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Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is celebrating its 10th Anniversary May 15th - May 16th with an event called Berkman@10.  The two day event features a selection of distinguished speakers, several scheduled as well as participant determined breakout sessions, book releases, and other presentations that explore cyberspace, the future of the internet, open education, open media, cooperation, transparency in government, and a host of other relevant themes.

One of the coolest aspects of the event, by far, is the number of ways for those of us who aren’t there to plug-in to what’s taking place. David Weinberger and others have put together a list of social tools event attendees are utilizing to capture and communicate in real time, including Twitter, an IRC channel, Second Life, and Webcasts.

Check it out.

So, I’ve been following Jason Calacanis on Twitter. I guess he’s in charge of Mahalo and one of those individuals who seems to have much more money and recognition after the end of the dot-com era than when he entered. Recently, in his quest to raise awareness about Twitter’s awesomeness, he decided to see if he could become the most popular “actual” member of Twitter. (Okay, so Barack Obama is the most popular member but I’m not convinced he’s actually twittering. Barak?)

Calacanis’ main goal has been to reach 20,000 followers before any other “actual” twitterer. And get this, if he does, he’ll pick one of his followers (at random) and provide that individual with a Macbook Air. Cool.

There’s an interesting twist to this, though. Even though Calacanis has 700 more followers than the nearest twitterer, Robert Skoble (19,334 to 18,399), he’s lost his lead to a journalist who’s now quickly closing in on 20,000. Check out the last month’s statistics here: Who is this guy?

His name is Leo Laporte. He has a radio talk show called the Tech Guys Labs and maintains a pretty active blog at Leoville.com. I don’t know much about him. What I do know, though, is that if Leo “wins” my chances of winning that Air are nil!! How many people have decreased my chances by actually following Leo as well as Calacanis? (me, admittedly).

Now, this whole affair has me thinking about a few things. a). the competitive nature of this leads me to wonder about the more nuanced aspects of this “Generative Technology”. (check out this post for an interesting discussion about Jonathan Zittrain ’s concept of sterile and generative technologies). It’s fascinating that people like myself (and 20,000 other people I guess) actually receive updates from Calacanis and Leo each and every day. Calacanis and Laporte have my attention in a way that no other stranger ever has before. I let them interrupt what I am doing, I anticipate an announcement, read through their posts. I am a true consumer.

I ask: What’s after the Air? 

So, it’s official. Pieter and I finally have an office space for the Open.Michigan OER initiative - a place where we can actually have our own desk space, our own phone lines, leave thoughts written out on the white boards, call meetings with the rest of the team, and even brew our own pot of coffee.

Here’s Piet and Tim chatting at Piet’s desk about our eduCommons set up - the virtual space where we’re currently placing course content for the OER initiative.

This evening, Tim and I rode up to the Digital Media Commons’ Video and Performance Studio to check out two events: Enjoy Your Flight and Note Works. Enjoy your flight was a bizarre recreation of an airport environment, replete with video surveillance equipment, TSA employees, gates and waiting areas, as well as various disgruntled passengers. While in the security line and sitting in the gate areas we were being watched and questioned by various characters, including TSA employees, a man asking us to sign a petition in favor of the Protect America act - another man freaking out about having to wait in line. One interesting component is that attendees were asked to participate in various ways. For example, Tim was handed an envelope with an ear piece in it; funny to see him wearing it. The interesting thing, though is that one couldn’t really tell who was or wasn’t part of the recreation. Aside from the personas people put on, the whole event seemed like a strange psychological experiment. Normal people began acting in strange ways, when I sat down I asked the woman next to me if the seat was taken, and then picked up a magazine on it - pretending to look through it. People started asking where others were going, small talk broke out - people really seemed to believe that they really might be going somewhere. After about 30 minutes, a terrorist did appear, running out of the waiting area with security in pursuit.

Note Works was a pretty rad installation where participants could interact with and arrange icons to play different musical sounds, set intervals, tones, etc. I’m not sure it was as intuitive as the creators may have hoped, but my 10 minutes or so at the controls led me to create an interesting composition on E, C, A, and B. I wonder if they recorded this too?

Both of these projects were a part of the GROCS initiative, a Digital Media Commons program that funds student research that uses digital media in collaborative learning. Check out the flickr stream for more visuals, including ones of Tim being searched by TSA employees - sort of.

A beautiful collection of photographs from this year’s Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year Competition.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007