decided she just had to see my brother, Darryl, who was then stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. So that she would not drive all by herself roundtrip from South Jersey, I went with her. We drove 27 hours to get there, as I recall, then spent about 15 hours with my brother at the fort, then drove 28 hours back east. I know ... made no sense then, either.

Well, my wife and I spent most of Labor Day weekend driving back and forth from Chicago to Garysburg, N.C. The 15-hour drive was much shorter than that Oklahoma trip, but also definitely longer than the 12-hour jaunt Mira and I did with my brother, Curtis, and nephew, Carlton, each way, when moving to Chicago my things from my studio apartment in Maryland, upon ending my stint with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in Washington.

This latest trip involved moving the last of what Mira wanted to keep after more than two weeks' cleaning out her late parents' home this summer so it could be rented. We rented a cargo van to bring it all back to Chicago. Little did we know that the 1,857-mile roundtrip would have us twice spending $100 to fill the gas tank in West Virginia. Or that Mira would swear I had hit a skunk when a foul smell consumed the van. Or that we would have to navigate a winding road up a mountain in the dead of night, fearful that a bear would block our path at any second. On a positive note, we did enjoy taking in the almost 1,000 wind turbines amazingly lining the terrain north of Lafayette, Ind.

Oh yes, to my wife's chagrin, I tweeted about our excursion along the way. "After Best Buy, golf store, Christian bookstore stops @miralowe says "Feels like I've been on a road trip – haven't got on the road yet," went an early tweet from me. Mira tweeted this: "Me & @herbertlowe listening to Sade & Elton John on Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds Highway in Indianapolis.” And from me: "OMG! Just this moment, electricity restored to our home in #Garysburg, N.C. – finally, EIGHT days after Hurricane Irene blew through." One more: "Story of my life: @miralowe awakes from nap and starts asking lots of questions – e.g., did I drink her lemonade? Why is windshield dirty?"

But it was my tweets from within West Virginia that caught the eye of maybe the only two people I know either born in or touting from West Virginia: my former Atlantic City Press cohort Vicki Smith and fellow NABJ member Angela Dodson. "Why in the world are you THERE?" Vicki asked on Facebook when I tweeted from Scarbro, W.Va. Equally mystified, Angela offered, "Holler if (you) need me to send in some kinfolk or something to get you out." Thankfully, there was never any cause for alarm. Here's hoping this blog posting answers their questions.