Benjamen Walker has always had his finger on the pulse of the most overlooked and under-explored facets of culture and technology through his podcast Theory of Everything. This week he visits with the Maroons – descendants of escaped slaves who established free communities in the mountains of Jamaica – and explores their relationship to the political establishment of Jamaica, and their tastes in radio.
Decades before the first shot was fired in the American revolution a band of runaway slaves known as the Maroons living in the mountains in Colonial Jamaica took on the British Empire and won. I’ve long been obsessed with the Maroons and so last summer I jumped at the opportunity to visit their compound in Charlestown for the annual celebration of their 1739 victory. I learned the Maroons hope to play a leading role today as Jamaica moves down the path of Marijuana decriminalization and legalization, but some of the folks I met claim the Maroons are still listening to Radio What’s Innit Fo Me?
Find more of Ben Walker’s terrific “Theory of Everything” podcast here.
*Correction from Molly Sauter: “The plea deal of the PayPal14 stipulates that each defendant owes $5,600 in restitution payments to the PayPal corporation, not $1,600 as I state in the video.”
In this talk Ron Deibert — Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto — puts the revelations of NSA wiretapping in a broader context, emphasizing the political economy of the cyber security industrial complex and its unintended consequences in a world of Big Data, along with an alternative approach to securing cyberspace, drawing from his recent book, Black Code.
For decades, policymakers and futurists have heralded digital tools as essential to the the future of learning. Has the moment of disruptive transformational revolution finally arrived? If we are at a watershed moment, what futures are available to us?
Justin Reich — visiting lecturer at MIT, Berkman fellow, and educational researcher — discusses the intersection of technology, free-market ideology, and media hype in U.S. education reform.
Citizen video in Southeast Asia has exploded in recent times, and has come to play a significant role in national and regional politics, documenting spectacular events, spearheading campaigns and uncovering scandals.
In this discussion, Andrew Lowenthal — Co-Founder and Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific human rights and environmental video project — outlines EngageMedia’s approach to video4change and their work in the region, in particular looking at West Papua, (a remote region of Indonesia that has been waging an independence campaign for more than 40 years), the development of regional, cross-border and multilingual video networks, and the effect and possibility of the internet and online media to generate new post-national political configurations and collaborations.
Citizen video in Southeast Asia has exploded in recent times, and has come to play a significant role in national and regional politics, documenting spectacular events, spearheading campaigns and uncovering scandals.
In this discussion, Andrew Lowenthal — Co-Founder and Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific human rights and environmental video project — outlines EngageMedia’s approach to video4change and their work in the region, in particular looking at West Papua, (a remote region of Indonesia that has been waging an independence campaign for more than 40 years), the development of regional, cross-border and multilingual video networks, and the effect and possibility of the internet and online media to generate new post-national political configurations and collaborations.
Two weeks ago, the Berkman Center co-sponsored the third – and, we learned, final! – ROFLCon. For the n00bz, ROFLCon is a conference named after the acronym for “rolling on the floor, laughing” and devoted to celebrating internet culture. Friend of the Show Tim Hwang co-founded the event in 2008 when he and Christina Xu invited Tron Guy to Cambridge.
Both ROFLCon and internet culture have evolved since then, so we sent producer Frances Harlow on location to ask attendees, “What are memes, and do they really matter?”
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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.
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