Amar’s Blog

Harvard-Yale-MIT Cyberscholar Working Group
Tuesday, February 19 @ MIT (room TBA)

The next Harvard-Yale-MIT Cyberscholar Working Group will be held on Tuesday, February 19, at MIT (room TBA). Please join us for our usual vigorous discussion, with two scheduled presentations:

* Stephen Wilmarth, Senior Program Specialist and Co-Founder of the Center for 21st Century Skills, will make a presentation entitled “Five Socio-Technology Trends that Change Everything in 21st Century Learning and Teaching”

* Berkman Fellow Melanie Dulong de Rosnay will present based on her ongoing research in Open Access to scientific and academic research.

Bios of both presenters, as well as an abstract of Mr. Wilmarth’s presentation, follow.

* Abstract *

New digital technologies open the door on changes in learning and teaching that go much deeper than anything we’ve experienced in history.  Converging technologies are augmented by new social patterns, creating a “virtuous cycle” of new knowledge creation.  Until now, technology has made its impact on productivity in global commerce, as we’ve defined it by industrial age standards.  So, e-mail, the World Wide Web and cell phones have made us more accessible, more mobile, and more productive in our daily lives.  The problem is, our measurements of productivity continue to be grounded in industrial age standards and ideas.  The case can be made that at the dawn of the 21st century, converging technologies and emerging social trends lay the groundwork for entirely new landscapes, in society, in commerce, in the very meaning of the work we do and the lives we lead, and ultimately in the what, where, why, and how we learn.  Curriculum design has been the foundation of our pedagogy practice and professional teaching standards in a system that has changed only marginally since the start of the modern academy of the Renaissance period.  But emerging socio-technology trends will have a broad and definitive impact on curriculum design going forward. Learning and teaching will be reshaped by the forces of social production, social networks, a semantic web, media grids, and a new paradigm of knowledge creation best stated as a metaphor with biological, organic, sustainable tenor.  Let’s refer to the metaphor as “the new zoo” and debate how this metaphoric representation of knowledge creation forces a new look at how we should redesign learning experiences going forward.

* Biography *

Stephen Wilmarth is currently a Senior Program Specialist and Co-Founder of the Center for 21st Century Skills in Litchfield, Connecticut.  The Center is an NSF-funded program with the purpose to design and operate innovative learning programs in K-14 classrooms and learning communities.  The mission of the Center is to prepare learners for productive lives in a global 21st century society and economy.  He received his B.A. in History from the University of Bridgeport, and has attended Suffolk Law School, Babson’s Olin Graduate School of Management, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Prior to his experience as an educator, Wilmarth founded several high-tech, VC funded start-ups.  He has been a guest lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the London Business School, and is currently under contract with ASCD (an educational publishing house) to co-author a book on curriculum design with Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs of Columbia University’s Teachers College.  He has been a friend of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Internet Society Project at Yale Law School for the past several years.

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Open Access - Ongoing Research

* Biography *

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where she leads research in copyright law and information science. In addition, she is designing a distance learning course on copyright for librarians in partnership with eIFL, working on open access science and open data policy with Science Commons, coordinating publications for Communia, the European thematic network on the digital public domain, and serving as legal project lead for Creative Commons in France.

Prior to joining the Berkman Center, Ms. Dulong de Rosnay participated to research projects on legal metadata and ontologies, rights expression languages, e-science and open access, Internet governance, and technical standardization (MPEG-21). She holds a doctorate in law from CERSA (the Administrative Science Studies Research Center from University Paris 2), where her dissertation was entitled “Legal and technological regulation of networked information and creative works.” She also holds degrees in political science and law from the Universities of Lyon, Leipzig, and Tilburg, and has taught copyright law at the University of Technology of Compiègne, France.

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