Narcotweets: Reporting on the Mexican Drug War using Social Media; Anya Kamenetz on Who Can Learn Online, and How?

Narcotweets: Reporting on the Mexican Drug War using Social Media

Tuesday, July 10, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

In the last few years, the war among drug cartels and the Mexican authorities has intensified. It is a brutal war that has claimed the lives of many innocent people. Citizens, using Social Media, have organized a communication network reporting daily on the dangerous zones of their cities. How did they start and how effective are they? In this presentation we analyze the information sharing practices of people living in cities central to the Mexican Drug War. We will describe the content, volume, and network structures of a microblogging corpus from several cities afflicted by this war. First, we will describe how citizens use social media to alert each other and comment on the violence that plagues their communities. Then we will examine how a handful of citizens aggregate and disseminate information from social media, many of whom are anonymous. We present our published and ongoing research (jointly with Eni Mustafaraj) on this phenomenon that we hope will expand our understanding of self-organized civic media efforts along with some of the challenges that these might face. Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Panagiotis "Takis" Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science and Founder of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Anya Kamenetz on Who Can Learn Online, and How?

Much of the conversation around the new wave of online 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, senior writer at Fast Company Magazine, and author of two books and two e-books about the future of education, discusses who online learning serves, and how. video/audio on our website>

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