How can technology help journalists make sense of complex issues and explain them to the public in a clear, understandable manner?

Last year, Jay Rosen's journalism students spent an entire semester researching and making explanations in partnership with ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom which focuses on investigative journalism. The class did amazing work to highlight notable examples and develop their own explainers. One of my favourite examples is this project from 2011, where students redesigned the same ProPublica background article as a video, a podcast, and an FAQ.

Gary Grice, better known as “GZA” or “The Genius”, is rapidly becoming a fixture around Cambridge’s institutions of higher learning. In December, GZA visited Harvard and MIT, meeting with a wide variety of professors and graduate students. We at Center for Civic Media were honored to host the Wu Tang Clan co-founder for a tour of our lab and a visit to the Media Lab. He’s now returning to MIT to offer a guest lecture, “Hip-Hop as Civic Media.” Ethan and I worked together to write this post.

How can designers imagine innovative technologies for news and journalism? I think I know the answer. In this post, I propose a model and demonstrate it by picking apart the "Profile article" for innovative ideas. The resulting design is a browser plugin which can attach writers' tools to any text form on the web.

I'm currently taking Ethan Zuckerman's class on News in the Age of Participatory Media, a compressed intro to journalism for engineers. In principle, we're a group of engineers trying to learn enough about journalism to imagine new technologies to support journalism and media-making in general. In practice, that's a really hard thing to do. People could genuinely argue that we're only half-learning journalism in a fraction of the time students take in journalism school. Furthermore, we also need to think about technology. How can we do that?

Do social networks inherently support democratic values, in contrast with ideology-bound political institutions?

At the MIT Media Lab Friday, former Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar talked about what it took for the news company to reimagine itself and listen to networks during the Arab Spring. He was joined by Mohamed Nanabhay, head of New Media at Al Jazeera, who discussed their new challenge of shifting media coverage from the spectacle of protest to the politics of building a new society. [Update: a video of the talk has been posted to the Media Lab blog]

Is there a media obesity problem in America? Is our appetite for tasty celebrity news and comfortable opinions creating a toxically-polarised society? What should our information diet be, and how would we measure it? Who's responsible to change the media?

Today, Tom Stocky visited the Media Lab to talk about how Facebook designs and builds products. He's a Media Lab graduate and the director of product management at Facebook. He shared five principles for great design: start with people; hack and share; solve the root cause; keep it simple; and be bold.

Tom started out by encouraging us to start with people, to build social systems with people at the center. He showed us a network diagram by the Dachis Group's social business design team. He wanted to differentiate what Facebook does from that model. Instead of thinking about systems, he encouraged us to start with people's experience in the real world and then design a product around that, with people at the center.

Do we need a Magna Carta for the Internet? Who should create it, and what might it contain?

Rebecca McKinnon spoke at the Center for Civic Media today about her new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (TED Talk). For many years, Rebecca was the face of CNN in Beijing and Tokyo. Then she co-founded Global Voices with our director Ethan Zuckerman. More recently, she has been thinking about what it means to be a netizen, and what might be our responsibilities and rights.

Todays Berkman Lunch was on "Designing for Remix: Computer-supported Social Creativity" by Andres Monroy-Hernandez. Andres, who is a PhD candidate at the Media Lab, designed the Scratch community online and now splits his time between the Berkman Center and Microsoft Research. Since I recently helped start a creative writing centre in London, I was very keen to see how Andres worked to build community among creative learners online.

I first learned Scratch during a class on creative learning with Mitch Resnick, Sherry Turkle, and Karen Brennan. I also conducted a short ethnography on what happens on Scratch when learners get stuck. One possible strategy for getting unstuck involves looking at and modifying others' projects from the Scratch website. So I was excited to learn more from Andres about the values and practices of the Scratch community, as well as the design principles which support them.

Can we graft our humanity and our souls onto the web—using the Internet to craft a life story which grows in richness over time? In the 19th century, the Romantic poet Wordsworth famously stated: "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." Jonathan Harris, who spoke at the MIT Media Lab last Monday, is trying offer something similar with his new storytelling platform Cowbird.

Recently when I pasted a BBC article link into Facebook, the title and summary in Facebook presented the opposing view to that taken by the article. Here's the story.