A few times per year, I have been sharing a “Head of School’s bookshelf” with community members at Phillips Academy. It comes this time in two parts: 1) six books that are among those I’ve read in the past few months and which I commend as “community reads” because of one or more connections to … Read more
The New York Times is running one of its Room for Debate series on the future of libraries. The four debaters (so far) are Luis Herrera, director of the San Francisco Public Library (and a board member of the Digital Public Library of America); Susan Crawford, visiting professor at Harvard Law School; Buffy J. Hamilton, … Read more
One of the ideas that Urs Gasser and I had from the start of the Born Digital book project was to find a way to co-produce the ideas behind the book. The concept was to celebrate, in a graphic way, the creativity and ability of young people. We worked closely with dozens of student interns … Read more
As I’ve been gearing up to write a new book, I’ve been thinking about how to do it better this time — continuous improvement and all that. Some fairly obvious observations are on my mind: stronger argument, a more compelling narrative, less repetitive, probably shorter, and one big-picture idea,* below the rest of the post. … Read more
Prof. Sahara Byrne, of the communications department at Cornell, is the Berkman Center‘s lunch series speaker today. Prof. Byrne studies responses to Internet safety techniques. She’s interested in the “recipes for disaster,” such as when parents love a given safety technique and kids hate it. She’s a believer in psychological reactance theory: that when kids … Read more
This summer I’ve been occasionally doing video/audio Skype sessions with Steve Bergen’s Summercore program for teachers. It’s the first time with “distance ed” that I’ve felt the process is natural. The sessions are about a half-hour, focused mostly on issues related to youth media usage, with teachers on the other end asking questions. They’ve done … Read more
No small issue on the agenda here at Aspen Ideas Festival — the future of education, technology, and how people learn — but the panel assembled is in fact up to the task. Connie Yowell (MacArthur Foundation, whose brainchild is the $50 million Digital Media and Learning initiative), Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), … Read more
ArsTechnica has posted my debate with Adam Thierer, the eloquent director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom. I read more or less everything Adam writes and by and large agree with it all. Here, we disagree on whether it’s time to rethink the scope of Section 230 immunity in certain … Read more
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the State of the Net Conference in Washington DC to release formally the Internet Safety Technical Task Force final report. It’s available online. We’ve posted an executive summary (3 pages plus cover pages) as well as the full report (278 pages in total).
This week was a big one for the study of young people and the Internet: Mimi Ito and her team released the results of their long-anticipated, 3-year study on Digital Youth. The study was funded by the MacArthur Foundation as a centerpiece of its Digital Media and Learning initiative. It is required reading for anyone interested … Read more