BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Upcoming events and digital media // December 1, 2010

[TUESDAY 12/7] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "Rethinking the community calendar: A case study in learning and teaching Fourth R principles" with Jon Udell, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/12/udell)

Special note: The Berkman Center has issued a call for papers for the Rethink Music conference, to be held this coming spring in Cambridge and Boston: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6456


[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on LEARNING AND TEACHING THE FOURTH R PRINCIPLES
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12/7/10, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live

Topic: Rethinking the community calendar: A case study in learning and teaching Fourth R principles
Guests: Jon Udell, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft

The elmcity project invites everyone who publishes community calendar events to:

   * Realize that event data published in a structured format, unlike data published as HTML or PDF, can be routed through pub/sub syndication networks.
   * Make public calendars available in the appropriate structured format: iCalendar (RFC 5545), the venerable Internet standard supported by all major calendar applications and services.
   * Recognize that iCalendar is the RSS of calendars. It can enable a calendar-sphere in which, as in the blogosphere, everyone can publish their own feeds and also subscribe to feeds from other people or from network services.
   * Help build the data web by owning the parts of it for which we ourselves are the authoritative sources.

The elmcity project delivers enabling technical infrastructure for this new approach to the community calendar. The project's calendar syndication service is free; it runs open source code on the Microsoft Azure platform; it provides all of its syndicated data in open formats.

The real challenge isn't technical, though, it's conceptual. Most people don't know how they could (or why they should) be the authoritative publishers of their own data. Missing concepts include:

   * The pub/sub communication pattern
   * Indirection ("pass-by-reference" vs "pass-by-value")
   * Structured versus unstructured data
   * Data provenance
   * Service composition

Along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, these Fourth R principles will empower an informed and engaged 21st-century citizenry. As Jeannette Wing argues in her computational thinking manifesto, computer and information scientists are no longer the only ones who need to understand and apply these principles. Now we all do.

Drawing from the experience of the elmcity case study, this talk will explore what these Fourth R principles are, why they're hard for most people to understand, how we can teach them, and why we should.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/12/udell


OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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12/1: Barbara van Schewick on Internet Architecture, Innovation and Network Neutrality // Stanford Law School (http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6557)

12/2: The Future of Internet Policy: A Conversation on Network Neutrality, featuring Berkman Faculty Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain // Yale ISP (http://yaleisp.org/2010/11/dec-2-the-future-of-internet-policy-a-convers...)

12/2: Ideas Matter: Can Technology Solve Global Poverty? // Global Poverty Initiative at MIT (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=164990043540570)

12/3: Privacy and the Press: Scoops, Secrets, and Ethics in the New Media Landscape // Silicon Flatirons (http://www.silicon-flatirons.org/events.php?id=886)

12/6: Nicholas Christakis - Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives // IBM Research (http://ctr4sschristakis.eventbrite.com/)

1/17: The GovData Project: Help Us Make Government Data Accessible! // IQSS at Harvard (http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/2459)


DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
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Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive.

-Mica Pollock on Building OneVille: Understanding and Improving a Communication Ecosystem in Education (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/11/pollock)

-Barbara van Schewick on Internet Architecture and Innovation (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2010/11/vanschewick)

-Radio Berkman 169: Wiki'd (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/11/23/radio-berkman-169-w...)


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BERKMAN CALENDAR & UPCOMING EVENTS PREVIEW
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ABOUT US
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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.