Throughout the history of the Internet there have been several attempts to launch an online community that would bring people together to discuss common and/or varied interests. Creating one that would be both successful and long-lasting is a challenge, one that only a few online communities have managed. Benjamin Mako Hill’s Building Successful Online Communities class at … Continued
October is Domestic Violence Awareness month, and has been observed as such since 1981. This week specifically, October 15-21 2017, is the National Network to End Domestic Violence‘s Week of Action. During this time, organizations and advocacy groups work to educate the public on programs, services, and community resources to prevent violence and to support survivors. … Continued
The overwhelming success of the summer blockbuster Wonder Woman has brought new mainstream attention to the topic of gender and cinema, with many media outlets noting that women are less likely to be chosen for major creative and directorial positions or perform as the lead protagonist. Gender equity is a very real issue, which makes Carlton University … Continued
October is National Protect Your Hearing Month and National Audiology Awareness Month, a month where audiologists and organizations like the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) would like people to take time out of their day to learn about audiology and how they can prevent noise-related hearing loss in themselves and others. … Continued
Censorship occurs when someone — an organization, group, government, media outlet, or similar — suppresses something that they believe will be harmful or objectionable. Sometimes people censor in the belief that they are helping to protect others from seeing, hearing, or reading something that is offensive and/or would harm someone. Other times it can be … Continued
In 1982, library activist Judith Krug held the first Banned Books Week, an event intended to raise awareness of books that had been, or were in danger of being, removed from libraries or having their access restricted. Why 1982? Because earlier that year there had been a record number of attempts to remove or restrict … Continued
September 15 marks the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month, an annual event that celebrates not only the contributions of Hispanic and Latinx Americans, but also the histories and cultures of them and their ancestors from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. This observance lasts until the 15th of the following month and … Continued
For all of his swagger and bravado, Indiana Jones makes a terrible archaeologist. With all due apologies to Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg, Indiana was always slightly more interested in the treasure and his fetching female companions than he was with the “who, what, when, where, how, and why” of the historical sites he visited … Continued
Latin may be the language of love, but Ethnologue says that there are more than 7,000 living languages in the world today. This left students with Andrew Nevins’s Introduction to Linguistics class at Harvard Summer School much to choose from for their Wikipedia coursework. Together his class edited 38 articles, with some students becoming so taken with Wikipedia that … Continued
