Amy Bruckman, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

BIO

Amy Bruckman is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She and her students in the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group do research on online communities and education. In the Science Online project, she is exploring how students can learn about science by writing about it online. She is also exploring how Wikipedia actually works, conducting empirical studies of regular contributors, administrators, participants in WikiProject subgroups, and people banned from Wikipedia. Her research on Computer Supported Collaborative Innovation (CSCI) explores how people can collaborate across distance on projects where the goal state is initially only partially described. Amy is a member of the Georgia Computes! Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance, and is focusing on teens who have a passion for computing related technologies like social networking and games. She is designing new socio-technical systems to help build on their interests to encourage them to pursue education in computing. Amy is interested in ethical issues in Internet research, and was a member of working groups on this topic organized by AAAS, AoIR, and APA. Amy received her PhD from the MIT Media Lab's Epistemology and Learning group in 1997, her MSVS from the Media Lab's Interactive Cinema Group in 1991, and her BA in physics from Harvard University in 1987. In 1999, she was named one of the 100 top young innovators in science and technology in the world (TR100) by Technology Review magazine. In 2002, she was awarded the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies. More information about her work is available at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/



Title:
Social Support for Creativity and Learning Online

Abstract:
In the mid 1990s, we began to ask some hopeful questions about the potential of the Internet to empower the individual: Can users become creators of content, rather than merely recipients? What can people learn through working on personally meaningful projects and sharing them online? If content creation is to some degree democratized, does this have broader cultural or political implications? This enthusiasm faded a bit by the dot-com bust, and many began to wonder: will it be business-as-usual after all?

But then it started happening. On Wikipedia, thousands of volunteers collaborate to create a shared resource that, while not without flaws, is astonishing in its breadth and speed of adaptation. Furthermore, the process of writing this resource is truly collaborative to a degree that should make any Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) professional envious. On sites like deviantart and newgrounds, people collaborate on original art projects and animations. On MySpace, teens create their own web pages, sharing snippets of html and expressing themselves in a quintessentially teenage fashion. Blogs written by ordinary citizens have become influential in politics and culture, almost just as envisioned by science fiction writer Orson Scott Card. Peer production of content, it seems, has arrived.

What has made this explosion of creativity possible is not better tools for production (though those help), but rather social contexts for sharing those products with others. The easy availability of an audience motivates people to create. In this talk, I'll review the history of peer production of content on the Internet, and present current research in the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) Lab at Georgia Tech that aims to help support this phenomenon. Drawing on work in the fields of online community design, CSCW, and computer-supported cooperative learning, I'll discuss how we can design Internet-based environments conducive to creativity, collaboration, and learning.


Dale Dougherty, Maker Media (http://makermedia.com/)

BIO

Dale Dougherty is General Manager of the Maker Media, a division of O'Reilly Media. He is the founding editor and publisher of Make and Craft magazines, both of which focus on DIY projects, and the creator of Maker Faire, which showcases creative communities.
Dale has been instrumental in many of O'Reilly's most important efforts, working closely with Tim O'Reilly to establish O'Reilly as a leading technical publisher. An early Web pioneer, Dale was the developer and publisher of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial Web site launched in 1993 and sold to America Online in 1995. Dale was developer and publisher of Web Review, the online magazine for Web designers from 1995-1999, which was sold to CMP in 1999. He developed the Hacks Series of books in 2003, which includes the bestselling Google Hacks and Excel Hacks. He coined the term Web 2.0 as part of developing the Web 2.0 Conference.
In its fourth year, Make Magazine has a paid circulation of 110,000. It is the leader of a new DIY technology segment that includes hobbyists and enthusiasts and increasingly a growing number of teens. Craft, in its second year, has a circulation of 40,000, and combines traditional low-tech with new ideas and new technologies. Both are family-oriented publications.
Maker Faire in its third year has become the largest technology-oriented consumer event in America, a celebration of the DIY mindset and creativity. The most recent Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area attracted 65,000 people over two days.
He lives and works in Sebastopol, California.



Title:
The Joy of Making

Abstract:
The pages of Make Magazine and the exhibits of Maker Faire demonstrate that a new generation has discovered the joy of making. At the center of this "maker" movement are hackers who have reconnected to tinkering and craftsmanship. They are personalizing, customizing and even creating the physical world around them. They are exploring the intersections of high tech and low tech, art and science, as well as design and engineering.