Tag Archives: berkman@10

Berkman@10: IRC and the Dialogue of Education

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I will say it: Berkman@10 is offering too many social tools for its audience. Twitter. IRC. A democratic question display. And then there’s Flickr, Second Life, and the live webcasts. At one point, I was watching a streaming live video from someone’s cell phone (and was surprised at the quality to boot). I honestly felt too connected throughout much of the day.

While I took notes, though, I posted a couple of tweets, and then mostly hung out in the IRC channel. I’ve only used IRC a couple times before Berkman, so I had all the tools necessary to automatically jump into the channel and start chatting with everyone present in the virtual environment. But, seriously, and I [mis]quote Tim Hwang (with whom I shared a “Food for Thought” dinner): there were some haters in there. Harsh criticism from those who decided to speak their mind (I’m especially looking at you, Dave Winer).

Besides the negative critique from the IRC audience members, I actually used IRC a lot, beyond mere chatter. Kudos to everyone in the channel for actually paying attention to the speakers, because I used you guys as an educational tool. Some people in the chatroom seemed a bit out of the loop, so others would explain concepts or post links to biographies of the speakers and even those who stood up to ask questions. IRC provided an excellent source of information, and a quick one at that. I lost the discussion a few times in my attempts to multitask, and IRC got me back on track, but the best implementation of IRC turned out to be the opportunity to gain more information about what was being said. Hypertext proves useful, once again.

Considering its practicality today, I want to introduce the IRC medium to a class at school sometime. It’d be a good experiment in networking during a seminar discussion, but it would also prove that students can collaborate to further educate each other, or also to stay ahead of the dialogue in the direct teacher-pupil relationship. I might easily predict that more “hating” would occur in a classroom setting: students complaining that they’re bored, pointing out that the teacher is wrong, declaring that they found a video on YouTube of a cat flushing a toilet. Ultimately, though, IRC would create a hyperdiscussion, one that exceeded the hierarchy of the teacher-student partnership, a grassroots educational system of sorts. I know that if my Sociology of Education (SO444.A1) class had established an IRC node during our weekly seminars, we easily could have used it to find relevant information online, particularly at the beginning of the class when my professor would ask us if we had found anything of relevance in the news at the time. Well, IRC: log on, talk to my classmates, share links with one another. Hypertext moves beyond unilinear writing constricted to paper. IRC moves beyond the linear narrative discussion. In fact, if you want to be savvy, you could even call it metaconversation. But an IRC channel in a classroom, in a lecture, in a seminar could do wonders (though I don’t obscure the potential for chaos) for education in a university setting.

Berkman@10: Age and the Future of the Internet

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“The Future of the Internet,” or so Berkman@10 advertises. The welcoming address and first session in the morning attempted to establish how to approach the future of the Internet, but I think that a key issue must be brought forward before any discussion commences: who is the future of the Internet? I’m sitting amongst a mass of adults and my guess that the demographic ranges from thirty on. I’ve seen less than ten audience members that might be students around my age. So, who is the future of the Internet? Is it the adolescents that initially commenced the explosion that turned into digital social networking, with websites like MySpace and Facebook? Or is it the contemporary adults sitting around me in this auditorium?

Or, in this room, is the demographic of the adult audience limited? Is it a niche in the totality of adult digital users? A mix of industry guests and academic scholars and researchers, is the demographic more educated than the average digital adult?

Then I must ask: Should we be defining the future of the Internet by these adults’ terms?

If you look at my spotlight on Michael Wesch, re/view the three videos. He argues that humanity has defined computing and the Internet in archaic terms, but also by archaic methods. I’m not saying that adults aren’t everpresent online, but they certainly are not omnipresent. Neither are youth. I don’t want to approach the digital divide in this article, though. I do, however, want to say this:

I wish that more youth had registered for Berkman@10. There certainly exists a dichotomy between the adult and adolescent perspectives toward the Internet and contemporary technology. My generation possesses different values and approach digital ethics differently. I do not want to suggest that we are more right than adults. But if we, Berkman@10, are going to argue about the future of the Internet, then we need to hear more from the “younger” generation present in the audience.

There is a strong polarity between Berkman@10 and ROFLCon, and not simply a polarity of content. I admire ROFLCon because it encouraged an amalgamation of digital inhabitants (contributors and critics) and digital creators (the “industry”). The demographic of the “inhabitants” consisted mainly of adolescents. I believe that, because so many youth attended ROFLCon, the audience was much more involved and familiar with the practicality of the technology, rather than the theories and assumptions present in an approach to the technology. A good example is the Question Tool used by both conferences (the ROFLCon tool is down at the publication of this article), where the audience members can submit questions and then vote up or down “good” questions, later to be viewed and answered by the speaker(s). The implementation at ROFLCon simply worked, while at Berkman@10 the tool hasn’t reached its full potential, nor do I think it will. My guess is that the membership of ROFLCon simply was more interested in what everyone had to say, while here we just want to hear from the infamous panelists. The presence of technology at Berkman@10 trounces that at ROFLCon, however, and I find that a bit strange. More laptops… but that may be because of the more academic nature of this conference, and it’s definitely easier to transcribe notes on a keyboard.

Either way, I am almost twenty one years old. I am very involved in technology. I grew up on a Macintosh. There is a septuagenarian sitting across the aisle. Is he that much more involved? Will I be less involved digitally in 2025 than the contemporary youth at that period? Or will Web 3.0, or whatever we’re in for, enable a highly digital future? And will I be heralding in that age, or will it still be the adults of today?