Who can Learn Online, And How?; Expanding the Concept of Accessible Technology

Who can Learn Online, And How?

Tuesday, June 19, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

The selection of free online higher learning experiences--as distinguished from merely raw learning materials, like MIT's Open Courseware --- has expanded greatly in the past six months. Udemy, Coursera, the Minerva Project, Udacity, and edx all offer courses created by faculty at top universities in the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) format, each with some combination of video lectures, exercises, a social component (chat rooms, wikis, Facebook groups) and even a form of certification for your learning. And many of them are offering these courses for free. Much of the conversation around this new wave of education startups has focused on what they mean for the incumbent institutions, from for-profit online universities to the traditional Ivy League. But what about what they mean for learners? Who is currently succeeding in open learning contexts? What are the missing pieces of the ecosystem--from discovery, to peer support, to mentoring, to assessment--that will allow the most severely underserved learners to succeed in this new learning environment? Anya Kamenetz is a senior writer at Fast Company Magazine. She's the author of two books and two ebooks about the future of education. Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006), dealt with student loans, generational economics and politics, and DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, (Chelsea Green, 2010) investigated the roots of the cost, access, and quality crises in higher education as well as innovations to address these crises. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Expanding the Concept of Accessible Technology

Tuesday, June 26, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

This presentation expands the idea of accessible technology to show how the way we make our shared world of buildings, technologies, public spaces, practices, laws, and attitudes builds a total environment which welcomes some people and keeps other people out. The talk presents the evolution of how accessible technologies in the broadest sense make our citizenry more inclusive and diverse. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of Women's Studies and English at Emory University. Her fields of study are feminist theory, American literature, and disability studies. Her work develops the field of disability studies in the humanities and women's and gender studies. This year she is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Urs Gasser and John Palfrey on Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

The practice of standardization has been facilitating innovation and economic growth for centuries. The standardization of the railroad gauge revolutionized the flow of commodities, the standardization of money revolutionized debt markets and simplified trade, and the standardization of credit networks has allowed for the purchase of goods using money deposited in a bank half a world away. These advancements did not eradicate the different systems they affected; instead, each system has been transformed so that it can interoperate with systems all over the world, while still preserving local diversity. But interoperability is not also without its risks. In this presentation authors John Palfrey — Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School — and Urs Gasser — Executive Director of the Berkman Center — demonstrate how interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system, and now is mor e important than ever. Interoperability offers a number of solutions to global challenges, but in order to get the most out of interoperability while minimizing its risks, we will need to fundamentally revisit our understanding of how it works, and how it can allow for improvements in each of its constituent parts. video/audio on our website>

RB203: From Digital Uprising to Digital Society

Lots of digital ink has been spilled about how and whether digital technology played a critical role in bringing about the Arab Spring. But it's been 18 months since the spark of revolution was first lit in Tunisia, way back in December of 2010. How has digital technology played a role in laying the foundation for a stable Tunisia? Today's guests were tasked with finding an answer to that question. And it turns out to be a very complex and interesting one, leading them to explore Tunisia's communications infrastructure, Tunisia's digital economy, and an increasingly technology-enabled civil society. Zack Brisson and Kate Krontiris of Reboot are the authors of the recently completed TUNISIA: FROM REVOLUTIONS TO INSTITUTIONS. audio on our website>