Troll Wrastling for Beginners: Data-Driven Methods to Decrease Hatred Online (3/25); Pop-Up Learning (4/1)

Troll Wrastling for Beginners: Data-Driven Methods to Decrease Hatred Online

Tuesday, March 25, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Hateful and even violent speech are familiar online; what’s unusual are data-driven efforts to diminish them. Experiments so far have produced intriguing results including: some ‘trolls’ recant or apologize in response to counterspeech, and small changes in platform architecture can improve online discourse norms. Benesch will describe these findings and propose further experiments, especially in climates where online speech may be tied to offline violence.

Susan Benesch founded the Dangerous Speech Project, to find ways of diminishing inflammatory speech – and its capacity to inspire violence - while protecting freedom of expression. Her framework to gauge the dangerousness of speech in context has been used in work to prevent violence in Kenya among other countries. Building on data from Kenya, she is now conducting new research to test the effectiveness of counterspeech on social media platforms. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Pop-Up Learning: The Future of MOOCs and Online Education

Tuesday, April 1, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

After months of hype and hope about MOOCs, or massive open online courses, one thing is clear: they aren’t very good at teaching those most in need of education. Instead, they’re serving the education “haves”: About 80 percent of people taking MOOCs already have a college degree. But free online courses may still spark an education revolution, in ways that their biggest proponents hadn’t guessed. This talk will take a closer look at who is taking MOOCs and why, and examine how free courses fit into broader Internet trends.

Jeffrey R. Young is an editor and writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he leads the paper's coverage of technology and its impact on teaching, research, and student life. He is also an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park, teaching a course on multimedia storytelling. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Karim R. Lakhani on How Disclosure Policies Impact Search in Open Innovation

Most of society’s innovation systems –- academic science, the patent system, open source, etc. -– are “open” in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosures amongst innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems, however, is whether disclosures take place only after final innovations are completed, or whether disclosures relate to intermediate solutions and advances. Karim R. Lakhani -- Harvard Business School professor and Berkman Faculty Associate -- presents experimental evidence showing that implementing intermediate versus final disclosures qualitatively transforms the very nature of the innovation search process, and presents comparative advantages of intermediate disclosure systems. video/audio on our website>