Date: Thursday 4/5/2007
Time: 3:30-5pm
Location: Cordura 100

Speaker bio:
Laszlo Z. KARVALICS (45) Budapest, Hungary. Founding director, BME-UNESCO Information Society Research Institute, associate professor, Head, Department of Information and Knowledge Management, Budapest University of Technology. Fulbright Research Scholar, George Washington University, Center of International Science and Technology Policy (CISTP). Teaching and research on social impacts of information technology, comparative analysis of national information strategies, information history and education in the information age. Invited expert in several EU-projects and events. National representative, UNESCO Information for All Program (IFAP), being invited to the Network of Eminent Advisors (NEA) of Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP). Key person of the Hungarian Information Society strategy making. Founding editor of the Hungarian language Information Society quarterly. Has written books, studies and plenty of small articles for the dissemination of the “Information Society thinking” and Internet-culture. His best-selling books are (in Hungarian): Introduction to Information History (Gondolat, 2004) Information, Society, History (Typotex, 2003) Searching of the Information Society (Aula, Budapest, 2001) Toothpick on the Net (Prím, Budapest, 2000) Information Society (from technology to the human aspects) (Muszaki, 1995). MA in History, Literature and Linguistics PhD and Hab. in History, ELTE, Budapest.

Event Recap:
Laszlo Z. Karvalics (Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University) presented a talk entitled “Knowledge Producing Megamachines and Social Entrepreneurship” at the Digital Vision Program on April 5th, 2007.

The essential elements of Dr. Karvalics’ ideas are that many branches of science are facing a shortage in brain processing power. The only scalable way the shortfall can be augmented, Dr. Karvalics argued, is by delegating appropriate parts of the scientific research tasks to the system of public education; ie. to harness the knowledge generating capacity of high school students worldwide by engaging them in REAL scientific problems. For this to happen new types of social/educational/research forms, i.e. hybrid groups of millions of teachers, researchers and students, need to be created. Social enterpreneurs can play important roles in this transition as ice-breakers in generating pilot projects, as champions of extending local best practices to a global level, as active players in the new distributed knowledge generating environments, as evangelists of the transition, and as co-designers of the this large scale social innovation.