MediaBerkman

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Technology has made us all kinds of promises when it comes to transforming the way we learn — not least of which was the promise to break the “digital divide.” The ease of communication promised by the web would allow the economically disenfranchised to have access to ideas and collaborative resources more commonly found in affluent schools.

So it is assumed.

In fact there is some evidence showing that some educational technologies are used less effectively in poor schools than in rich ones.

Today’s guest, Berkman Fellow Justin Reich, gathered data on the usage of some 180,000 publicly accessible wikis used for collaboration and education in school settings for his report The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equity in Online Learning Environments. What he found was that wikis were generally less helpful to poor schools than conventional wisdom might have us believe.

He talked to David Weinberger about his findings.

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When the net competes with family, friends, school, and mass media, how do kids tell truth from the garbage? Researchers here at the Berkman Center sought to find out, and came back with some fascinating findings:

1. Search shapes the quality of information that youth experience online.
2. Youth use cues and heuristics to evaluate quality, especially visual and interactive elements.
3. Content creation and dissemination foster digital fluencies that can feed back into search and evaluation behaviors.
4. Information skills acquired through personal and social activities can benefit learning in the academic context.

We sat down this week with four people intimately involved with the research: Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Nathaniel Levy, and Ned Crowley.

(You can find the report Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality, and even more information here.)

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Should we change our name? How can we tell better stories? What’s missing from current reporting on tech and internet issues?

We’ve made up a cute little survey right here, and would love for you to drop us some thoughts!

AGAIN, THAT SURVEY IS HERE

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Until everyone started using the net to date sociologists didn’t have much information to go by when trying to figure out the beautiful process of human courtship. Only things like this.

But dating sites are the 2nd leading source for modern relationships. And the data collected by dating sites sheds some light on how the heck people are getting together in the first place.

Berkman Fellow, Harvard PhD Candidate, and Friend of the Show, Kevin Lewis dug into some of this data and shares his amazing findings on how folks are pairing up online.

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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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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — a U.S. House bill that would give the Department of Justice the authority to demand that ISPs block sites accused of hosting pirated content — seemed to be doing well. Nearly half of the Senate sponsored similar legislation that survived a committee vote. And people weren’t generally making a big deal about it.

But on the week before Thanksgiving SOPA suddenly hit the front page after a particularly fraught House committee hearing on the bill. Battle lines became clear. Representatives of big content owners like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) partnered with big brands and the US Chamber of Commerce in support of the legislation, saying it would protect millions of jobs. On the other side web entrepreneurs like Google, Twitter, and Facebook sided with Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the bill, saying it would basically give corporations a legal path to censor any site that poses a competitive threat. And now it looks like the bill might have a harder time than legislators originally thought.

But talk to the creators of intellectual property one on one and you’ll see that many don’t have a clear opinion on the bill. The open web has benefitted the work of artists, coders, and researchers alike, allowing them to share their work with new audiences and experiment with new business models for next to nothing. But many creators see that same technology as stealing food from their mouths when their work appears on torrent sites and uncredited on blogs.

We spoke with two people this week to help get our heads straight on SOPA. The graphic artist Jim “Zub” Zubkavich worries about what piracy is doing to his career, but sees SOPA as a little draconian. And Julian Sanchez of the CATO Institute gives some idea of what SOPA will do if implemented, and the chance it might have of passing.

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2011 has been a big year for quintuple threat actor/writer/comedian/rapper Donald Glover. For the last decade he released rap, remixes, and mixtapes on the web completely for free under the names Childish Gambino and MC DJ. Not just free of charge, but free of any kind of copyright notice or license. But over the summer Glover, now picking up notice for his smart rhymes, instrumentally organic sound, and indie sensibility, got signed to Glassnote records, home to big indie acts like Mumford and Sons and Phoenix, and has been hard at work touring, and preparing for the release of his first “for pay” album CAMP.

Earlier this year we caught up with Donald to talk about where his musical inspiration comes from, and how he feels about the explosion of free music on the web.

This episode is a re-edit of an earlier episode. Listen to the original, featuring an additional interview with Amanda Palmer here.

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Video games aren’t just, well, fun and games. When you pop open a video game — be it Farmville on Facebook for your smartphone or World of Warcraft on your $10,000 immersive gaming setup — you are entering into any number of different terms and conditions agreements about behavior and property that govern your playtime. But questions have started to arise as more and more games build the concept of virtual property into their play. New powers, levels, avatars, privileges — who do those things belong to, and under what jurisdiction do they fall?

Greg Lastowka is a professor of law at Rutgers University and author of the book Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds. Lastowka has given a great deal of thought to the virtual worlds of video games, and documented some of the cases where the laws of the game and the laws of real life clash, sometimes violently.

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A batch of E-Readers shown off at the 2011 National Book Festival

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What would a digital version of your public library look like? There’s more to it than e-books and digital reading devices. Librarians, scholars, innovators, and techno-wizards are collaborating under the mantle of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to build a next generation public library. Such a thing could incorporate one or more of many different elements: a set of physical buildings; a purely digital archive with an open API layer for coders to play around with; a full fledged digital lending library.

And when the DPLA converge on the National Archives in Washington, DC this Friday (you can check out the agenda and tune in to a livestream here) they’ll get to work out just a few of those ideas.

Today, a special report from Benjamin Naddaf-Hafrey who spoke to a few of the minds behind the DPLA.

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It’s time to stop thinking about intellectual property as something purely for your legal counsel to deal with. That’s the driving idea behind John Palfrey’s aptly titled new book Intellectual Property Strategy.

Companies and institutions that have to worry about creative works, trademarks, or brands would be well-suited, Palfrey says, to seize the sword and shield from the attorneys (who tend to be aggressive and/or defensive about IP) and exercise a little more flexibility and creativity with intellectual property on their own.

Palfrey sat down with David Weinberger for this week’s Radio Berkman to talk about why.

Listen up! Comment on the show! Tweet us! And check out the reference section after the jump for links to our guests and more.

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