Berkman Center Events & Webcasts

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, June 19, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA

Guest: danah boyd
Topic: MyFriends, MySpace: American Youth Socialization on Social Network Sites

Publics offer youth a space to engage in cultural identity development.  By engaging in public life, youth learn to interpret the cultural signals that surround them and incorporate these cultural elements into their life.  For a diverse array of reasons, contemporary youth have limited access to the types of publics with which most adults grew up.  As a substitute for these inaccessible publics, networked publics like MySpace and Facebook are emerging to provide contemporary American youth with a necessary site for peer engagement.  While networked publics provide space for various critical forms of sociality, the architecture of the sites that support networked publics is fundamentally different than the physical architecture that we take for granted in unmediated life.  Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are all properties that today’s youth must face in their public expressions.  Because of these properties, youth are being socialized into a public life that is quite different from what their parents experienced.  In this talk, I will address what youth are doing on social network sites and why it matters.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications.

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman. Lunch is provided to those who RSVP. Please email rsvp at cyber.law.harvard.edu

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, June 12, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA

Guest: Erin Mishkin, Urs Gasser, and John Palfrey
Topic: Digital Natives: Understanding a Generation Online

On Tuesday, June 12, Berkman Executive Director John Palfrey and Research Coordinator Erin Mishkin will hold a lunchtime discussion on Berkman’s Digital Natives project. With over a million young people “born digital,” now is the time to look ahead and to shape the educational and regulatory framework for the emerging digital space in ways that advance the public interest. The Digital Natives project explores this “born digital” generation and the emerging trends of how they construct identity, learn, create, and socialize in an ever-changing “always on” landscape. In some cases, like the surge in online creativity, these trends point to opportunities we should harness. In others, significant risks lurk that are critical to address. As a global society, can we come to understand what’s happening with a generation online, to embrace a digital present, and to shape, in constructive ways, a more digital future?

We invite you to come and share ideas and insight into the project’s goals and methodology and look forward to talking through the challenges of conducting research in a rapidly shifting technological landscape.

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman. Lunch is provided to those who RSVP. Please email rsvp at cyber.law.harvard.edu

Erin Mishkin Bio: Erin Mishkin has worked with teens in various arts mentoring programs since 2001. She received a Masters degree in education from Harvard University in 2006 where she focused her research on cyber bullying and developing curriculum on cyber bullying prevention. Prior to returning to school, Erin worked at National Public Radio in their Distribution Division where she did everything from operate a conference popcorn maker to manage their commercial marketing initiative. She currently works as a research coordinator for the Berkman’s Digital Natives project.
John Palfrey Bio
Urs Gasser Bio

Wiki: www.digitalnative.org

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, June 5, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett Street, Second Floor, Cambridge, MA

Guest: SJ Klein
Topic: One Laptop per Child: Education, Development, and Content

Tomorrow, June 5, Director of Content for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Project SJ Klein will hold a lunchtime discussion on education, development, and content on the newest models of the OLPC. Following up from last week’s keynote by Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC workshop at Berkman’s Internet & Society Conference, SJ will talk about the process in which content is gathered and developed for the OLPC. Come discuss issues related to improving access to and the quality of learning materials in developing countries, especially in South America and Africa. Related topics include the educational impacts of technology, licensing, and government standards.

Samuel J. Klein has spent many years developing collaborative communities. He is an advocate for free universal access to knowledge and tools, and a veteran Wikipedian, founding the project’s first newsletter and translator network, and organizing last year’s international Wikimedia conference in Cambridge. Previously he has worked to develop software and supporting communities for machine-assisted human translation, and to set up free education centers. Klein is interested in local and sustainable knowledge development, and structures and principles that help this flourish. He establishes ties with teachers, game developers, and publishers, helping them to understand the need and uses for free and open materials, and to work with the global community around open education.

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. For information about our event webcasts and remote participation, see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/webcast. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman, at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman. Lunch is provided to those who RSVP.

OLPC: http://www.laptop.org
Group wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Education_and_development