Erkki Sutinen
Can an ICT professional be trained to spark innovation? Background for a contextualized ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania
EdTechΔ research group, focusing on educational technology creation, under these premises:
Making a difference in action
Triangulation in research
Multiple perspective in development
Bidirectional partnerships
How come does our education system train professionals who can design an architecture to meet the needs written in a specification, for making existing processes more efficient, but not experts who can creatively, critically and supportingly talk with their customers and identify their real needs?
New project in the ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania, to make the students re-link...
If I were asked to summarize everything that’s happened at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme 2007 here at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society I would, undobtedly, quote Jonathan Zittrain in one of his comments past Thursday: Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia?
To explain why I can (1) draw a list of all the applications and/or online resources we used during the course, (2) write a little digression about academic blogging and (3) explain one of my recursive reflections during these days: what is Web Science
Conferences 2.0
Speaking in public has changed, specially if you pretend the audience to interact. Solemn one way speeches are over; prettily packeted content is too. The full disclosure of ways to interact with people in information...
Unsorted, non-elaborated ideas that showed up on the last session:
OII SDP 2007 Reloaded
Organizing a conference on the previous days of the next edition of the SDP. During this year there’ll be a call for papers & review. This should be extended to the whole pool of SDP students since 2003. A journal or proceedings book would be a good output of the whole work. Seminars and workshops could wrap up the conference. Organizing committee: Vero, María, Karoline, Karen, Alla, Chintan, Daithí, Ismael
The idea of this event is:
a) first, to put together a call for papers (works in progress) to get a nice
feedback about the big (and small) questions that were put on the table in the
course of these last two weeks.
b) Second, this event would take the format of a working...
Student research seminar: Chintan Viashnav
In a highly abstracted conceptualization, both the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Internet consist of two components: the end-devices and the network that connects them. Traditional telecommunications regulation has assumed the presence of a network core that could be engineered to fulfill regulatory goals as well as a vertically-integrated industry structure that could meet regulatory obligations. In my dissertation, I propose to take the case of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the technology that enables voice communications over the Internet, and argue that disruptive trends in technology are eroding the control in the core that was traditionally possessed by network designers and owners. This eroding control in the core...
Student research seminar: Daithí Mac Síthigh
In this seminar, I discuss my ongoing research topic on how media/brodcasting law is changed - or changes - in relation to new, Internet-based media. While this is not a new issue for scholars of the media or freedom of expression, the current ‘transition period’ is certainly a fertile one for the researcher. Acknowledging the range of recent publications and studies dealing with the US, I focus on the treatment of new media in Canada and the European Union. In this presentation, the relevant legislation, regulations and proposals for reform are discussed, and a range of theoretical approaches are highlighted; I touch on the role of technological determinism in the reformers’ strategies, and note my ongoing engagement with...
Lead: Terry Fisher
Solutions to crisis to actual business model
Strengthening copyrights
Strengthening technologycal control
Alternative compensation system
My reflections
Fisher’s model (2004), at a retailer/private level (i.e. Noank), looks exactly like the Spanish model (1941), but without the technology. I wonder if this is sort of a gone-techie Spanish model that regards only and exclusively the diffusion of digital content. In this sense, conceptually is the same thing — being the implementation in the digital world (actually, the tracking of files’ use) its main added value.
Fisher’s model at a State level (just exactly as the Spanish one, where it is hugely critizised), basing on income taxation is not Pareto Superior but, on the contrary, clearly harms the...
Leads: Jonathan Zittrain, John Palfrey
We don’t know who uses Wikipedia, we don’t know what values does it vindicates
How do people actually use/abuse it?
many kids use it without participating/understanding; are kids plagiarizing
how easy is to become a Wikipedian: try participating earnestly; experiment with particular forms, like deleting articles; concerns about “going native”
Is wikipedia egalitarian?
who is participating, excluded
control of code - control of content
abuse of those who give freely?
Does peer production make us into the Borg?
effects of lack of singular authorship
Is Wikipedia accurate?
citing Wikipedia as a source
Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia? Is Academia losing the sense of what’s important? And what’s...
Quick, brief introductions to tools used by researchers in the management of their… uh, life?
BibCiter
http://bibciter.net
by Ismael Peña-López
Free software bibliographic manager. Allows both management of bibliographies and publication on the net (RSS feed included)
Yep
http://yepthat.com
by Daithí Mac Síthigh
File manager. Mostly for PDFs you can tag. Mac version only.
LinkedIn
http://linkedin.com
by Marcus Foth
Social networking. Really effective as based on degrees of separation”
Dopplr
http://dopplr.com
by Marcus Foth
To manage one’s trips. Export to calendar by iCal. Shows who else is going to be in that place.
ClaimID
http://claimid.com/
by Fred Stutzman
User centered identity. Avoid inconsistent identities over different websites.
Tapor...
Student research seminar: Cindy Shen
Two metaphors– “the cathedral and the bazaar” – are widely used to characterize the organizational structure of the development model of commercial software and that of OSS. While “cathedral” represents rigid hierarchy and centralized control, the “bazaar” model of OSS represents an egalitarian network of developers free of hierarchical structure. Powerful as they are, these two metaphors may help to spread a rather stylized image of the OSS. Empirical studies of OSS show highly skewed distribution and power law relationships of project sizes, project membership, and cluster sizes of the OSS community, but the underlying mechanisms of those power law relationships remain under explored.
This on-going project extends knowledge on OSS by...
Student research seminar: Rachel Cobcroft
In his consideration of Verkeersbordvrij, Jonathan Zittrain poses the challenge of identifying the technical tools and social structures that inspire people to act humanely online. This presentation engages with the notions of philanthropy and gift giving in virtual communities, seeking to understand the factors that motivate members of Flickr.com to share their images under Creative Commons licensing. It seeks to identify the tipping point at which an individual’s focus is turned from their own ‘life blog’ towards participation in an online community, aspiring to collaborative, commons-based peer production. Investigating frameworks of P2P and integral theory and employing the methods of virtual ethnography, this research explores the way...
Lead: Talha Syed
The main criticism Talha Syed makes is that it should be possible to shift the debate from the established mainstream (economic) discourse (for or against, but inside the system) and try and move towards new mental maps, new ways of thinking.
Premises of conventional approach
homo aeconomicus: man is naturally narrowlyh self-regarding material gain
preferences fixed, invariant
policy is neutral
Premises of most critics
heterogeneous rather than unitary motives
but still relatively exogenous to policy
policy should be neutral (efficiency)
Further departures
heterogeneous
but context-sensitive, exogenous to policy, culture
normatively, neutrality untenable, undesirable
Pluralist motives
intrinsic: internal drives and ambitions; enjoyment
social: activity’s...
Leads: Karim Lakhani
This talk will focus on how firms and communities are leveraging external sources of knowledge and talent for innovation. We will discuss the practices that are enabling a new paradigm of open innovation and consider their applicability to established firms. The talk will present results from newly emerging research on open source communities and the pharmaceutical industry to develop an understanding about new strategies for innovation. The first part of the talk will discuss how R&D labs in science-based firms are broadcasting their most difficult scientific problems to large networks of scientists around the world and the success they are achieving by tapping into distributed sources of knowledge. Key drivers for success in a distributed knowledge...
Student research seminar: Ismael Peña-López
The goal of this research is to add reflection and knowledge to the belief that there is an important lack of tools to measure the development of the Information Society, specially addressed to policy makers aiming to foster digital development. We believe there is still an unexplored point of view in measuring the Information Society which goes from inside-out instead of outside-in. In other words, the main indices and/or reports focus either in technology penetration or in the general snapshot of the Information Society “as is”. There is, notwithstanding, a third approach that would deal with working only with digital-related indicators and indices, thus including some aspects not taken into account by the technology penetration...
Student research seminar: Benjamin Addom
This is a proposal for a theory-driven Evaluation Research using Fourth Generation Evaluation Framework (FGE). The history of agricultural development reveals that agricultural technologies over the years have been bought, borrowed, or stolen and therefore should not necessarily be domestic. The model of diffusion of innovation especially has been applied in the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. TEEAL and AGORA are two initiatives that are transferring scientific knowledge from the North to the South. The proposed research tries to explore or assess or evaluate the merit of the initiative to the primary users (researchers, students and policy makers) and its worth to the secondary users (farmers) in Ghana. The concept of...
Lead: Marcus Foth
How do residents connect with each other to create and maintain social networks?
How can technology dbe degisned to neotiate a balance between the opportunitiews of interactive services vs. identity, trust and privacy?
What is the role of content?
What’s community? Social network, urban village, swarm, neighbourhood, me and my friends… Have something in common?
Shift from the “little boxes” model to personalized social networks: more permeable boundaries…
Urban tribes: swarms of interconnected friends, filling the gap between college and married life, fluidity of social networks, place and proximity matters.
Communicative Ecology
Discursive layer
Social layer
Technology layer
global vs. local; collective vs. individual; online vs....
Lead: Michael Best, Ethan Zuckerman
Mobile Telephony in Developing Countries, by Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman introduces TEDGlobal 2007, which was held in Africa.
African issues about ICTs can be tracked at Timbuktu Chronicles, by Emeka Okafor, or at Africa Open For Business. But TED just focused on Foreign Aid, mainly lead by Bono (see Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda (all via Ethan Zuckerman’s blog).
The point should be to fix, before you pour into Foreign Aid, government/governance, so the money goes to the appropriate place/hands. More indeed, investment should go hand to hand with entrepreneurship and infrastructures.
Number of handsets is still increasing in Africa, but the difference (among many others) between blog...
Student research seminar: Bodó Balázs
Bodo Balazs does an overview of piracy practices along history and seeing how they actually, even if acting against the Law, they played an important role on knowledge diffusion.
Piracy exists because there is a systematic market failure created by the advent of the Internet, and is not suppliers pushed but demand pulled.
And more, piracy has evolved from evil masterminds to individuals interconnected through peer-to-peer networks. Causes?
Not enough products at the right price at the right time, vs. the largest, most comprehensive digital archive in history: demand is there, supply is not
Release strategies, the party next door effect: commercial campaigns cannot more be constrained to country boundaries, because they will spill over and become...
Lead: Ralph Lengler
In this session I will first briefly show some of my works, namely our e-learning-project visual-literacy.org with the periodic table and the VIZ-HALL.
An ad (but also other forms of visual commmunication) which elicits a mental collaboration from the consumer is more likely to be an effective ad. As the consumer contributes in the process of making meaning, he becomes “part-author” and thereby he is moving from adversary to accomplice.
What Makes Visualization Effective?
VizHall, to rate a picture. As a peer-learning tool that it is, is that it requires involvement by the user to make full benefit of it.
Likeability
Entertaining
Relevant
Empathetic
Alienating
Confusing
Familiar
The power of the metaphore, based on intelligence. The problem is that you have to...
Lead: Ralph Schroeder
Researchers increasingly work at-a-distance and across institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries. What are the challenges of online collaboration? How is working in distributed mode different from face-to-face meetings and collaboration? When people work in a distributed group, what are the implications for trust and leadership? There are also ethical and legal issues in e-Research, such as the privacy and anonymity of data, intellectual property and access to shared digital resources. And finally, different disciplines organize online research in different ways. What are the lessons from these ways of working together? The lecture will examine both general issues in distributed research and individual e-Research projects.
Millions of people spend lots...
Lead: Lewis Hyde, Wendy Seltzer, Rob Faris
Recent years have seen the idea of “the commons” as a form of ownership being discussed in a number of areas. Many environmental issues are usefully approached in terms of common assets, from aquifers to wetlands, from the oceans to the atmosphere. People who think about technology find themselves more and more speaking in terms of a commons, especially in regard to broadcast spectrum, the architecture of the internet, and software. Arguments that arise out of biotechnology–about seedlines, patented drugs, the ownership of genetic materials and so forth–also benefit from a clear model of what it means to place limits on the market and hold some things in common. Finally, many of the recent turf battles around...
We’ll never thank Chintan Vaishnav enough for arranging our visit to the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Foundation, impressive places where to work (or study, of course: actually, a place to learn, either official role you get there with), really interdisciplinary.
MIT Media Lab
We visited Lifelong Kindergarden research group, which as Lego as main founder, and Lego Mindstorms as one of Lego-MIT Media Lab most interesting outcomes.
We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:
Scratch
Jay Silver
Jay Silver kindly introduced us to the rudiments of Scratch and how to get started on this tool. Actually, I still wonder whether it is a game, a multimedia design and production tool, an educational technology, a collaborative web 2.0 networking social software or all of them....
Leads: Henry Jenkins, Carrie Lambert-Beatty
What connections might we posit between the participatory culture which has grown up around popular media and the ideals of participatory democracy? In the last Presidential campaign, we saw the emergence of blogs, amateur film contests, and social networking software as significant resources for political activism and we saw signs that people were remixing media images for the purpose of creating their own political commentary. What seemed to be cutting edge practices four years ago are emerging as pervasive aspects of the current campaign season (witness the anti-Hillary “1984″ advertisement, the Pro-Barrack “Obama Girl” video, and Hillary Clinton’s own spoof of The Sopranos, all circulated via YouTube in an...
Leads: Brian Fitzgerald, Wendy Seltzer, Bill McGeveran*
This session will examine the role of copyright law in the Internet world. It will consider recent cases concerning YouTube, Google and Sony highlighting what the law currently provides and asking - what it should be?
(*) though scheduled, Bill McGeveran could not come
Moral rights: stay with the person, the creator
Economic rights: go to the copyright holder, that can be the creator himself or whoever own these rights. And the copyright system is about permission. Infringement is about seeing what was there before, what is out there now, and guess whether there is any relationship.
Main work for the session is at the Wiki Page for the session
Readings
Lessig, L. (2007). “Make Way for Copyright Chaos”. In The New York Times,...
Student research seminar: María Gómez Rodríguez
In 2009-2010, the European communications framework will be modified, so that I would like to analyze the different possibilities to approach the control over access and over Internet service providers in Europe, mainly: (i) regulation and (ii) antitrust. The EU communications framework has been a solid base to implement regulation in the member States, however the real implementation of the framework has been dysfunctional, long and, in some cases, not correctly harmonized. The Internet and the telecommunication networks are essential facilities, thus antitrust authorities have jurisdiction to dictate measures to solve any abuse of these essential facilities. Therefore the net neutrality debate in Europe it can be constructed as a...
Student research seminar: Seok-Jin Eom
In this presentation, I would like to examine what factors made the different outcomes and performances of e-goverment. Focusing on the roles of consultant in private sector and the institutional arrangement through which their policy ideas and knowledge came into government and were fortified and spread, the Federal Enterprise Archietecture initiative in the U.S. federal government will be anlyzed.
The Korean Government benchmarked the US e-Government initatives, but relayed to a “stove-piped” business reference model: shifting from function-driven to agency centric; and from cross-agency to stove-piped systemic.
What’s missing
Relations between public and private sector
Receptivity of ideas from private sector to government...
Leads: Jonathan Zittrain, John Clippinger, Phil Malone, Bill McGeveran, David Weinberger, Wendy Seltzer
Privacy in Atlantis is a Socratic dialogue between figures called the Economist, the Merchant, the Philosopher, and the Technologist. They are gathered by the wise Counselor who must make online privacy law for Atlantis, and they argue their different positions. The result of the dialogue is that there turns out to be a lot less real difference between “market” ideas of propertied rights in personal information on one hand and a “dignity” concept of privacy as a human right on the other hand. So long as the data subject can consent to collection or use of data in both models, both models theoretically face most of the same challenges.
This session will model the Socratic...
Lead: Helen Margetts
What is the impact of the internet on public policy? How does it affect governments’ capacity to influence societal behaviour? One way of tackling this question is to break policy down into four constituent elements - the four ‘tools’ of government policy identified by Christopher Hood and Helen Margetts in their new book The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, building on Hood’s 1983 classic):
• nodality
• authority
• treasure
• organisation
The internet and other digital technologies have potential to impact government’s use of all of these tools, both through the use of such technologies by government itself and through societal trends in internet use, to which governments must respond. New webmetric techniques offer...
Student research seminar: Karen McCullagh
It is often said that we have a righ to a private life, yet what this means remains unclear. This presentation reports 3 Phases of research:
1) How does the concept of private data interplay with the concept of sensitive data?
2) In the blog era what is private data? Is the technology changing perceptions and expectations?
3) Would a definition of private data be useful? How should it be defined?
The principle of sensitivity holds that the processing of certain types of data should be subjet to more stringent controls
Test sensitivity ratings of seven categories of data recognized in the Directive (UK) as sensitive
Test perceptions of sensitivity of eight not legally recognized categories of sensitive data which emerged in interviews with data...
Student research seminar: Fred Stutzman
In this talk I will seek feedback on the potential framework of my dissertation. I am interested in the role social technologies play in the management of real-world social networks, particularly in the management of real world social networks in periods of transition.
What happens with online identity with (so much) Web 2.0 services, subscriptions, etc. How do we create digital identity? What does it mean to have a digital identity? How do we manage it?
How do Microformats play with online identity?
All along your trip through social networks, you can take with you some content, people, resources and leave behind the other ones. Across your transition through platforms… where’s the meeting point? the focal point?
This transition: is a...
Leads: Judith Donath, John Clippinger
Identity, by Judith Donath
Individual identity vs. social identity
Facets of identity, identity signals, identity deception
Intimacy vs. Prestige
Individual Identity, by John Clippinger
Software called Higgins to analyze how identity is used on the internet.
Your immune system does not know who you are… but who you are not.
Important terms of art
identification: tied to the biological personal (biometric)
authentication: tied to an accepted identifier (SSL)
verification: tied to a third party
principle of minimum disclosure: no need to bring more info than just the absolutely necessary to identify you, with user control upon minimum disclosure
My reflections
Recovering Prof. García Albero reflections about cybercrime, I wonder if there is...