Civic Education in a Connected World; Jeff Jarvis on Public Parts; Celebrating OMLN@2

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.

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>

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.

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 innovations 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>

Celebrating the Online Media Legal Network's (OMLN) 2nd Anniversary

Tuesday, December 13, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

The Online Media Legal Network ("OMLN") was created at the end of 2009 by David Ardia, Kim Isbell, and Helen Fu as part of the Citizen Media Law Project, in order to respond to the lack of experienced legal advice available to independent news organizations, online content creators, and solo digital journalists. As the OMLN nears the end of its second year, it has helped over 160 clients with more than 330 separate legal matters, and has more than 225 firms, clinics and individual attorneys in its roster with coverage in all 50 U.S. states. At this event, timed to celebrate the OMLN's second anniversary, the staff of the OMLN will discuss the history and growth of the project, the accumulated data regarding the nature and geographic distribution of clients and legal issues that have come to the OMLN, and the OMLN's efforts to meet those needs. They will also discuss potential future uses of the OMLN in connection with research and tracking of legal trends. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

OpenCourt on Transparency in the Court

With the support of a Knight News Challenge grant OpenCourt streams and archives live daily coverage of court sessions. The project seeks to make courts more accessible to the public through technology while respecting legitimate concerns about privacy. John Davidow (Executive Producer), Joe Spurr (Director), and Val Wang (Producer) join the Berkman Center community to talk about this fascinating project. video/audio on our website>

Radio Berkman 188: SOPA on the Ropes(?)

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>

Mayo Fuster Morell on the Spanish Revolution & the Internet: From Free Culture to Meta-Politics

In the context of multiple crises – ecological, political, financial and geopolitical restructuring – there are emerging forms of social cooperation. In the Spanish case, we have seen some of the largest demonstrations since the country made its transition to democracy in the 70s with massive occupations of public squares, attempts to prevent parliaments’ functioning and citizen assemblies of thousands of people taking place in spring and autumn 2011. Mayo Fuster Morell — a PhD candidate from the European University Institute in Florence — analyzes commonalities and differences between emerging forms of social cooperation that suggest a shift to a more active role of civic society in the network society. video/audio on our website>