UC Berkeley School of Information

Howard Rheingold offers a glimpse of the future of high-end online learning in which motivated self-learners collaborate via a variety of social media to create, deliver, and learn an agreed curriculum: a mutant variety of pedagogy that more closely resembles a peer-agogy. Rheingold proposes that our intention should be to teach ourselves how to teach ourselves online, and to share what we learn. He will show how the use of social media in courses he has taught about social media issues led him to co-redesign his curriculum, which led to more active participation by students in co-teaching the course.

We used to know how to know things. That’s how we guided our businesses, our government, our daily lives. But now there is so much to know and so much conflicting advice to listen to. It seems like everyone’s an expert, and no one agrees with anyone else. This looks like a problem, but it actually can be a source of tremendous strength. It turns out that our old system of knowledge was based around the limitations of paper, a disconnected, expensive medium that managed a world that was too big to know by cutting down on what we had to deal with. There were of course advantages to that, but they came at the cost of throwing out most of what the world was trying to tell us. In the new knowledge ecology, knowledge takes on the properties of its new medium, the Net. That means knowledge has become huge, it's connected, and it embraces disagreement and differences. The key is to think about knowledge not as a set of content but as a network: the smartest person in the room is now the room itself. Then the questi

What does it mean to think about culture and community before one thinks about technology? And how could that paradigm shift allow scholars and professionals to re-imagine solutions that think past net delusions around grassroots political movements, and empower community decision-making in the developing world, indigenous knowledge around climate change or cultural heritage, and communication between states and citizens? This talk takes us to several places where I have focused my fieldwork on technology and culture, and community-driven design, including Egypt's Tahrir Square, the Zuni Nation of New Mexico, the Kyrgyz Steppe, and Rural India. Across these projects, I argue for the power of thinking of both culture and technology as dynamic, and mutually co-constructed, introducing design, fieldwork, and research approaches toward the study of global media and information.

Lada Adamic is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information and an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. She is also affiliated with EECS. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structure in blogs and other online communities. She has received an NSF CAREER award, and best paper awards from Hypertext'08, ICWSM'10 and '11, and the most influential paper of the decade award from Web Intelligence'11.

In this talk new media scholar Rhonda McEwen examines the context for the emergence of social media and explores the subject beyond superficial understandings of software use, to engage in debates regarding the consequences of these media for our sociality. She will begin with a reflection on a timeline representing the rise of social media, then shares research findings from four of her new media projects — as well as drawing on current affairs — to describe the roles of Facebook, SMS, Skype, Blogs, LinkedIn, and Twitter in the areas of transitions, design, critique, and praxis.

Technology is no longer the limiting factor, so what should we do? More than just rejecting the industrial model of learning, we need to think further. We can draw on different models of cognition and learning, and emerging technology capabilities, to propose new approaches to achieving our goals. We need to look for outside inspirations for rethinking what education might mean. Our reach should transcend learning and look to truly transformative experiences. Come explore the possibilities and co-create the future of learning design.

More than a year after the Google Book Settlement fairness hearing, Judge Chin ruled that the settlement was not fair and could not be approved. In this talk, Pam Samuelson explains why she thinks the failure of this settlement was inevitable. It will also discuss the options available after the failure of the settlement and why some of these options are more likely or desirable than others.

The past decade has seen great interest in information and communication technologies applied to international development, an endeavor sometimes abbreviated ICTD. Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare? How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker? What value is wireless technology to a farmer earning a dollar a day? In this panel, four prominent thinkers active in ICTD debate the potential for electronic technologies to contribute to the socio-economic development of the world’s impoverished communities. Eric Brewer is a UC Berkeley professor who develops wireless technologies to connect rural communities. Megan Smith is vice president of new business development at Google and managing director of Google.org. Kentaro Toyama is co-founder of Microsoft Research India, and a computer scientist turned technology skeptic. Wayan Vota is a senior director at Inveneo, a non-profit that works to provide information technology to underserved communities of the developing world.

Health care reform and the recent economic downturn are placing unprecedented pressure on the health care system to provide consumers with value. Patients, purchasers, regulators, and other key stakeholders are demanding that care be readily accessible, proactive, and focused on improving health while containing costs. Many in the health care system are developing novel strategies to provide these services including new delivery models centered on patient-centricity, health information technology, and integrated delivery systems. The lecture will discuss how these forces interact as well as the challenges and opportunities they afford in improving the U.S. health care system.

The last decade has seen the organic growth of the web as a platform, enabling near-frictionless community-building, social communication, and collective action. But the institutions citizens support to represent our collective will and achieve our common goals have been left behind, largely by their own design. Today, several factors are converging to make re-crafting of government possible, and a key ingredient are the very hackers and designers who see the enormous opportunity to build a “citizen Internet.”

Traditional businesses follow a simple formula: create a product or service, sell it, collect money. But in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root — one in which consumers have more choices, more tools, more information, and more peer-to-peer power. Pioneering entrepreneur Lisa Gansky calls it the Mesh and reveals why it will soon dominate the future of business. Mesh companies create, share and use social media, wireless networks, and data crunched from every available source to provide people with goods and services at the exact moment they need them, without the burden and expense of owning them outright. Gansky reveals how there is real money to be made and trusted brands and strong communities to be built in helping your customers buy less but use more.

Wired has declared “the web is dead.” We will look at several technologies and information systems that have died (or are on life support) — pigeon post, the area code — and others that are thriving — mobile applications, cable, World of Warcraft — and try to figure out whether the web is going the way of the dodo. Will our grandchildren know what a URL is? We will connect the web to ideas of location and ask: what is the meaning of place, in the digital age? Slides from this lecture are available at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20101027bahat

According to the article on Hypermedia in Wikipedia, Ted Nelson coined the term in 1963 and published it in 1965. The definition in the article states that “hypermedia is used as a logical extension of the term hypertext in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information” and the World Wide Web is presented as a classical example. But it can be argued that the characteristics of hypermedia and their use in global collaborations go back much further in time. At the beginning of the 20th century the Belgian pioneer of knowledge organization Paul Otlet (1868–1944) began exploring “substitutes for the book” and to find new technologies to order and to link fragments of texts, images, sound, etc., for scholarly collaborations on a global level. Otlet sketched and commissioned hundreds of drawings of what we would call nowadays interfaces to synthesize global knowledge. It will be argued that Paul Otlet’s views and visualizations on substitut

Have you ever watched someone deeply engaged in a video game and performing a highly complex but completely artificial task with incredible competence? Could that focus and attention be bottled and used for something serious? We're convinced it can. In the world of collaboration taking place in the online role-playing games, every day (and night) tens of thousands of teams of 5 to 100's of people from multiple time zones, countries and cultures, each with different and highly complementary skills self-assemble around extremely challenging goals. This sounds a lot like the new world of global business collaboration. The psychological principles and affordances found in MMOs have much to teach us about teamwork, leadership, innovation, urgency, and incentives. To be clear, we are not talking about just using games for training and simulation, although these are wonderful applications. We expect a range of uses that range from borrowing a few of the key psychological ingredients from great games like World of W

It accumulates on our hard drives and lurks in our genes. Companies and consultants promise to refine it out of data or distill it into knowledge. It can topple churches and tyrants; the health of democratic societies depends on its free exchange (and free, we're told, is exactly what it wants to be). Its revolution has upended our lives: now we do its work, suffer its fatigue from its explosion, and worry about its widening gap, as we take up our roles in its society, its economy, and its age — not to mention (in a more transitory and purely local way) its school. So what could it — or not to beg the question, what could they — possibly be? Does "information" name a single concept or a family of concepts? Or is it not really a concept at all, but just a bit of semantic sleight of hand? For starters, it helps to look at how we got here. It turns out that confusion of the meanings of "information" began at least two centuries ago (and as it happens, dictionaries all get the story wrong). "Information" has alw

Reputational information helps decision-makers predict a company's or person's future performance based on their past behavior. Our economy is filled with systems that capture and publish reputational information; examples include credit reporting databases, eBay feedback ratings, job references and consumer product reviews . This talk will survey various reputational systems, discuss some lessons about designing and implementing them, and explore how legal regulation can help or hinder the process.

Most people move through the world tripping on problems in their path. True entrepreneurs look at those problems through a different set of lenses: they see them as opportunities. This lecture will focus on creating value by turning problems on their head. Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, shares surprising stories that come from her courses on creativity and entrepreneurship that demonstrate that by creatively challenging assumptions, breaking the rules, and having a healthy disregard for the impossible you can bring remarkable ideas to life.

As we enter the 21st Century, the Media and Entertainment Industry has undergone changes not seen since mechanization of the theater with the advent of the motion picture camera. Several data points suggest the “tipping point” for digital entertainment (and its accompanying economic model and consumer expectations) is here, putting significant pressure on the traditional monetization and business models for entertainment content. As we enter this new age, Daniel Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group, shares insights on this “Media and Entertainment Disruption” that has already occurred and the online, social format of storytelling yet to come — ultimately changing the entertainment experience for both media companies and consumers.

In 1987 Robert Solow observed that "We see evidence of the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics." In 2009, the situation is utterly changed; a large and growing body of evidence reveals that IT is affecting not only productivity, but also competition. And technology's impact is not limited to only a few industries, but is instead being felt throughout the economy. Dr. McAfee will first present evidence of IT's deep and broad impact, then offer an explanation for how the humble computer could be having such a large effect. The "Computer Revolution" in business is actually four distinct but related developments. McAfee will describe each of them, then use case studies to show how leading companies are taking advantage of them to advance within their industries.

These days nearly every economic transaction involves a computer in some form or other. What does this mean for economics? I argue that the ubiquity of computers enables new and more efficient contractual forms, better alignment of incentives, more sophisticated data extraction and analysis, creates an environment for controlled experimentation, and allows for personalization and customization. I review some of the long and rich history of these phenomena and describe some of their implications for current and future practices.