The travel portion of this "Newsroom of the Future" journey is coming to an end. Next week I'll be visiting the University of Maryland's J-Lab, which can probably be considered the nexis for the entire citizen media movement.

Then onward to The Washington Post's online newsroom, which is not only housed in a separate building from the main Washington, D.C., newsroom, but in a separate state. That makes for some tricky convergence. Stay tuned for details on how the two newsrooms communicate and for an inside peek at an online operation considered by many to be the best among American newspapers.

Then on to Cambridge, Mass., and the Media Lab at MIT. Since 1985, faculty, researchers and students have been on the hunt for innovation. MIT's own literature acknowledges that skeptics initially thought the lab's approach was unorthodox.

But since its inception, faculty and graduates have started more than 60 companies and have helped create now-familiar technology such as digital video and wearable computers, and done pioneering work in computation and human-machine interfaces.

Researchers at MIT are all about "creating a future where machines not only augment human capabilities, but also relate to people on more human terms." In other words, a future where a computer can tell whether or not I'm bored by a story I'm reading. Yikes.

My visit to MIT is all about the 'real' future, a place we can't even imagine yet in which technology will impact the way we communicate with one another. What can we learn at MIT that puts us ahead of the curve? Most of the concepts we're talking about today - audio and video, convergence, fielded data - are based on existing technology. Most newspapers are just in various stages of "catching up" to it.

But what's out there conceptually? And what can we do now to be ready, even if it's years away from coming true?

The last stop after MIT is Harvard and The Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

If MIT is about the technology, then Berkman is about relationships - specifically, how cyberspace impacts our lives, our practices, our laws and sanctions. Berkman is part of Harvard Law School; its faculty provides the bulk of the research into the relationship between law and cyberspace. So, from Berkman we're going to hear about issues such as privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control and electronic commerce. How will those issues impact the journalism we practice tomorrow? Stay tuned.

When this final trip is complete, the real work begins: not just a final report that offers some proposals for changing our newsroom practices, but the start of what I hope will be an ongoing conversation here at The Spokesman-Review about our role as journalists in a rapidly changing world.