Berkman Center Webcast live oggi ore 18.30 - Coding as a Liberal Art
Coding as a Liberal Art http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2013/02/kimball *Diana Kimball, Berkman Center Fellow* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live What is the purpose of a liberal arts education? Commencement speakers have assured generations of college graduates that the real value is less in /what/ they've learned than in /how/ they've learned to think. This talk will present a personal case study in learning to think through code. Along the way, it will argue that coding belongs not just on the periphery of the liberal arts, but at the center of a new canon. About Diana Diana is an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School. While at Harvard College, Diana Kimball studied history; after graduation, she moved to California to design software. Upon returning to campus two years later, she decided to begin learning how to /build/ software in earnest. Since that moment, she has written countless surprisingly useful scripts, survived the college's introductory computer science course, and launched two full-fledged web applications. As a co-creator of ROFLCon, Diana's interest in internet culture runs deep. Most recently, this interest has expressed itself in her programming pursuits and in her efforts to apply an open-source ethos to mentoring. She's also exploring the concept of total authorship as it relates to art. Link - Diana's blogposts on coding <http://blog.dianakimball.com/tagged/coding>
Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2013/02/burrell *Jenna Burrell, Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live Ghana, a small country on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, is the size of Oregon. Its entire population is only double that of New York City. Yet what is unfolding there, I argue, matters to the future of the Internet. New users are increasingly connecting from the margins of the global economy. This includes Ghanaian youth connecting from Accra’s numerous urban Internet cafes. The new global diversity online offers a more rigorous check on the ideals associated with the Internet in early cyber-utopian discourses. These ideals linked the novel material properties of the technology to new possibilities for greater equality, openness, and freedom. I draw from a 6-year period of ethnographic research (2004-2010) on youth in Accra’s Internet cafes, where the primary activity was cultivating relationships with foreigners in chat rooms and dating sites as these users sought to enact a more cosmopolitan self. In particular, I will discuss network security practices in the West that have, in many instances, led to overreaching measures, such as country-wide IP address blocking to handle scamming activities originating from the West Africa region (i.e. the famous Nigerian 419 e-mail scams). In this discussion we may consider how network security and network administration are shaped not simply by an impersonal technical logic or even commercial interests, but also by cultural biases and parochialism that violate, perhaps unwittingly, these early ideals of the Internet. About Jenna Jenna Burrell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her first book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (The MIT Press) came out in May 2012. She completed her PhD in 2007 in the department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Before pursuing her PhD she was an Application Concept Developer in the People and Practices Research Group at Intel Corporation. Her interests span many research topics including theories of materiality, user agency, transnationalism, post-colonial relations, digital representation, and especially the appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by individuals and groups on the African continent. Link * Is the Digital Divide a Defunct Framework? <http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/05/09/2012/digital-divide-defunct-fr...> * Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/invisible-users>
The Next 27 Minutes Are An Experiment: Thoughts On The Fallout from Kony 2012 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2013/02/devanesan *Ruha Devanesan, Executive Director of the Internet Bar Organization and Berkman Fellow* Today, 6.30 pm Webcast live: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast http://nexa.polito.it/berkman-webcast-live On March 5th, 2012, the American nonprofit, Invisible Children, published a video called "Kony 2012" on the social video-sharing network, Youtube. Within six days, the video was dubbed the “most viral video in history,” beating out pop artists Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Beyonce’s music videos in how quickly it hit 100 million views. Much has been written on the Kony 2012 phenomenon by journalists, bloggers and academics. My aim in this talk is to only briefly summarize their thoughts and my own on the successes and failures of the initial Kony 2012 campaign, but then, more importantly, to explore the way in which Invisible Children has responded to criticism and adapted its messaging, and to ask what lessons can be learned by the human rights advocacy community from Kony 2012 and Invisible Children's subsequent actions. About Ruha Ruha is the Executive Director of the Internet Bar Organization, a nonprofit organization working to improve access to justice through technology through applied research in the fields of Online Dispute Resolution, mobile technology for dispute resolution, ICT4D, ICT4Peace and digital-economic inclusion for individuals in emerging economies. In her capacity as Executive Director, she has led the design and implementation of several tech-focused social justice initiatives, of which PeaceTones is her personal favorite. The PeaceTones Initiative helps talented, unknown artists from developing nations build their careers while giving back to their communities. Through PeaceTones, Ruha and her team are looking to rework the traditional record label into something more fair to the artist, while teaching musicians the legal, marketing and technology skills they need to succeed as social entrepreneurs of their own making. Links * Kony 2012 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc * Kony 2012 website: http://invisiblechildren.com/kony * Ruha's Nonprofit: http://peacetones.org
participants (1)
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Giuseppe Futia