Event on Friday night (optional/extra credit)

IF YOU WANT, come to this event held at MIT on 10/21 at 7pm

"A Robot Sent to Destroy Me": Town Hall Meeting on Media and Democracy

This is FREE.

If you want to earn extra credit, comment on this post afterward with ONE cool thing you learned at the event, the name of ONE cool person you met, and ONE way this event might inform your projects.

Finding Out Stuff (AKA Information Literacy)

As a reminder:

You have a strip of paper with questions on it.

Find out the answers to the questions.

Make a comment on here with your answers.

This is important! We ALL need to know the answer to your questions! You're building the class' "textbook" or "reference book"!

Link to a website you found useful in finding out stuff regarding your question.

Thanks!

America Speaks (10/14)

Greetings, change agents!

Last Friday was kind of cool, wasn't it?

Please bring your laptops this Friday! We'll be hunting for information in class, and this works better if most of you have your own laptops!

We're also going to visit a problem-solving and project-based learning workshop at the college at 12:00, and you're going to model your awesome creative thinking and teamwork skills for professors at the college. You'll be asked to work with the professors to conceptualize some element of your Be The Change project: for example, a bumper sticker, a social media campaign (like Facebook or Twitter), a public outreach act (such as a flash mob, protest, public demonstration), or a YouTube video. So, come in with an idea of what your social or political problem is!

Also, you've probably heard on the news or elsewhere already, but Occupy Boston continues to make waves. Over 2000 people attended the students' march on Monday (did you???) And over 100 Occupy Boston participants were arrested very late Monday night.

(Your professor was there during the arrests. And yes, it was scary. And yes, it felt momentous, too. That's sort of how this stuff works--scary and momentous all at once.)

Here's video from the moment when the arrests began: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu63e7QD_5k

Some clips from the arrests: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6FfO2rRbeQ

Occupy Boston's media team continues to do good work. See the press releases and other coverage at: http://occupyboston.com

TOMORROW! (10/7)

We're going to deliver speeches in class!

Please make sure you have listened to JR's TED talk, linked in the previous post.

BUT THEN!  After all your speeches have been delivered in class, we're getting on the train and going to OCCUPY BOSTON!

What is Occupy Boston?  Check out these links:

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1371366&srvc=rss
http://www.tuftsdaily.com/occupy-boston-gathers-crowd-pushes-for-grassroots-social-change-1.2642350
http://civic.mit.edu/blog/mstem/a-visit-to-occupyboston

You see, you're really lucky.  You're studying political activism in a semester when Boston is engaging in a massive, large-scale citizen protest.  People--students, workers, everyone--are occupying Dewey Park in protest against social injustices, especially those having to do with the gaps between the haves and have nots.

Occupy Boston needs STUFF in order to KEEP occupying Boston.  Here's the list: https://sites.google.com/site/occupyrevolution/what-we-have

Please bring something in "high" demand from that list to donate to Occupy Boston tomorrow, if at all possible.  Ice packs, reusable camping dishes, cough drops, reusable not-easy-to-break (metal or plastic) cups--all these are good and inexpensive and easy to find choices.