In Internet & Society class
tonight, we’re talking about the shift in the digital space from
consumer of information to users.  A key text: Yochai Benkler’s “From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access.”  Case in point: weblogs.  Our guest lecturer in class is Shenja van der Graaf, visiting from the Netherlands.  (Her blog is here.) 
We talk about this shift at the juncture where our module in the
course on Intellectual Property meets the module on speech.

It’s timely that the Shorenstein Center‘s case study on weblogs has just come out.

A bit more on this course.  We’ve offered it for the past three academic years through the Harvard Extension School, and includes both in-class and distance students.  Dr. Urs Gasser
is teaching it with me.  It’s grown each year in the number of
students enrolled, which is exciting.  The students who are
present each week bring up great questions and keep a conversation
going.  Distance students watch videos of the class and do the
same reading, based on an online syllabus.  Distance students are involved in an online discussion with their in-class colleagues through the online H2O rotisserie system.  It’s a great deal of fun — and quite a challenge — to teach this class with dual modes.