MediaBerkman

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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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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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.

Download the MP3

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More info on this event here

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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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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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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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Thanks to the internet, we now live — more and more — in public. Yet change brings fear, and many people—nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy—despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds.

In this talk, Jeff Jarvis — blogger, professor of journalism, and author of the recent book “Public Parts” — argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.

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