Upcoming Events: Internet Skills and Wikipedia's Gender Inequality; The First Year of HarvardX; Robotic Surveillance

Internet Skills and Wikipedia's Gender Inequality

Tuesday, January 21, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Although women are just as likely as men to read Wikipedia, they only represent an estimated 16% of global Wikipedia editors and 23% of U.S. adult Wikipedia editors. Previous research has focused on analyzing aspects of current contributors and aspects of the existing Wikipedia community to explain this gender gap in contributions. Instead, we analyze data about both Wikipedia contributors and non-contributors. We also focus on a previously ignored factor: people’s Internet skills. Our data set includes a diverse group of American young adults with detailed information about their background attributes, Internet experiences and skills. We find that the gender gap in editing is exacerbated by a similarly important Internet skills gap. By far the most likely people to contribute to Wikipedia are males with high Internet skills. Our findings suggest that efforts to overcome the gender gap in Wikipedia contributions must address the Web-use skills gap. Future research needs to loo k at why high-skilled women do not contribute at comparable rates to highly-skilled men.

Eszter Hargittai is Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. Aaron Shaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His research focuses on political and economic dimensions of collective action online. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The First Year of HarvardX: Research Findings to Inform the Future of Online Learning

Tuesday, January 21, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Larsen Hall, G-08, Appian Way, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live. Hosted by the HGSE and HarvarX and co-sponsored by the Berkman Center.

During the 2012-2013 academic year HarvardX launched six courses on edX, an online learning platform jointly founded by Harvard and MIT. In addition to expanding access to knowledge and improving residential education, one of the underlying goals of of the enterprise was to advance research on learning. To that end, on January 21st, the HarvardX research team and MIT's Office of Digital Learning, will release a series of course reports detailing research findings that cut across the enterprise and drill deeply into the nuances of particular courses. In this talk, affiliates from HarvardX will discuss the reports, with particular emphasis on the six courses created and taught by faculty from schools and departments across the University. Based upon data from 400,000 registrants, the researchers will explore the influence of diverse teaching approaches and instructional platforms, highlight the various learning goals of students, and delve into activity, persistence, and performance metrics that go beyond simple measures of attrition and completion. The aim is to provide a critical research-informed perspective on MOOCs and other online learning endeavors and inspire discussion about the limitations of online learning and possibilities for innovation in coming years.

Speakers include: Introduction: Peter Bol, Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Speaker: Justin Reich, Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society; Discussant: Bridget Terry Long, Academic Dean and the Xander Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Member of the HarvardX Research Committee; Discussant: Dan Levy, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government and co-chair of the HarvardX Research Committee more information on our website>

Robotic Surveillance: Authorship or Intrusion?

Tuesday, January 28, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Robots will use surveillance for locomotion, communication, and for marketing. As robots are adopted for personal use, private third-party surveillance will expand to new locations and scenarios. This project explores how the pending increase in robotic surveillance poses new questions for U.S. privacy law, particularly the application of privacy torts. Some robotic surveillance will be necessary, some will be superfluous, and some will be deliberately intrusive. Some will be automatic, while some will depend on a robot's deliberate decisions. Is it possible--or desirable--to craft meaningful laws or guidelines before widespread private adoption of robots?

Margot E. Kaminski is a Research Scholar in Law, Executive Director of the Information Society Project, and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the Information Society Project. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Cyberscholar Working Group at Yale

Tuesday, January 29, 6:00pm ET, Yale Law School, 40 Ashmun St., Room A436. New Haven (Please note this is not in the main Yale Law School building)

The Cyberscholar Working Group is a forum for fellows and affiliates of MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, Columbia University, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research.

This month's presentations include: (1) Balancing Remedies with Notice in the Enforcement of Copyright Licenses; (2) Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources and Intellectual Property Rights: An Agenda for Global Justice in the context of Nagoya Protocol; (3) Copyright and Data-sharing Policies and the Market for Cartographic Information RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Sara Boettiger on Re-Thinking Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Models for the Poor

The world faces a growing population, resource constraints, climate change, and a global food system under stress. But new technology is limited in its ability to address the problems facing those in poverty. 780 million still lack access to clean water. 1/5 of humanity lives without electricity. 80% of sub-Saharan Africa is farmed with a hand-hoe. Sara Boettiger -- Senior Advisor at Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and Assistant Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley -- will discuss the need to re-think existing models of Intellectual Property Rights (e.g. patent pools, clearinghouses, humanitarian use licensing), re-invent our research agenda, and work to shift the international debate. video/audio on our website>