“Fast-A-Thon” for Darfur at Bentley College

Mark Frydenberg invited me to speak at Bentley College this evening as part of the CIS Presents “Current Topics in Information Technology.” The title of the lecture was “Technology and Social Activism”. So, I gave a version of the talk I was hoping to give at the ACME Summit.

Over the past year, ACMEBoston has used blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, and open source technologies like our Drupal-based ACMEBoston Projects site as online tools to organize for media and progressive social change. This evening, I talked about some of the ways we’ve used these tools and how these technologies have helped increase awareness about our work and the issues involved.

I shared the example of how Andy Carvin’s video for Rocketboom, featuring an excerpt from our National Day of Out(R)age - Boston rally and press conference on May 24, ended up (briefly) in a segment about Net Neutrality on the PBS show NOW with David Brancaccio. Because we knew that it was going to be difficult to attract local media to the event, we reached out to local bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers who we knew were already concerned about the issues involved and who we thought may be interested. We were fortunate that Andy Carvin, Steve Garfield, and other local citizen media folks showed up to cover the event on that day.

I also talked about how ACMEBoston has been working with the Boston Neighborhood Producer’s Group to help bridge the “Knowledge Divide” when it comes to learning how to use these new media tools. I noted that we used our video blog on blip.tv to help share the two short videos that Danielle and I shot during our meeting at BNN’s Multimedia Center to help raise awareness about our work and to encourage others to get involved in creating empowerment through sharing knowledge.

I enjoyed talking with the students this evening and appreciated the invitation from Mark to be there. The podcast will be available later this week on the CIS Lecture Series blog.

Oh, yeah and I took this picture (above) passing by one of the buildings on campus.

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