The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge

Many of the problems we face as a country and even as a world today – the health pandemic, the economic crisis, political violence of the kind we saw in Washington in January – are the result of our severe information disorder. We swim in a sea of lies. How did that come about? What can be done about it? Might it be time to think anew about our rights to knowledge, our approach to the public sphere, our concepts of information and the public good?

Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman addresses these questions in his new book. 

In this xTalk he hopes to spark a discussion for all of us about a new progressive agenda for change. Larry Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation, writes, “Kaufman’s erudite tour de force not only explains how the 'information economy' works to shape our world, it shows how battles over who and how information is controlled have been with us since the invention of the printing press. Better still, this wonderfully written, eminently readable book . . . lays out clearly why we need to restore control over the information economy and how open knowledge and open learning are keys to that effort.” Join us to learn more about Kaufman's new book.

There will be a Q&A after the presentation. Faculty are invited to participate and share comments and reflections.

To receive the Zoom link for this xTalk please send request to this email.

Peter Kaufman
Writer, teacher, and documentary producer, Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning. Previously he served as associate director of Columbia University's Center for Teaching and Learning; president and executive producer of Intelligent Television; a founding contributor to the Audio-Visual Think Tank at Sound & Vision in the Netherlands; co-chair of the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank in the United Kingdom; co-chair of the Copyright Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists; a member of the Scholar Advisory Committee of WGBH's American Archive of Public Broadcasting; a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences; and a consultant to the Library of Congress's National Audiovisual Conservation Center, the world’s largest archive of moving images and recorded sound.

Read MIT student Isioma Osubor's reflections on Peter Kaufman's xTalk.