Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 19, 2013

This is my Welcome post that originally appeared on the new Benetech Blog. We’ve made things more engaging, adding more images and video along with the ability to share and comment on content. We’ve started a Benetech blog that will feature voices from across our organization (one that is separate from my personal Beneblog ).

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 3, 2013

We strongly support this position and believe the digital content revolution holds the best promise for the future of braille. The increasing focus on digital content, rather than its printed form, and the shift to electronic distribution of ebooks pave new avenues for removing the barriers to accessibility.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 3, 2011

Through the LIT project, we’re adding many new innovations to the groundwork laid by the B4E project, with a focus on three core areas: content, tools, and utilization. With the LIT project – especially with its open-content aspects and new tools – we’re setting our sights on changing the lives of many more students. In the U.S.,

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 8, 2013

You can read about the latest developments in the effort to make it legal for people with print disabilities to share books across borders in my recent blog post. We’re dedicated both to helping the commercial publishing industry create accessible content and distribute that as their primary product. Funders like the U.S.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 18, 2012

In November, I wrote a blog post entitled: Why I’m Scared of the SOPA bill. Make no mistake, we are for the Internet, we are for jobs, we are for legal access to content, and we are for human rights and freedom of speech.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 8, 2015

The Vice President of Global Literacy leads Benetech’s biggest program, standing at the confluence of some of the most active and rapidly evolving fields: digital content, EdTech, domestic and international education, and user-centered design. This post originally appeared on Benetech's Blog. Check out our job postings and apply now

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

In short, we trust our users to personally commit to only using Bookshare books for the purpose of creating accessible content for people with bona fide disabilities. Unlike traditional DRM that uses strong locks to lock up content to prevent copying, we allow our users to make copies. How do we know it's inadvertent?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 29, 2010

Just got late-breaking news: the judges just rendered a guilty verdict in the trial I was about to discuss in the following blog post! The content of the expert testimony is important, but the competence of the expert is equally important,” says Jorge Villagran, IT manager of the archive project.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 17, 2014

Making content accessible for the blind has been a traditional example of fair use. To address this need, we’ve been operating the DIAGRAM Center , a research and development hub working to set standards, generate best practices, and design tools to ensure that images found in digital content are accessible to everyone.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 5, 2013

I’ve been actively advocating for an international copyright exception model that would greatly benefit people with disabilities, as anyone who has read my blog over the years can attest! For starters, it closely follows the Chafee Amendment , which is the copyright exception that has made Bookshare possible in the United States.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 5, 2010

I'm much rather post something in a blog than go through a formal sending of a snail mail letter! The FCC just did a series of four blog posts asking for feedback on their new accessibility plans. Here are my comments on the big picture and a couple of their proposals. The FCC should embrace a more Web 2.0

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 10, 2013

This post originally appeared as part of an online debate about How Big Data Can Have a Social Impact, which the Harvard Business Review Blog Network hosted jointly with the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. Right now I''m in Oxford, England, for the annual Skoll World Forum! Big Data is all the rage in Silicon Valley.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 30, 2010

I announced in this blog last month that judges in Guatemala had found two former police officers guilty in the 1984 forced disappearance of Guatemalan student and union leader Edgar Fernando García. Prosecutors announced that Benetech’s analysis of archive contents will be a key part of future investigations.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

My biggest concern about OERs has been that few people developing them have been measuring the impact: they celebrate the creation of the open content textbook or coursework, but don't collect the information on whether anybody is using them. OERs are the open source equivalent of open source software.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 10, 2014

This post originally appeared on the Benetech Blog. First we identified the titles we wanted to add—all requested by Bookshare non-student members, including some of the best science books of 2013 as reported by NPR’s Science Friday show. With the Skoll Foundation’s support, your gift will have far more impact on our users around the world.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 4, 2010

One of the great rewards of my job is receiving copies of those many emails praising our team or our software or our content for the difference we’ve made. I want to encourage more of the team to write guest blogs or host brown-bags or find other ways to share your work and its impact.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 13, 2007

Gerry Davis, who is one of our board members was there and took some pictures, and I thought I'd blog them and share the moments. We recently had a meeting in Silicon Valley to celebrate the progress we're making with the Route 66 Literacy program. The main reason for the meeting was that Professor Karen Erickson was in town.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 29, 2010

We brainstormed about people he needed to connect with like European Braille embosser makers, the Library of Alexandria (working on Arabic content for the blind) and of course Bookshare. I had no idea when I agreed to the mentor gig that there would be something like this I actually know something (a lot) about.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 20, 2008

The first school was Sokehs Powe School, which is on Sokehs Island next to the incredible rock pinnacle I mentioned in an earlier blog. In this school, they also had content in Pingelapese, which is a dialect related to the main island language, Pohnpeian. Like most of the schools we saw, this one reminded me of schools in California.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 22, 2009

Guest Blog from Amy McNeely, Bookshare Librarian This past week, April 12th through April 18th, was National Library Week. is what we call social computing, when the content is contributed by the users, like YouTube or Wikipedia. Every year, the American Library Association picks a different theme for the occasion. at its core.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 6, 2009

The coverage has focused, however, not on the bulk of content in the report but on the Commission’s controversial recommendation to ban Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from holding future political office. The TRC’s final report has been covered extensively in the press.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 21, 2008

We're hoping to revive it with new funding, and have already committed to developing more content with our partner, the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm looking forward to reporting on the latest from Route 66 Literacy on my blog and in future updates.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 25, 2004

I hope to share some of this learning from our team in the BeneBlog in this and future blog posts. There is a great deal of information out there, but our point of view is different and we hope useful. It's complicated. The landmine problem is complex and multifaceted. Demining groups are experts in all of these issues: they have to be.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 7, 2013

And, that''s not even mentioning that fact that the MPAA has already gotten their content excluded from the Treaty years ago. What it all boils down to is this: Content owners, such as the MPAA, are advocating for stronger, more clearly defined protections.for themselves. This blog was originally published in the Huffington Post.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 30, 2011

This blog first appeared in the Huffington Post. She recalled that when Yemen decided to ban Al-Jazeera, activists there bridged the gap by recording videos on their phones, posting the footage to YouTube and Facebook, linking content directly to the Al-Jazeera stream and then tweeting the story.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 24, 2015

Her story is so compelling, I’ve already written a blog post about this incredible woman, entitled Rockstar Nairobi Social Entrepreneur. So, we’re happy to share the American (and Canadian and British and Indian) content we already have. So, we fill in for them. Nairobi, Kenya Next I headed to Nairobi, Kenya. Enough said!

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