Check out the new Knight-Batten awards

(This is a repost with some tweaks of what I just put on the Rockchucks blog)

I'm going to come back with some deeper observations on my own blog later, but I want to post this quickly so you can peruse it and see how it validates our ideas, or how it may suggest that our ideas need a bit of a polish or a nudge.

The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism were just announced, and you will find a couple of familiar faces (and some not) among the winners. Here's the link.

I think these projects might should influence/inform our projects as we move forward. Team Kansas, I particularly think the TechPresident project (grand prize winner) has implications ... Is there something here you can reflect/learn from/build on in what we're doing?

Team Kansas: Progress Report

The KU/K-State team had an hour-long phone conference on Monday night (Sept. 3) and here are the highlights of what we discussed. We decided to continue exploring ways we could further develop and add depth to Better Letter and still retain its simplicity. Towards that goal, team members divided themselves into groups to explore the following (1) ways we could integrate video into the design of the product to allow users alternative ways of communicating. One possible solution could be to simply insert a link that would connect users to video-hosting sites that already exist (2) the possibility of incorporating Google maps to help public figures identify the geographic areas generating particular issues
(3) Research and identify open source voice recognition software that can easily be integrated into the site to allow citizens with disabilities to be part of the conversation.
(4) Incorporate a comments and Talk About feature into the design.
(5) The team is in need of a computer coder who can help design a prototype that would incorporate the above features.
(6) We further decided to explore the possibility of Beta testing the product on the sites of K/State and KU student media.
(7) The team will adopt the name Team Kansas.
(8) Each member will continue to research other innovative ways of improving our product.
(9) We will move the conversation to our blog and continue to be actively involved in blogging.

Rockchucks stepping up

At our weekly conference last night, the Rockchucks team seemed to be leaning toward a broad idea that one team member dubbed "collabor-portal." Three or so members of the team are working toward nailing the idea description by noon Tuesday.

As they worked toward deciding on one idea last week, the blog discussion was all over the place, with some people floating some pretty theoretical concepts and others sprinkling in totally new bits of ideas. The discussion was quite lively and engaged, with a lot of back and forth in the comments areas. No one in this group seems shy, and at the same time, no one person appears to be dominating the discussion.

I'm waiting to see the articulation of the idea before giving it a tough critique. Up until now the ideas have been in sort of "soft focus" which makes them harder to evaluate from a practical standpoint. It's my hope that they would rather hear the tough critique from faculty now, than fall flat in Toronto.

As the week progresses, the team members will be critiquing the idea and they will also self-select into sub-groups for technology, presentation and research.

A question for the research folks among us: Is there any good way (besides transcribing notes) of recording the conference calls? Would that be useful to you research people?

Expiring minds wish to know ... ;-)