Welcome and introduction from instructors
Joost Bonsen, Neri Oxman, Mitchel Resnick
Guest panelists describe their projects and what impact means to them
Student discussion on what impact means to us
Joi Ito, Ethan Zuckerman, Sputniko!
Tufekci, Zeynep. Is The Internet Good or Bad? Yes. Medium.
Negroponte, Nicholas. One Laptop per Child TED. Feb 2006
Kraemer, K., Dedrick, K., Sharma, P. (2009) One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs Reality. Communications of the ACM.
Watters, Audrey. (2012) The Failure of One Laptop Per Child HackEducation.
Khera, R. (2011), The UID Project and Welfare Schemes Economic and Political Weekly
What does impact mean to you and your work? (Let’s say that your project or the project you’re thinking about works beyond expectations, what does the world look like in 20 years?)
Meryl Alper, Sasha Costanza-Chock
Eubanks, V. (2011). Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Chapter 1)
Hargittai, E. (2008). The digital reproduction of inequality. Social Stratification, 936–944.
Buechley, L,, and B. M. Hill. (2010). LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardwareʼs Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities
Thinking About Making: An Examination About What We Talk About When We Making (MAKEing) These Days by Leah Buechley
Comedy Hack Day WellDeserved: A Marketplace for Privilege March 2015
Describe a project whose impact you're interested in. Write about who is implicitly included and excluded. What would you change?
Resnick, M. and Bruckman, A. and Martin, F. (1996). Pianos Not Stereos: Creating Computational Construction Kits, Interactions
Papert, S. (1987) Information technology and education: Computer criticism vs. technocentric thinking, Educational Researcher, vol. 16, pp. 22-30.
Carey, J. Technology and Ideology: the Case of the Telegraph. In Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Routledge, 1992.
Turkle, S. (2007) Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Introduction, and selected essays - Cello, Knots, Stars)
Brennan, Karen. 2014. Constructionism in the Classroom: Three Experiments in Disrupting Technocentrism. In Constructionism and Creativity. Vienna, Austria.
Papert, S. (1990) A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future M.I.T. Media Lab Epistemology and Learning Memo No. 2.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. Marion Boyars.
In the spirit of evocative objects, write about an object from your own childhood.
Bødker, S., Ehn, P., Sjögren, D., & Sundblad, Y. (2000, October). Co-operative Design—perspectives on 20 years with ‘the Scandinavian IT Design Model’. In proceedings of NordiCHI (Vol. 2000, pp. 22-24). University of Notre Dame.
VozMob project (2010) Mobile Voices: projecting the voices of immigrant workers by appropriating mobile phones for popular communication in Napoli, P.M., and M. Aslama, Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere. Fordham Univ Pr.
Arnstein, Sherry R. 1969. A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35 (4): 216–24.
Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell. 2011. Towards a feminist HCI methodology: social science, feminism, and HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 675-684.
Adelman, C. (1993). Kurt Lewin and the origins of action research. Educational action research, 1(1), 7-24. (especially pp 7-10 and 13-14)
Summary of Literature Review
Liptak, A. (2011, June 14). David C. Baldus, 75, Dies; Studied Race and the Law. The New York Times.
King, G., Keohane, R. O., & Verba, S. (1994). Designing social inquiry: Scientific inference in qualitative research. Princeton University Press.
Gray, M. (2014, July 9). When Science, Customer Service, and Human Subjects Research Collide. Now What? Culture Digitally.
Pick a study/project that you admire or that you are worried about, and write a blog post:
describing the methods that they used
describing the findings
imagine the ethical and legal questions that would have to be answered by a researcher proposing this study
(if you're feeling adventurous) if you think the study was unethical, speculate on how might you have answered the research question by other means
Participate in Freedom to Innovate Summit at MIT
Readings
Hardy, Quentin (2014) Unlocking Secrets, If Not Its Own Value. The New York Times, May 31.
DeTar. Charlie. (date unknown) ON SELLING OUT. MIT Media Lab.
Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics?. Daedalus, 121-136.
Brief presentations of proposal and class feedback
Abstract of Proposal
Readings
H. Abelson, K. Ledeen, and H. Lewis. Digital Explosion Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake? (Chapter 1) in Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion.
D. J. Solove. I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy. San Diego Law Rev., 44:745, 2007.
D. J. Weitzner, H. Abelson, T. Berners-Lee, J. Feigenbaum, J. Hendler, and G. J. Sussman. Information accountability. Commun. ACM, 51(6):82–87, June 2008.
d. boyd, A. Marwick, et al. (2011) Social privacy in networked publics: Teens attitudes, practices, and strategies.
A. Pentland. (2009) Reality mining of mobile communications: Toward a new deal on data.
L. Floridi. (2012) Big data and their epistemological challenge. Philosophy & Technology, 25(4):435–437.
After reading Charlie DeTar's essay, write an anonymous, class-accessible only blog post describing your take on an ethical line that exists within your field.
Readings
Seeyle, K. (2013, March) No Division Required in This School Problem. The New York Times.
Zittrain, J. (2015) Love the Processor, Hate the Process: The Temptations of Clever Algorithms and When to Resist Them (1hr video) Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Bogost, I. (2015) The Cathedral of Computation. The Atlantic.
Sandvig, C., Hamilton, K., Karahalios, K., & Langbort, C. (2015). Can an Algorithm be Unethical? Paper presented to the 65th annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Puerto Rico, USA.
Licklider, J.C.R. (1960). Man-Computer Symbiosis
Dwork, C. and Mulligan, D. K. (2013). It's Not Privacy, and It's Not Fair. Stanford Law Review.
Robinson, D., Yu, H., and Rieke A. (2014) Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future. Robinson + Yu.
Pasquale, F. A. and Bracha, O., Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness and Accountability in the Law of Search
Imagine that Boston has just created a new algorithm for assigning children to schools, in light of the readings on Peng Shi's PhD project and our other readings on algorithms. Imagine that families will be notified of school assignments in two months' time. How would you, as someone working for the city of Boston, ensure public accountability and fairness for this system?
Kay, A. (1972), A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages
Papert, S. (1980) Computers and Computer Cultures. Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books, Inc.
Resnick, A. How Children What (Blog post)
Watters, A. "The Audrey Test": Or, What Should Every Technie Know About Education HackEducation Blog.
Cottom, T. M. (2014) Democratizing Ideologies and Inequality Regimes in Digital Domains (video) Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Kay, A. (date unknown). Enlightened Imagination For Citizens
Papert, S. (1980) Gears of My Childhood. Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York, NY, USA: Basic Books, Inc.
Reflect on the aspirations described in Alan Kay’s and Seymour Paper’s In hindsight, what were the successes and limitations of its vision? And looking ahead, what are the opportunities for design and research?
What does impact mean to you and how has this meaning changed since the course began (if it has)?
Students present their final projects