Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age; Will Free Benefit the Rich?; Too Big to Know

Searching for Context: Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age

Tuesday, January 10, 12:30pm ET, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East A, Harvard Law School Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? In this talk, I present a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students’ reliance on and use of Web sources. Since 2008, as part of our ongoing study at the University of Washington’s Project Information Literacy, we have surveyed more than 10,000 students at 40 colleges and universities (including undergraduates enrolled at Harvard College). We have investigated how college students find information and conduct research—their needs, strategies, and workarounds—for solving information problems that occur during course-related research and in their everyday lives. We have found the large majority of students we have studied across all types of higher-education institutions in the U.S. still attend college to learn, but many are lost in a thicket of information overload. They struggle with managing the IT devices that permeate their lives. Our findings indicate that nearly all students intentionally use a small compass for navigating the ever-widening and complex information landscape they inhabit. These and other findings of Project Information Literacy have profound implications for teaching, learning, work, and play in the 21st century. Alison Head is the lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy. She is a Research Scientist in University of Washington's Information School and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Library Innovation Lab (2011-2012). RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Will Free Benefit the Rich? How Free and Open Education Might Widen Digital Divides

Tuesday, January 17, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

The explosion of open education content resources and freely available collaboration and media production platforms represents one of the most exciting emerging trends in education. These tools create unprecedented opportunities for teachers to design and personalize curriculum and to give students opportunities to collaborate, publish, and take responsibility for their own learning. Many education technology and open education advocates hope that the widespread availability of free resources and platforms will disproportionately benefit disadvantaged students, by making technology resources broadly available that were once only available to affluent students. It is possible, however, that affluent schools and students have a greater capacity to take up new innovations, even free ones, and so new tools and resources that appear in the ecology of education will widen rather than ameliorate digital divides. In this presentation, we will examine evidence for both the "tech as equalizer" and "tech as accelerator of digital divides" hypotheses, and we will examine technology innovations and interventions that specifically target learners with the most needs. A lively discussion will follow to consider how educators, technologists, and policymakers can address issues of educational digital inequalities in their work. An introduction to these issues can be found in this video op-ed. Justin Reich a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Hackademia: Leveraging the Conflict Between Expertise and Innovation to Create Disruptive Technologies

Tuesday, January 24, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

This talk describes two projects that tackle the same issue: how and why do nonexperts contribute to innovation? The conflict between expertise and innovation sits uneasily in academia, where the enterprise hinges on doling out official credentials. But a lack of expertise can in fact drive people to create the kind of disruptive technologies that really are game-changers. In this presentation Beth Kolko present findings from a book-in-progress based on interviews with hackers and makers tentatively titled Why Rulebreakers Will Rule the World. That book connects the hacking and making/DIY communities at the point of disruptive technologies, demonstrating how the lack of institutional affiliation and formal credentials within each community opens up the space for creative problem-solving approaches. Dr. Beth Kolko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. She was previously a professor of English at the University of Wyoming and the University of Texas at Arlington with a specialty in rhetoric. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Too Big to Know

Tuesday, January 24, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Law School. This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Office of the Senior Associate Provost at Harvard University.

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it's becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Indeed, the basic strategies of knowledge that emerged in the West addressed a basic problem: skulls don't scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge's new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. David Weinberger will discuss his new book,Too Big to Know. David writes about the effect of technology on ideas. He is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything Is Miscellaneous, and is the co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

Thursday, February 2, 6:00pm ET, MIT Media Lab. This event is co-sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Civic Media at MIT.

A global struggle for control of the Internet is now underway. At stake are no less than civil liberties, privacy and even the character of democracy in the 21st century. Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. It is time to stop arguing over whether the Internet empowers individuals and societies, and address the more fundamental and urgent question of how technology should be structured and governed to support the rights and liberties of all the world’s Internet users. In her timely book, Rebecca MacKinnon warns that a convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices is threatening the future of democracy and human rights around the world. Consent of the Networked is a call to action: Our freedom in the Internet age depends on whether we defend our rights on digital platforms and networks in the same way that people fight for their rights and accountable governance in physical communities and nations. It is time to stop thinking of ourselves as passive “users” of technology and instead act like citizens of the Internet – as netizens – and take ownership and responsibility for our digital future. Rebecca MacKinnon is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she conducts research, writing and advocacy on global Internet policy, free expression, and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. She is cofounder of Global Voices, an international citizen media network. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Global Network Initiative. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Radio Berkman 189: Peer Pressure

We’re so easily influenced by the habits and interests of our friends, you might think that social networks like Facebook would only magnify the power of peer pressure. But recent research from Harvard sociologists Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez, and Jason Kaufman shows that people are more likely to stick with their own interests than we might think. While younger folks are likely to build friendships based on certain cultural tastes they’re not likely to warm to their friends tastes so easily. This is surprising, say the researchers, given previous data and assumptions about how tastes spread virally on the net. David Weinberger chatted with Kevin Lewis to get more details on this study. video/audio on our website>