John Hockenberry introduces the Google Jockey team, a group of five people who are creating a livestream of google searches and links from twitter during the talks. To participate, tweet a link to #MediaLabIO, and follow along with the livestream.

• Design and Humanism–John Maeda
• Oversimplified–Cesar Hidalgo
• A Language for Community Computing–Sep Kamvar
• Social Madness–Reid Hoffman
• Conversation: John Maeda, Sep Kamvar, Cesar Hidalgo, Reid Hoffman

(Ethan and I are liveblogging #MediaLabIO sessions together this week. Here is the latest.)

In the final session of the first day of the Media Lab's spring meeting, Lab director Joi Ito introduced the council of advisors that are helping him shape his thinking about the Media Lab as the new director. Before bringing the advisors to the stage, Joi asked, "What matters most to us as a community?" The community is a thing with concentric rings, it's a pretty vague word. In the narrow circle of faculty meetings, the Media Lab faculty came to a rough agreement about what makes the Lab special. The answer was "Uniqueness, Impact, and Magic". At the Media Lab, Joi tells us, we're really good at uniqueness and magic, and we're pretty good at impact, but I think it's an area where we can improve.

The theme for the third session at the MIT Media Lab's Spring Meeting is "Learning Socities." It features a range of inspirational speakers, including:

• Mitch Resnick of the Lifelong Kindergarten group

(During this week's Media Lab Spring Meeting, I'm liveblogging the talks together with Ethan Zuckerman. This is the second morning session from Tuesday, 24th of April)

Henry Holtzman's Information Ecology group focuses on human interaction with the deluge of data we're all facing, from an avalanche of email to vast quantities of photos and video. His lab's strategy relies on knitting together ecologies of devices and services that help humans cope with these waves of data.

Dan Schultz's project Truth Goggles offers one way to think about this research approach. It's a project that sits in your web browser and alerts you when you're encountering assertions that appear in fact-checking databases, for instance, an assertion about a political candidate's position or stance. By alerting you to the presence of fact-checking information, it invites you to take a deeper dive into that layer of information.

(During this week's Media Lab Spring Meeting, I'm liveblogging the talks together with Ethan Zuckerman. This is the morning session from Tuesday, 24th of April. This first post originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's blog)

Radio host John Hockenberry introduces the first day of the Media Lab's spring sponsor meeting. He suggests that the lab is an "infectious idea", a way of working and thinking that spreads well beyond the walls of the building. He warns the crowd, packed into the third floor atrium at the Lab, and fourth and fifth-floor balconies, that this isn't "some sit back in your seats TED conference experience" - instead, we need to work to get the most out of our experience.

S. Craig Watkins joined us for lunch today to talk about learning environments which cultivate critical social vision.

Today, I'm a panelist at the Elizabethtown College Carper Memorial Lecture, which is on the topic of Ethics, Business, and Society. The headline speaker is the Bangaladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, creator of microcredit.

When I was an undergraduate at Elizabethtown College studying literature and the arts, I never expected that I would be coming back to speak at a business event. It's a delight to reconnect with my alma mater today. I'll be sharing blog updates throughout the day (Live etherpad notes here), starting with the talk by Dr Yunus: