Is there room in the music industry for middle-class musicians?
Friend of the show Nancy Baym brought together three career performer/songwriters who all stumbled on the same analogy for how musicians can “make it” in the digital age: that of Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). Kristin Hersh, Zoe Keating, and Erin McKeown discuss what models have worked for them, and the unorthodox ways they’ve learned to make a living as artists.
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This week’s guest, Juan Carlos de Martin, readily admits that he is only the latest in a long line of thinkers to portend the end of the university as we know it. He almost gleefully cites Thomas Edison as one of his most notable predecessors. But Juan Carlos may be the first to be right.
When Juan Carlos began his research tracing the history of the university – an institution that has barely changed since the founding of the University of Bologna nearly a millennium ago – he was optimistic about the democratizing effects of digital technology. However, Juan Carlos now says he has identified several persuasive arguments against the University that together could topple the ivory tower.
David Weinberger interviewed Juan Carlos – a Berkman Fellow and co-founder of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society in Torino, Italy – about what Juan Carlos has called the “perfect storm” on the University’s horizon.
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Listen:or download | …also in Ogg
We all know by now that SOPA/PIPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect IP Act, respectively — died a sudden death in Congress in January. When online giants like Wikipedia and Tumblr went dark on January 18th of this year to protest the measures Congressional switchboards were overwhelmed with calls to just drop it.
But how did a set of measures like SOPA/PIPA, otherwise unheard of and generally projected to pass into law quietly, get suddenly thrust into the limelight?
Field producer Melissa Galvez brings us these excerpts from a panel at the Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where internet and/or politics experts Susan Crawford, Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, and Elaine Kamarck discuss how the grassroots campaign to bring down SOPA/PIPA was built, and what it says about organizing on the internet.
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The #Kony2012 video, and accompanying campaign and meme, has done a lot to raise awareness.
Of WHAT exactly, it’s hard to tell.
The intended target for attention — the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony — is certainly a big one.
But the video was flawed. In favor of simplicity it glossed over crucial facts and advocated passionately for questionable solutions, in the end bringing more critical attention back to Invisible Children, the charismatic American youth group behind the campaign.
Most of all the explosion of Kony 2012 has raised awareness about sensitivities around the politics of intervention in Africa, and the utility of digital activism and fundraising for awareness campaigns in the United States.
This week at Radio Berkman we tried something new.
During our recent interview with Berkman Fellow Justin Reich about 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, we learned that only one percent of educational wikis succeed in creating the kind of multimedia, collaborative learning environment we have come to associate with open educational resources like PBWikis and Wikispaces.
Justin’s findings, and their implications, are so intriguing that we decided it was time to go into the field and do some investigative work of our own. Radio Berkman wanted to know: Who is making those successful wikis and how?
Producer Frances Harlow spent a day at Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts sitting in on professional development sessions and interviewing instructors, including
Director of Studies and History Department Head (and classroom wiki “missionary”) Matt Dunne
This week we tear apart the difference between Truth, Fact, and Evidence, and the quiet, but irreplaceable, role of the humble factchecker in our media:
Author/factchecker Jim Fingal on the Lifespan of a Fact
Former GQ intern and factchecker Gillian Brassil on how factcheckers get paid to watch True Blood
Veteran Atlantic Monthly factchecking department head Yvonne Rolzhausen on the underinvestment of media resources for factchecking
David Weinberger, author of the recent book Too Big To Know on what a fact is and why they don’t make for good storytelling
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.
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.
Listen:or download | …also in Ogg
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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