Jeff Jarvis on the NY Times’ do-not-track hypocrisy

Sunday’s New York Times editorializes in favor of Do Not Track and other privacy legislation going through Congress and the Federal Trade Commission. Yet The New York Times itself makes much use of personal, private, and tracking information itself. Indeed, it requires tracking.

Jeff Jarvis — Do-not-track hypocrisy

“What Stanford and MIT do for technology, we hope we can do for journalism”

Check out the video from the entrepreneurial journalism information session last week for the full details from Jeff Jarvis and Jeremy Caplan. We’ll also be at Hacks/Hackers NYC’s Epic Holiday Fête on December 20th; come prepared with questions about the program.

Entrepreneurial Journalism curriculum at CUNY

Entrepreneurial Journalism curriculum at CUNY. Detailed information on the courses for the new M.A./Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism. There will also be an information session at the J-School on Monday, November 29th from 6 to 7:30 pm you can attend in person or watch live.

Jeff Jarvis at TEDxNYED: “This is bullshit”

If I had learned about TEDxNYED earlier than I did, I would’ve totally applied and made my way to New York to attend. Alas, I did not, and get to relive the experience through the posts and videos published online (hooray for the web). Jeff Jarvis ran through a number of things he’s identified as broken, and then offered “Googley” suggestions to fix them. Money quote:

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

Reflecting on the entire post, I have two thoughts that come to mind. First, to what degree are the qualities he observes as broken actually broken, and to what degree are they rhetoric to emphasis the overall message of his presentation? Second, if things are as broken as he says they are, what comes next?

If there are parallels between how the internet has affected the media industry and how the internet is beginning to affect the education industry, then surely there are lessons to be learned from how the media industry reacted and where they failed to. The opportunity, however, is more likely with what can be distributed (lessons, mentoring, accreditation, etc.) than trying to reform command and control. Build the tool for the public to educate itself.