We're now a few days away from the start of the The Digital Tools for Public Service Journalism course. Monday, the 19th of May, marks its beginning.

A total of 42 applicants were selected to take part of these three weeks of online training.

They have a diversified profile. Altogether, 18 of the selected candidates are professionals from the country's media outlets, either newspapers, magazines or websites.

But we've also chosen a good number of citizen journalists and of reporters working for smaller news outlets: a total of 10. There are also 4 trainees who come from the academic environment, as well as 10 participants who are journalists involved with local NGOs.

Amongst the applicants for this online part of the course there are 22 men and 20 women.

A total of 19 comes from São Paulo, but there are trainees from Rio de Janeiro (4), Minas Gerais (4), Bahia, from the Federal District (2), Ceará (2), and one applicant from each of the following states: Alagoas, Pernambuco, Roraima, Mato Grosso, Rio Grande do Sul, Sergipe and Espírito Santo.

They share a great interest regarding digital tools and a will to enhance their knowledge in order to create a journalistic project of a social nature.

As instructors, we don't aim to impose any knowledge from up to bottom, as Jim Brainer very accurately put it. The wise thing, he says, and we fully endorse that, is to see how the instructor himself can learn from the student. In what ways he can better shape the course by interacting with the different participants.

Although we'll be looking into several digital resources, such as mash-up maps, creating a wiki and making use of social networks, we don't aim to offer a hacker course. We are not techie-geeky-mega-duper-experts. Our clear goal is to use those tools with a specific purpose, the creation of original and lasting projects that can have an impact in Brazilian society.

We'll be using our own personal experience as guidance, but we're not only open to suggestions and new ideas from the applicants we actually eagerly expect them to offer original takes that go far beyond our lessons.

I won't hide it. We're anxious for the beginning, both me and the assistant-trainer, Fabiano Angélico, but I mean it in a good way. We're both looking forward to see how the students will deal with the different tasks required from them and what projects they'll come up with.

Good luck and see you all next Monday!