Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Felipe Heusser on Open Government Data for Open Accountability [AUDIO]

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:15:21 +0000

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 [...]

David Weinberger on Too Big To Know [AUDIO]

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:10:03 +0000

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 [...]

Rebecca MacKinnon on The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom [AUDIO]

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:00:51 +0000

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, [...]

Andres Monroy-Hernandez on Designing for Remixing: Computer-supported Social Creativity [AUDIO]

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:08:33 +0000

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 [...]

Beth Kolko on Hackademia: Leveraging the Conflict Between Expertise and Innovation to Create Disruptive Technologies [AUDIO]

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:35:02 +0000

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 [...]

Justin Reich on How Free and Open Education Might Widen Digital Divides [AUDIO]

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:15:29 +0000

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 [...]

Alison J. Head on Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students in the Digital Age [AUDIO]

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:01:29 +0000

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. [...]

RB 189: Peer Pressure

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:45:59 +0000

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg 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 [...]

Celebrating Two Years with the Online Media Legal Network [AUDIO]

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:27:45 +0000

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 [...]

The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected World [AUDIO]

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:46:10 +0000

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 [...]

Jeff Jarvis on Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live [AUDIO]

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:13:07 +0000

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. [...]

OpenCourt on Transparency in the Court [AUDIO]

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:25:09 +0000

With the support of a Knight News Challenge grant OpenCourt streams and archives live daily coverage of court sessions. The project seeks to make courts more accessible to the public through technology while respecting legitimate concerns about privacy. John Davidow (Executive Producer), Joe Spurr (Director), and Val Wang (Producer) join the Berkman Center community to [...]

Mayo Fuster Morell on the Spanish Revolution & the Internet: From Free Culture to Meta-Politics [AUDIO]

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 01:00:48 +0000

In the context of multiple crises – ecological, political, financial and geopolitical restructuring – there are emerging forms of social cooperation. In the Spanish case, we have seen some of the largest demonstrations since the country made its transition to democracy in the 70s with massive occupations of public squares, attempts to prevent parliaments’ functioning [...]

Book Talk: John Palfrey on Intellectual Property Strategy [AUDIO]

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:39:12 +0000

Most entrepreneurs, corporate managers and nonprofit administrators leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization’s intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. John Palfrey — Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for [...]

RB 188: SOPA on the Ropes(?)

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:33:28 +0000

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg 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 [...]