Webcast: Born This Way Foundation Launch

Today! - Wednesday, February 29, 4:00pm ET Webcast.

This past January, Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, announced that they will officially launch the Born This Way Foundation (BTWF) on Wednesday, February 29 at Harvard University. You can tune in to the webcast of this special Askwith Forum, co-hosted by BTWF, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The California Endowment. more information on our website>

The Growth and Decay of Shared Knowlege

Tuesday, March 13, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Knowledge grows, but it also contracts as outmoded facts and theories are replaced with new ones. This talk will discuss our intuitions about knowledge domains and the methods by which such intuitions could be modeled empirically. Along the way, Dennis will unpack the "information as organism" metaphor, construct taxonomies of epistemological lifeforms, and consider evolutionary pressures on knowledge systems. The talk will conclude with a conversation about the health of the academic publishing industry, and about the challenges of doing comparative work between new and old media. Dennis Tenen is a literary scholar and a recovering software engineer. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, working with metaLab and the Cooperation Group. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

RB 191: Quality Control

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. video/audio on our website>

Jerome Hergueux on the Promises of Web-based Social Experiments

The advent of the internet provides social scientists with a fantastic tool for conducting behavioral experiments online at a very large-scale and at an affordable cost. It is surprising, however, how little research has leveraged the affordances of the internet to set up such social experiments so far. Jerome Hergueux — a PhD candidate in Economics at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Strasbourg, and a Berkman Fellow — presents the preliminary results of a randomized experiment that compares behavioral measures of social preferences obtained both in a traditional University laboratory and online, with a focus on engaging the audience in a reflection about the specificities, limitations and promises of online experimental economics as a tool for social science research. video/audio on our website>