MediaBerkman

Felipe Heusser — Founder and Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, a Latin American NGO based in Chile that uses information technology to promote transparency and active citizen participation, and a Berkman Fellow — gives an overview the spread of transparency policy through freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of ‘Open Government Data’ as the latest chapter of the transparency story, highlighting how it potentially may impact ‘open accountability’ and the rise of a new breed of online watchdogs.

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We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power.

David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book “Too Big to Know.”

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Many commentators have debated whether the Internet is ultimately a force for freedom of expression and political liberation, or for alienation, and repression. Rebecca MacKinnon — Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, cofounder of Global Voices, and a former CNN Bureau Chief for Beijing and Tokyo — discusses her new book, Consent of the Network, and warns that a convergence of unchecked government actions and unaccountable company practices is threatening the future of democracy and human rights around the world.

Mackinnon is joined by Ethan Zuckerman, Micah Sifry, and Andrew Lewman.

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The Scratch Online Community allows young people to share and remix their own video games and animations, as well as those of their peers. In four years, the community has grown to close to a million registered members and more than two million user-contributed projects. Andrés Monroy-Hernández — the developer of Scratch, a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, and Berkman Fellow — presents a framework for the design and study of an online community of amateur creators, focusing on remixing as a lens to understand the social, cultural, and technical structures of a social computing system that supports creative expression.

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How and why do nonexperts contribute to innovation? The conflict between expertise and innovation sits uneasily in academia, where the enterprise hinges on doling out official credentials. But a lack of expertise can in fact drive people to create the kind of disruptive technologies that really are game-changers. In this presentation Beth Kolko — Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington — connects the hacking and making/DIY communities at the point of disruptive technologies, demonstrating how the lack of institutional affiliation and formal credentials within each community opens up the space for creative problem-solving approaches.

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The explosion of open education content resources create unprecedented opportunities for teachers to design and personalize curriculum and to give students opportunities to collaborate, publish, and take responsibility for their own learning, free of charge. Is it possible, however, that because affluent schools and students have a greater capacity to take up new innovations, that new tools and resources that appear in the ecology of education could widen rather than ameliorate digital divides?

In this presentation Justin Reich — doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society — examines evidence for both the “tech as equalizer” and “tech as accelerator of digital divides” hypotheses.

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What is it like to be a college student in the digital age? Alison Head — lead researcher for the national study, Project Information Literacy, Berkman Fellow, and Research Scientist in University of Washington’s Information School — presents a working typology of the undergraduate information-seeking process, including students’ reliance on and use of Web sources.

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We’re so easily influenced by the habits and interests of our friends, you might think that social networks like Facebook would only magnify the power of peer pressure.

But recent research from Harvard sociologists Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez, and Jason Kaufman shows that people are more likely to stick with their own interests than we might think.

From the abstract of the report Social selection and peer influence in an online social network:

Using data on the Facebook activity of a cohort of college students over 4 years, we find that students who share certain tastes in music and in movies, but not in books, are significantly likely to befriend one another. Meanwhile, we find little evidence for the diffusion of tastes among Facebook friends—except for tastes in classical/jazz music.

So while younger folks are likely to build friendships based on certain cultural tastes they’re not likely to warm to their friends tastes so easily. This is surprising, say the researchers, given previous data and assumptions about how tastes spread virally on the net.

David Weinberger chatted with Kevin Lewis to get more details on this study.

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As the OMLN nears the end of its second year, it has helped over 160 clients with more than 330 separate legal matters, and has more than 225 firms, clinics and individual attorneys in its roster with coverage in all 50 U.S. states. Jeff Hermes, Andy Sellars, David Ardia, and others from the OMLN community discuss the history and growth of the project, the accumulated data regarding the nature and geographic distribution of clients and legal issues that have come to the OMLN, and the OMLN’s efforts to meet those needs.

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Civic education is the cultivation of knowledge and traits that sustain democratic self-governance. As the social networks of individuals become less based on geography and more based on friendships and common interests, consensus on shared civic values seems harder to achieve.

Charles Nesson joins Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Peter Levine, Harry Lewis, Elizabeth Lynn, and Juan Carlos de Martin to probe the tensions that make civic education difficult.

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