Author Archives: Phillips Academy

Congratulations to Phil Malone and Wendy Jacobs

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The Harvard Law School just announced the promotion of Phil Malone (in cyberlaw and intellectual property) and Wendy Jacobs (in environmental law) to the full-time faculty as clinical professors. Phil Malone has been the director of the Berkman Center clinical program for the past few years, first with Jeff Cunard and Bruce Keller as co-directors and recently as the sole director. He’s an extraordinary lawyer and teacher. It is our great good fortune at the Berkman Center that Phil has accepted HLS’s offer to join the faculty as a Clinical Professor of Law. Hooray!

Myth-Busting: Kids and Information Technology

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We’re planning our session on Digital Natives for the Berkman@10 conference later this week.  The idea is to hold a “myth-busting” session.  A first pass of myths are up on the conference wiki.  The idea is to discuss some of the common misconceptions about kids and technology that we explore in our forthcoming book, Born Digital.  Please suggest others, and looking forward to seeing many great friends later this week.  (Many thanks to Miriam Simun for her leadership on this and other matters.)

Duke and Open Access

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It’s been noted that Duke Law School has a long history of leadership in this area, beginning with an online repository for its faculty’s scholarship (dating from 2005) and its journals made accessible online (starting back in 1997!), both of which well predate HLS’s vote on an opt-out Open Access policy last week. Prof. Richard Danner, the school’s law librarian, has a fine article on the open access topic. (Thanks to Paul Lomio at Stanford for the note.) Prof. Jessica Litman, of Michigan, also has an article on this topic, which I found extremely useful when preparing to discuss Open Access with the HLS faculty.

HLS Goes Open Access, Unanimously

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I’m just delighted that the Harvard Law School faculty has voted unanimously to adopt an open access policy. This policy is consistent with the policy adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences earlier this year.

Here is what we approved:

“The Faculty of the Harvard Law School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office no later than the date of its publication. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.”

There have been many champions of this and related issues throughout the academic world, including Peter Suber and Michael Carroll. At Harvard, the university librarian, Robert Darnton, and Berkman Center faculty director Stuart Shieber, of the new school of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard, are chief among them.

Prof. Robert Darnton said of this vote: “That such a renowned law school should support Open Access so resoundingly is a victory for the democratization of knowledge. Far from turning its back to the outside world, the HLS is sharing its intellectual wealth.”  Amen.

Changing Jobs, Search for New Executive Director

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This summer, I’ll be moving to a new job at HLS, as vice dean for library and information resources.  I’m very excited about this new challenge.  I will still remain involved in the Berkman Center, as one of the faculty directors and in some research projects, but I’ll no longer be the executive director as of July 1, 2008.  We’ve opened up a search for a new executive director for the Berkman Center.  The job is posted here.  I hope you’ll encourage interested people to apply, and to talk to us about it at our upcoming 10th anniversary celebration next week.

Apple Gets it Right After StopBadware et al. Send Warning

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StopBadware and the rest of the Net community trying to keep the environment clean of bad code scored a good win this week in the public interest.  The StopBadware team and others were all over a software update from Apple that operated as badware, offering new software installations disguised as product updates.  StopBadware blogged about our review process, saying we were looking into it; prepared a report declaring them as badware; sent the draft report to Apple for review (as we do for all targets before public release); and lo-and-behold, Apple fixed the problem and issued an updated version.  Well done to Max Weinstein and the whole SBW team and others out there keeping companies honest.  If only it ordinarily worked this way…

Learning Race and Ethnicity, in the MacArthur Foundation/MIT Press Series

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Learning, Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media is the fourth book I’ve read in the MacArthur/MIT Press Series on Digital Media and Learning. This volume, edited by Anna Everett, is the furthest from my own field — law — and, for me, the most challenging.

Prof. Everett’s opening essay, (which follows the excellent foreword by the series authors, as with each volume in the series), is an effective overview of what follows in the volume. She takes up the familiar debate about the term “digital divide” and why it now rankles more than it helps. She also reminds us that the old joke about how online nobody knows you’re a dog is no longer true, with the advent of rich media and other “advances” in digital technology and how it’s used. I was left, from her chapter, with one line resonating in particular: “the color of the dog counts.” (p. 5)

The rest of the volume consists of three clusters. Future Visions and Excavated Pasts is the first. Dara Byrne leads off with a piece on the future of race. She pulls in and incorporates a series of great quotes from message boards and other online public spaces; takes up (and takes on) John Rawls on the public/private question that runs through so many of our discussions of online life, (p. 22); and digs deep on the future of whether there will be dedicated sites for different races as we look ahead. The punchline is that yes, “minority youth must have access to dedicated online spaces, not just mainstream or ‘race neutral’ ones.” (p. 33)

Tyrone Taborn’s “Separating Race from Technology” is the other essay in this first cluster. Tayborn compares the likelihood of any group of students (“majority white or minority, rich or poor”) knowing Kobe Bryant and Dr. Mark Dean, the African-American engineer involved in IBM’s development of the first PC. His point is clear. As one of a series of possible solutions to the problem of too few minority youth having mentors and heroes in the technology world, Tayborn calls for Digital Media Cultural Mentoring (p. 56).

The second cluster of essays take up art and culture in the digital domain. Raiford Guins guides the reader through a tour of the ways that hip-hop culture, art, and use of technology come together online in the form of “black cultural production in the form of hip-hop 2.0.” (p. 78) It’s a must-read essay; heplful to read with a browser open and a fast broadband connection on tap. Guins has an intriguing segment on the future of the music label, among other take-aways (p. 69 – 70).

Guins’ essay is well-paired with Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre’s celebration and contextualization of Judy Baca’s work at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in LA. (One wonders why LA gets more than its fair share of intriguing digital media production experiments and narratives?) Among other things, Sandoval and Latorre challenge the notion of “digital youth” and the challenges of overly delimiting based just on age — a helpful reminder of a point too easily forgotten. (p. 85) In the final essay of the cluster, Antonio Lopez offers insights into (and concerns about) digital media literacy with respect to Native American populations, told largely in the first person.

Jessie Daniels opens the third cluster with a jarring piece on hate, racism, and white supremacy online. Daniels picks up on themes about the fallacy of colorblindness established in Anna Everett’s introduction. With a link to Henry Jenkins‘ work, Daniels argues for a “multiple literacies” approach to shaping our shared cultural future online and offline. (p. 148 – 50)

Yet more jarring, to me anyway, is Douglas Thomas’s piece on online gaming cultures, called “KPK, Inc.: Race, Nation, and Emergent Culture in Onling Games.” Thomas draws us into gaming environments only to reveal a culture of wild adventure, first-person shooter games, acquisition, treasure, money, and hate all rolled together. The crux of his argument centers on the “Korean problem,” (p. 163-4), a blend of bigotry, nationalism, and competitiveness. The racists that Thomas exposes “are usually Americans / Canadians and white” — and gamers. (p. 164) Along the way, Thomas distinguishes his approach from that of our Berkman colleague Beth Kolko. (p. 155-6)

The final essay, by Mohan Dutta, Graham Bodie, and Ambar Basus takes us in a new direction, further afield, toward the intersection of race, youth, Internet, health, and information. The authors synthesize a great deal of disparate information in unexpected ways. The essay left with an expanded frame of vision, and a frame that I never would have come up with on my own. Their punchline: “disparities in technology uses and health information seeking reflect broader structural disparaties in society that adversely affect communities of color.” (p. 192)

On balance, this collection of essays hangs together very well. Each essay takes a on strong point of view. Overall, the collection both informed my thinking and provoked more by raising hard issues about the impact of growing up online for race, ethnicity, identity, and health.

Live-blogging Class on Blogging

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One of the great treats of co-teaching with David Weinberger is getting to be a student on the days that he leads discussion. Today, we’re taking up blogging, something he knows a thing or two about. You can also follow along with the class notes on The Web Difference class blog. A few of the issues that drew heat, and a bit of light:

– The early discussion has circled around the issue of whether news is tending toward the gossipy, whether on HuffPo or WaPo. The class members disagreed as to whether or not this trend is OK.

– David says that the HuffPo has two things that the printed version of the WaPo doesn’t have: 1) links and 2) people talking back, right there on the “paper,” in real-time. (I wonder whether the difference is so important on the second score, given that a) many papers have letters to the editor and op-eds, b) increasingly, most papers have web sites where one can post comments, and c) maybe some people prefer to have editors choose the letters to run rather than having to wade through 742 comments on the latest HuffPo story.) I agree with the follow-up insight that the difference is that people who read HuffPo and submit comments regularly feel more as though they are in a social setting, in a social network, while those who submit letters to the editors have this feeling less acutely, if at all.

– I’ve been looking forward to see if the students have any reactions to the Boston Globe’s article, by Irene Sege, on Saturday about girls and why they blog. One of the issues we took up earlier in the course, very briefly, is whether there’s a gender difference in terms of how people use the web.

Also: Some excellent students in the class have also created a meta-blog — a blog on blogging — for this class, yet another way to follow along.  The class bloggers pointed to a helpful video reference for those interested in the most basic question: “what is a weblog?”  One might also consider Dave Winer’s classic, “what makes a weblog a weblog?“

Lessig on Change Congress at HLS

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Tonight, Lawrence Lessig will return to the Berkman Center and Harvard Law School in a major address on his new initiative, Change Congress. Lessig was the first Berkman Professor, ten years ago, when the center was just getting off the ground. We are honored to welcome him back, as part of the Berkman@10 Series, celebrating where we’ve been and where we’re headed. Please join us today at 5:00 p.m. in Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, Friday, April 4, 2008. Admission is free and open to the public.