Alexander Howard

Tuesday, March 20, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Alexander Howard will speak about Gov 2.0 and open data issues at the Bekrman Center Luncheon Series. Details TBA. Alexander Howard is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O'Reilly Media, where he writes the intersection of government, the Internet and society, including how technology is being used to help citizens, cities, and national governments solve large-scale problems. He is an authority on the use of collaborative technology in enterprises, social media and digital journalism. He has written and reported extensively on open innovation, open data, open source software and open government technology. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

A conversation with FTC Commissioner Julie Brill and Professor John Palfrey

Thursday, March 22, 6:00pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA.

John Palfrey of the Berkman Center will engage Commissioner Julie Brill on the Federal Trade Commission’s policy and enforcement initiatives in the area of online privacy and data security. Every day we hear about privacy issues surrounding Facebook, Google, mobile apps, smartphones, Big Data and data brokers. Learn about the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to protect consumers in this area. Julie Brill was sworn in as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission April 6, 2010, to a term that expires on September 25, 2016. Since joining the Commission, Ms. Brill has worked actively on issues most affecting today’s consumers, including protecting consumers’ privacy, encouraging appropriate advertising substantiation, guarding consumers from financial fraud, and maintaining competition in industries involving high tech and health care. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

RB 192: Wikis, Teaching, and the Digital Divide

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. He talked to David Weinberger about his f indings. video/audio on our website>

RB 193: Facts Are Boring

On the podcast for Radio Berkman 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 Brassill 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. video/audio on our website>

Peter M. Shane on Online Consultation and Democratic Information Flow

The use of new media by governments around the world to engage the general public more directly in actual policy making raises significant questions of democratic theory and practice. Peter M. Shane — Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law — discusses his ongoing research on two of these questions: Under what circumstances might online consultation actually make democratic participation more meaningful? What role could the regular availability of online consultation play in engineering an information and communication ecology more genuinely supportive of democratic information flow? video/audio on our website>