Community Engagement

Leo Burd, from Microsoft, is newly graduated from the MIT Media Lab. Before entering MIT, he ran a community computer center in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A critical question for him was how a small room with twenty computers could ever impact one of the largest cities in the world with thousands of slums. He carried this interest of community empowerment into action-based research for his thesis work. This afternoon, he shared his projects with us.

Creating Conversation

Karrie Karahalios presented some of her investigations for how to create “Social Catalysts”.

Her work is motivated by an interest in developing technologies that “catalyze interactions”, that can get people to talk. Her approach is to (a) explore social cues that are transmitted, (b) sense those cues, (c) visualize social patterns, and (d) encorporate all of the above into the media space. By doing this, she seeks to provide more cue variety, feedback, message personalization, turntaking, conversation repair, etc…

Here are four of her projects:

The Center for Internet Studies

An Introduction to the Center for Internet Studies
with Chris Coward and Maria Garrido

The CIS is a recent addition to the family of research groups at the iSchool here.

Quick Snapshot:
What do they study?

Their central focus is the study of ICT and development of countries (economic, social, etc…).

How do they study it?

- They have a number of frameworks from which they draw:
Development Communications, Participatory Development, Sustainable Livelihood, Development Informatics, Social Movement Theory, Social Network Analysis, Development Economics
- Methodologically speaking, they leverage both quantitative and qualitative methods. They depend on the research question to drive the choice of method.

Where do they study?

At least one of their projects has a roster of 25 different countries.

They migrated from the Evans School to the iSchool (working at the Roosevelt Commons Building). Today, they took the time to formally introduce themselves to our community and engage in conversation about their work. Currently, they are starting new projects and appear very open to collaborations and ideas. Some of that conversation is excerpted below:

Information Security Compliance: A train-wreck of laws, practices, and technology

Debriefing on the First Annual Information Security Compliance and Risk Management Institute: Topics, Problems and Future Directions

Barabara Endicott-Popvsky, John Christiansen, Jane Winn

John detailed the “train-wreck” combination of technological development, information policies, and legal standards. In brief: Information technologies are new. Information protection standards are even newer. Information protection laws are generally newer still. Information protection laws are proliferating and overlap.

Rise of the Net-Native Class

Welcome back to a new school year. We are now resuming regular meetings and corresponding blog reports on each conversation.

The “Net Native”

Bob presented preliminary work on the rise of the “Digital Native” or “Net Native” and their impact on the workplace. There is a new class of employees on the rise. They have particular characteristics that are different from employees before and are conflicting with existing work practices and other structures. These people are the “Digital Natives” or “Net Natives”.

Bob’s group has begun to investigate the characteristics of these people and to model their impact on knowledge management in the company structure.

During this research conversation, a majority of the audience’s questions challenged Bob on the scope of his generalizations and relevance of his focus on “Net Native”. This summary will briefly summarize Bob’s findings and then summarize the discussion. I encourage you to chime in via comments.