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OpenCourt: Transparency in the Court; The Fate of Education in a Connected World; Public Parts

Berkman Events Newsletter Template
Upcoming Events and Digital Media
November 22, 2011

Remember to load images if you have trouble seeing parts of this email. Or click here to view the web version of this newsletter. Below you will find upcoming Berkman Center events, interesting digital media we have produced, and other events of note.

berkman luncheon series

OpenCourt: Transparency in the Court

Tuesday, November 29, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

berkman

OpenCourt aims to create a model for judicial transparency in the U.S as envisioned by our Founders. This Knight News Challenge pilot project streams live daily coverage and posts it onto the Internet daily. The project seeks to make courts more accessible to the public through technology while respecting legitimate concerns about privacy. Our streaming and archive videos represent a firehose of information. How do we increase the value of this raw footage -- by helping people use it, by contextualizing the content and meta-data such as subject tags to better organize and increase access to the information gathered. Other challenges we face are how to scale up beyond a single courtroom and how to make the project sustainable. OpenCourt staff members John Davidow (Executive Producer), Joe Spurr (Director), and Val Wang (Producer) will join us to discuss. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

berkman luncheon series

The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected World

Monday, December 5, 6:00PM, Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School. Free and Open to the Public.

berkman

Civic education is the cultivation of knowledge and traits that sustain democratic self-governance. The broad agreement that civic education is important disintegrates under close scrutiny. As the social networks of individuals become less based on geography and more based on friendships and common interests, consensus on shared civic values seems harder to achieve. American education is under stress at every level, and schools and colleges must re-imagine their commitment to civic education. This seminar will probe tensions that make civic education difficult, and feature Charles Nesson (HLS) as Provocateur and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bard College), Peter Levine (Tufts University), Harry Lewis (Harvard SEAS), Elizabeth Lynn (Project on Civic Reflection) and Juan Carlos de Martin (Berkman Center) as participants. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

berkman luncheon series

Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live

Tuesday, December 6, 12:30pm ET, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

berkman

Thanks to the internet, we now live—more and more—in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip. Yet change brings fear, and many people—nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy—despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds. But not Jeff Jarvis. In this shibboleth-destroying book, Public Parts argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovati ons such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all. Jeff Jarvis blogs about media, news, technology, and business at Buzzmachine.com, and appears weekly as a co-host on Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Google.” He is associate professor and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

video/audio

Radio Berkman 188: SOPA on the Ropes(?)

radio

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — a U.S. House bill that would give the Department of Justice the authority to demand that ISPs block sites accused of hosting pirated content — seemed to be doing well. Nearly half of the Senate sponsored similar legislation that survived a committee vote. And people weren't generally making a big deal about it. But on the week before Thanksgiving SOPA suddenly hit the front page after a particularly fraught House committee hearing on the bill. Battle lines became clear. Representatives of big content owners like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) partnered with big brands and the US Chamber of Commerce in support of the legislation, saying it would protect millions of jobs. On the other side web entrepreneurs like Google, Twitter, and Facebook sided with Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the bill, saying it would basically give corporations a legal path to censor any site that poses a competitive threat. And now it looks like the bill might have a harder time than legislators originally thought. But talk to the creators of intellectual property one on one and you'll see that many don't have a clear opinion on the bill. The open web has benefitted the work of artists, coders, and researchers alike, allowing them to share their work with new audiences and experiment with new business models for next to nothing. But many creators see that same technology as stealing food from their mouths when their work appears on torrent sites and uncredited on blogs. We spoke with two people this week to help get our heads straight on SOPA. The graphic artist Jim "Zub" Zubkavich worries about what piracy is doing to his career, but sees SOPA as a little draconian. And Julian Sanchez of the CATO Institute gives some idea of what SOPA will do if implemented, and the chance it might have of passing. audio on our website>

Other Events of Note

Events that may be of interest to the Berkman community:

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