New Knowledge Ecosystems: How & What Do We Know?
Systems of knowledge such as libraries, universities, publishers, and newspapers are centuries old. And the affordances of a print world have embedded specific practices within these systems. But digital technologies have radically changed everything by offering new ways of communicating information, from the paparazzi to research scientists, and everyone in between. This deeper, more structural change is reshaping knowledge institutions and making them more porous, chaotic, energetic, and motile.
How can we retool the pillars of our existing knowledge systems to embrace technological change? How do we think about new institutions of knowledge like Wikipedia? Citizen journalism? Online learning like EdX and Coursera? Self-publishing in repositories like SSRN and arXiv or via Amazon? The knowledge ecosystem is changing although knowledge has always been social. How can we reconcile this with our previous understanding of experts? Who do we listen to?
Presenters
I write about the effect of the Internet on ideas. I am a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything is Miscellaneous, and Too Big to Know. I am a senior researcher at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and am co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. I live in Boston.
I'm a 4th-year PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the cofounder of ImpactStory, and open-source web tool that helps scientists and other academics get rewarded for doing accessible, engaged, and Web-native science--things like blogging, tweeting, sharing open data, and writing open-source software.
I've got a background in history, art, and education, and was a middle-school teacher for five years before discovering a passion for science and making science work better.
I'm the founder and editor of the Watershed Post, an entrepreneurial online news startup that covers the rural Catskills of upstate New York.
The Catskills region is close to New York City, and its natural resources are vital to the city's existence. But like many rural areas, the region is a news and information desert: poorly served by news media, and lacking widespread mobile coverage and internet access. The Watershed Post played a vital role in keeping information flowing in the Catskills during devastating flooding from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.
Marguerite Avery has been working in scholarly communication and publishing for about ten years, a field in which she is a major advocate for change and reform. She works closely with the scholarly communities in STS, Information Science, Communications, and Internet Studies and these interactions inform her thinking as to the value of scholarly publishers as well as the severe limitations they place on rapidly changing models of scholarship. In addition to acquiring books, Margy regularly participates in conversations around open access, the transformation of scholarly communication, libraries, digital humanities, altmetrics, data standards, and data visualization. She’s especially interested to learn more about how scholars are thinking about their research, research objects, and publication.
Monday, March 11
