The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding and support from Knight’s network of influential peers and advisors to help advance their ideas.
Throughout 2012, innovators from all industries and countries are invited to participate in three challenge rounds, each with focused topics on emerging trends.
Round 1 - on networks - is closed, and the winners will be announced June 18.
Round 2 - on data - will be open May 31 - June 21. We’re looking for new ways of collecting, understanding, visualizing and helping the public use the large amounts of information generated each day. Winners will be announced in late September.
Details on Round 3 will available later this year.
Anyone, anywhere can apply for the challenge - whether for-profit start-ups or non-profit ventures. For more information on a variety of topics - from guidelines for for-profits, on intellectual property licensing, open source software and more - visit our FAQ.
Join classrooms around the world under one “digital roof,” so that students may learn together across cultures, borders, and boundaries.
While several virtual classrooms and online learning organizations exist, there are no organized global efforts focused on uniting children of very diverse backgrounds through online exchange, learning, and play.
Global Playground has existing brick and mortar schools in five countries. We reach thousands of diverse children in both developing and developed nations. Now we just need a way to connect them all. Through our Digital Schoolhouse, teachers will be able to link their classrooms and their students together online.
Children are inherently curious, about each other, about the world. However, they are infrequently exposed to news, information, and contact from sources outside their immediate community. Teachers would love to facilitate these interactions, but often have little time to develop them. The Digital Schoolhouse provides immediate access to appropriate content and collaboration tools, helping teachers offer their students a window into other parts of the world. Facebook, Twitter, and other existing platforms need to be culled and filtered so teachers can reliably employ their advantages in the classroom. This portal is designed specifically for these teachers and their students.
We have Teaching Fellows and their collaborative teams placed locally in several countries. We have teachers in the US signed up and eagerly anticipating joining their classrooms with the Digital Schoolhouse. A team of technologists, teachers, learning scientists, and instructional designers has constructed curricular content and teacher trainings to optimize the value of the Digital Schoolhouse. Now, a team of web designers and developers are assembled and preparing to build a portal to connect our current network with teachers around the world through their preferred platforms.
The physical schools have been built. The connections with many more schools have been established. Preliminary content was collected, captured, and organized in an initial version of the portal; a pilot program has been coded and is soon to be tested by a handful of teachers both in the U.S. and abroad. The current version can pull in data from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr. The future version will be able to push data, manage many more user accounts, and distribute news, information, curricula and games in real-time (or asynchronously) to classrooms around the world on their preferred/available platforms.
After the initial development, all content will be user generated. Global Playground will source content from abroad through its Teaching Fellows and domestically, through its connections with 200+ teachers. As our user base grows, we will rely on existing and new donors to cover server maintenance and web support costs.
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