• ADVERTISEMENT

    1st Day at Knight News Challenge Winners Conference

    by Fabio Berzaghi
    June 12, 2008

    I am in Boston at the Center of Future of Civic Media which hosts the Knight News Challenge Conference.

    Yesterday after registering I assisted to the welcome speech by Alberto Ibarguen. He believes that what Knight is doing is the next big thing happening. A mix of technology, local communities. A new way to educate and inform people and make news accessible to everybody and reported by common people and not necessarily only journalists. Following Alberto’s speech the Co-Director of the Center for Future Civic Media talked about how young people are getting more involved with politics and how star-trek really represents our society. Obama resembles Spock, and there are a lot different races that in star-trek that represent our current multi-ethnic society. Doesn’t make sense to you? Well, that’s what he really said. A parallel between star-trek and modern society. After dinner a couple of dozen stands where set-up to show demos and after going through all of the stands I stop by 3-4 that I thought were interesting and/or related to our project. One stand was dedicated to a project on interactive narrative, which was tested at an elementary school. The kids created interactive stories with a simple plug-n-play open source software called ######.

    Another project was a sort of game on a portable device connected to a GPS. The user would talk to characters and pick-up objects whenever it would get close to it moving in the real world. There are many different projects related to different topics: radio, products, connecting people in rural areas, an audio blog for kids, comics, women and technology. For now it was quite overwhelming but after a bit I talked to a few people and had a chance to talk to Alberto, the CEO of Knight and I really enjoyed the conversation.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    More later.

    Fabio

    Tagged: games knight conference mit

    Comments are closed.

  • ADVERTISEMENT
  • ADVERTISEMENT
  • Who We Are

    MediaShift is the premier destination for insight and analysis at the intersection of media and technology. The MediaShift network includes MediaShift, EducationShift, MetricShift and Idea Lab, as well as workshops and weekend hackathons, email newsletters, a weekly podcast and a series of DigitalEd online trainings.

    About MediaShift »
    Contact us »
    Sponsor MediaShift »
    MediaShift Newsletters »

    Follow us on Social Media

    @MediaShiftorg
    @Mediatwit
    @MediaShiftPod
    Facebook.com/MediaShift