Youth Leadership for Change Summit at UC Berkeley

From July 31st to August 3rd, 2002, seventy young people and twenty-five adults from 25 cities and 18 states, all of whom live or work in public housing, met at the Haas School of Business on the UC Berkeley campus for the Youth Leadership for Change Summit. The summit was the second annual event sponsored by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development designed to empower youth from HOPE VI housing developments to identify solutions to problems in their communities, while also providing them with resources, training, and tools to enable them to put innovative solutions into action.

During four days on campus, the ninety young people participated in an experiential learning environment in which they worked with other social entrepreneurs from HOPE VI housing developments to create social enterprise plans and media advocacy pieces. They got hands-on experience as they developed the plans; and they were introduced to digital storytelling, digital video production, and online radio production. Participants learned how to create videos documenting issues that affect their communities. With digital cameras donated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, they will use their newfound skills back home to make videos in their local communities. They then plan to show these documentary films to policymakers in an effort to better educate them about the issues facing public housing constituents.

During the summit, the National HOPE VI Youth Leadership Council held its first official meeting and elected council officers--establishing the infrastructure for connection across cities and between sites, and enabling partnerships to develop strategies for promoting and supporting a commitment to improving communities and educating youth to become leaders for change.

The summit was sponsored by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Washington, DC), The National Congress for Community Economic Development, and three UC Berkeley departments -- the Interactive University, the Haas School of Business, and the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD). The summit curriculum was designed by Deborah McKoy, PhD at the IU, Oscar Walters-Durant at the Haas Young Entrepreneurs Program, Heather Hood at IURD, and Shirl Buss, PhD from San Francisco State University. UCB Graduate students in City and Regional Planning (and former Y-PLAN mentors) served as team coaches throughout the summit. HUD is already planning on holding a third annual conference at UCB next summer and has just approved of an evaluation research project on the HOPE VI youth initiative to be conducted by Deb McKoy and Shirl Buss.

See related story in the Berkeleyan.

The Blog Comes to UC Department of Journalism

Paul Grabowicz, director of the Graduate School of Journalism’s New Media Program has become intrigued by weblogs, and by their potential for journalism and journalists. A number of mainstream journalists already host their own blogs, and columnist William Safire, of the New York Times, as well as the New Yorker magazine, have written about them. Not limited only to the established or well connected writer, weblogs are used to link communities with common interests and agendas, by families and friends to overcome barriers of distance, or just to share photos or quick greetings, by teachers and students, and, as well, by verbal doodlers and web soap-box preachers. There is as much possibility for weblog uses, and abuses, as there is diversity among Internet users. The IU News has covered the weblog phenomenon a number of times in the past two years. Beginning with a story in September 2000, and continuing through the publication of IU staffer Chris Ashley's two part essay on weblogs [1], [2].

Now Professor Grabowicz, along with Wired magazine co-founder John Battelle, is teaching a Fall 2002 course about weblogs. Participants "will create a weblog that explores the subjects of intellectual property and copyright, topics of keen interest to the online publishing community. They will post news bulletins, stories, background information, and links to related blogs as well as solicit feedback from readers; local experts, including campus faculty, will contribute as well." Read the whole story about the class in the Berkeleyan.

The UC Computing Services Conference

From July 28-30, UC Berkeley hosted the 2002 University of California Computing Services Conference. More than 300 people attended the three day event which featured presentations on new emerging technologies, including: wireless, e-business, educational technology, and security.

Guest speakers included Ruzena Bajcsy the director of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society), Jack McCredie the Chief Information Officer and Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Systems and Technology for the Berkeley campus, and Daniel Greenstein the University Librarian and Director of the California Digital Library. There were also presentations by IU Technology Architect Raymond Yee (speaking about Interoperability and B-OLE--the Berkeley Open Learning Environment), and by Jeanette Zerneke and a team from the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), an IU Internet Learning Community Project partner.

The conference theme this year was Improving Life Through Technology, and the focus was on collaboration to develop innovative technology to address some of society's most pressing problems. The conference provided attendees with the opportunity to exchange ideas and talk about specific issues and challenges faced as technology evolves. Campus reports were given through Sunday evening's poster board session, and many Birds of a Feather sessions provided another venue of informal exchange on specific campus topics.

Since 1982, people from the UC campuses have been meeting during the summer to discuss common issues associated with providing and supporting information technology services in the UC system. The UCCSC conference is a result of grass roots efforts by UC campuses to share knowledge and information for the benefit of all UC campuses. For the past several years, approximately 200 people have attended. The conference location shifts each year between northern and southern California campuses.

Topics range from campus technical issues and projects, to organizational and policy issues; participants include technical support staff, system administrators, unit directors, librarians, and people with various job titles for whom technology plays a significant role in their daily activities.

The Public Library of Science

Two Bay Area biochemists, one at Berkeley and one at Stanford, aim to use the Internet to reform the way scientific papers are published. Berkeley biochemist Nicholas Cozzarelli is editor-in-chief of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Pat Brown is a biochemist at Stanford University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Cozzarelli and Brown are part of a plan for reform that they believe will make new scientific knowledge and research findings accessible for free to a much larger potential audience: they want to raise about $20 million in foundation grants to bring together top scientists to review scientific research, and publish it on the Web in the Public Library of Science.

As explained on the PLS website: The Public Library of Science is a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world, for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good.

Touting what he believes will be the benefits of the plan, Brown says: "A high school student in San Jose could read the latest paper in cell biology. Scientists in the Third World could see scientific articles they can't afford. These people are totally disenfranchised from the latest evidence-based science."

Both Brown and Cozzareli support the Public Library of Science, an advocacy group turned scientific publisher that plans to make all research articles it publishes available online immediately and at no charge. For a recent article about Cozzarelli, see the Berkeleyan; for one about Brown visit the San Francisco Chronicle.

Web Tools Arrive in the Lecture Hall

Last Spring a Berkeley lecturer needed a substitute to cover for him while he was on vacation. He settled on creating a Power Point presentation--with voice and images--that he put up on a website that allowed students to go online and "attend" his lecture at any time of their choosing.

Lecturer Americ Azevedo created the stand-in for his Spring 2002 Introduction to Networked Applications and Computing course. While some students decry this encroachment by computers into an area of face-to-face human relations, others appreciate and enjoy the benefit of being able to get information they may have missed. Azevedo lauds the arrival of cyber-lectures, and believes that putting lectures online, in conjunction with new web tools that allow messaging and online conversations, will actually allow for an increased exchange of ideas and information between students and teachers--though admittedly not face-to-face--than the traditional mode of one speaker in front of a full lecture hall.

For a Berkeleyan story about Azevedo and his virtual lecture, check here.

BAWP 2002/2003 Saturday Seminar Series

The Bay Area Writing Project has announced the dates of its annual Saturday Seminar Series. This popluar program of seminars and presentations for teacher professional development will begin its 2002/2003 run on Saturday, October 5, 2002.