Hackademia; Too Big to Know; Designing for Remixing; Consent of the Networked

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, Austin North Classroom, Austin Hall, 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>

Designing for Remixing: Computer-supported Social Creativity

Tuesday, January 31, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

From Andres: In this talk I present a framework for the design and study of an online community of amateur creators. I focus on remixing as a lens to understand the social, cultural, and technical structures of a social computing system that supports creative expression. I am motivated by three broad questions: 1) what is the functional role of remixing in cultural production and social learning? 2) what are the structural properties of an online remixing community? 3) what are amateur creators' attitudes towards remixing? This research builds on my work on the Scratch Online Community, an online community I conceived, developed and studied. The Scratch website allows young people to share and remix their own video games and animations, as well as those of their peers. In four years, the community has grown to close to a million registered members and more than two million user-contributed projects. Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. 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>

Alison J. Head on Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age

What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? Alison Head — lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy, Berkman Fellow, and Research Scientist in University of Washington's Information School — presents a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students’ reliance on and use of Web sources. video/audio on our website>

Justin Reich on How Free and Open Education Might Widen Digital Divides

The explosion of open education content resources 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, free of charge. Is it possible, however, that because affluent schools and students have a greater capacity to take up new innovations, that new tools and resources that appear in the ecology of education could widen rather than ameliorate digital divides? In this presentation Justin Reich — doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society — examines evidence for both the "tech as equalizer" and "tech as accelerator of digital divides" hypotheses. video/audio on our website>