Radio Berkman

Crowdsourcing has been touted as a future business model for everything from design, to advertising, to reporting, to data analysis. But is it for real, or just trendy?

Jeff Howe, of Wired Magazine, put a stamp on the phenomenon with his 2006 book Crowdsourcing, and has been gathering evidence for its development as the future of a participatory economy. He sat down with David Weinberger to go into detail.

With newspapers shuttering left and right, revenues plummeting, and readers spiking in all directions for their news content, journalists are very quick to turn the mirror on themselves these days. This kind of morbid narcissism is not without purpose. In fact, many journalists, editors and publishers understand that their survival depends not just on soul-searching, but finding some accurate data on how the stories they produce are read and spread.

Last week saw the launch of a powerful new tool for news analysis: Mediacloud.org. Frequent guest and Mediacloud principal Steven Schultze joins us in the studio once again to talk about what media cloud is, and why it matters.

Could the “Digital Revolution” in China lead to an actual political revolution? With greater openness, communication, and debate taking place among the 1/5th of Chinese citizens on the web, the potential is greater now than ever before. But our guest this week, Rebecca MacKinnon, suggests that the scenarios for China’s political and digital future are more diverse than they may seem. And can offer some interesting lessons for the democracies who are eager to use the web in governance.

Is scholarly research being held hostage by the academy? Some seem to think so, and some are doing something about it, by creating a new model for the scholarly publishing industry – called Open Access. The Open Access model offers scholarly work free of charge and free of copyright online. However, achieving Open Access may be easier said than done.

Last week Peter Suber, Senior Researcher at SPARC gave a great presentation at Harvard University (check it out here), so we thought we’d pick his brain for a bit on the battle for Open Access.

The technological advancements of the past twenty years have rendered the future of the library as a physical space, at least, as uncertain as it has ever been.

The information that libraries were once built to house in the form of books and manuscripts can now be accessed in the purely digital realm, as evidenced by initiatives like the Digital Public Library of America, which convenes for the second time this Friday in San Francisco.

But libraries still have profound cultural significance, indicating that even if they are no longer necessary for storing books they will continue to exist in some altered form.

Radio Berkman host David Weinberger postulated in his book Too Big To Know that the book itself is no longer an appropriate knowledge container – it has been supplanted by the sprawling knowledge networks of the internet. The book’s subtitle is “Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.”

Inspired by the work of Harvard Graduate School of Design students in Biblioteca 2: Library Test Kitchen – who spent the semester inventing and building library innovations ranging from nap carrels to curated collections displayed on book trucks to digital welcome mats – we turned the microphone around and had library expert Matthew Battles ask David, “When the smartest person in the room is the room, how do we design the room?”

Matthew Battles is the Managing Editor and Curatorial Practice Fellow at the Harvard metaLAB. He wrote Library: an Unquiet History and a biography of Harvard’s Widener Library.

David Weinberger is the author of Too Big To Know and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center. He is also the co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab.

Is there room in the music industry for middle-class musicians?

Friend of the show Nancy Baym brought together three career performer/songwriters who all stumbled on the same analogy for how musicians can “make it” in the digital age: that of Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). Kristin Hersh, Zoe Keating, and Erin McKeown discuss what models have worked for them, and the unorthodox ways they’ve learned to make a living as artists.

This week’s guest, Juan Carlos de Martin, readily admits that he is only the latest in a long line of thinkers to portend the end of the university as we know it. He almost gleefully cites Thomas Edison as one of his most notable predecessors. But Juan Carlos may be the first to be right.

When Juan Carlos began his research tracing the history of the university – an institution that has barely changed since the founding of the University of Bologna nearly a millennium ago – he was optimistic about the democratizing effects of digital technology. However, Juan Carlos now says he has identified several persuasive arguments against the University that together could topple the ivory tower.

David Weinberger interviewed Juan Carlos – a Berkman Fellow and co-founder of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society in Torino, Italy – about what Juan Carlos has called the “perfect storm” on the University’s horizon.

We all know by now that SOPA/PIPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect IP Act, respectively — died a sudden death in Congress in January. When online giants like Wikipedia and Tumblr went dark on January 18th of this year to protest the measures Congressional switchboards were overwhelmed with calls to just drop it.

But how did a set of measures like SOPA/PIPA, otherwise unheard of and generally projected to pass into law quietly, get suddenly thrust into the limelight?

Field producer Melissa Galvez brings us these excerpts from a panel at the Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where internet and/or politics experts Susan Crawford, Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, and Elaine Kamarck discuss how the grassroots campaign to bring down SOPA/PIPA was built, and what it says about organizing on the internet.

Technology has made us all kinds of promises when it comes to transforming the way we learn — not least of which was the promise to break the “digital divide.” The ease of communication promised by the web would allow the economically disenfranchised to have access to ideas and collaborative resources more commonly found in affluent schools.

So it is assumed.

In fact there is some evidence showing that some educational technologies are used less effectively in poor schools than in rich ones.

Today’s guest, Berkman Fellow Justin Reich, gathered data on the usage of some 180,000 publicly accessible wikis used for collaboration and education in school settings for his report The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equity in Online Learning Environments. What he found was that wikis were generally less helpful to poor schools than conventional wisdom might have us believe.

He talked to David Weinberger about his findings.

When the net competes with family, friends, school, and mass media, how do kids tell truth from the garbage? Researchers here at the Berkman Center sought to find out, and came back with some fascinating findings.

We sat down this week with four people intimately involved with the research: Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Nathaniel Levy, and Ned Crowley.