MacArthur/MIT Press Series on Youth, Media, and Learning

Last month, the MacArthur Foundation, along with MIT Press, announced the release of a series of new books on youth and new media. The series is a treasure trove. I have been working my way through the six books over the past several weeks as I’m simultaneously working on late drafts of the book that … Read more

How Does a Foundation Program Officer Decide How to Make Grants?

At the Berkman Center’s lunch speaker series, Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation is with us today. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen such a public, open discussion by a program officer of a foundation about how they do their work in funding great projects. The Knight Foundation has been running the News Challenge … Read more

Eszter Hargittai on Digital Na(t)ives

We have the great pleasure today at the Berkman Center of hearing from Eszter Hargittai, a prof at Northwestern, on her large-scale research project on how 18 / 19-year-olds use digital technologies. She’s also worked on problems related to what she calls the “second-level digital divide” over the past decade or so. She surveyed over … Read more

Born Digital

For the past few years, Urs Gasser and I have been working on a book project together about a phenomenon that we have become obsessed with: how some young people, including our kids, use technologies in ways that are different that what we’ve seen before. The book is called Born Digital (Amazon seems not yet … Read more

Throwing Code Over the Wall to Non-Profits

Total blue sky, inspired in part by a wonderful gathering pulled together by Jake Shapiro at PRX and Vince Stehle at the Surdna Foundation, picking up on thoughts from various contexts: If I could start (or otherwise will into existence) any non-profit right now, what it would do is to develop and apply code for … Read more

Keith Sawyer's Group Genius

On the long flight from Boston to Shanghai, I read R. Keith Sawyer‘s recent book, Group Genius. It’s definitely a worthwhile read for anyone who cares about how innovation really works as a functional matter; anyone who runs any kind of an organization; and anyone who ever struggles with trying to do something creative, whether … Read more

Viacom Believes Fewer Than 60 Take-Down Mistakes

I’ve been e-mailing with Michael Fricklas of Viacom since I posted about Jim Moore’s home video that got caught in Viacom’s 100,000 take-down push on Friday. Mr. Fricklas wrote to me a few times during their process of assessing how many errors they made out of 100,000. Today, he wrote: “… we’re achieving an error … Read more

Here's a group list of resources online for teachers

At St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s today, I’m talking with an extraordinary group of teachers at a NYSAIS workshop. The topic is using technology in teaching. We’re going to build a list of resources we’ve talked about today for posterity. Who’s first? – Eduforge.org A meta resource for technology and education, including sharing of information … Read more

Knowledge@Wharton on social networking sites

I’m not sure it’s all right, but a provocative piece about Facebook & co. at the excellent Knowledge@Wharton site, with lots of quotes from Kevin Werbach, who usually is right. The implication is that they will become the victims of their own success, expand too far, and the digital natives will leave them for the … Read more