WELLESLEY HILLS (October 24, 2012) – Ten years ago MassBay Community College began a program, the OneBook project, designed to engage students, faculty, staff and the general public around a common text and to holding activities and discussions around that text. Since then, other colleges in the region have used MassBay’s program as a model and have brought the OneBook concept to their campuses.
This year MassBay proudly presents the tenth year of OneBook with the title, Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. An excerpt from the book (page 3) explains all that it explores: “The digital explosion is changing the world as much as printing once did — and some of the changes are catching us unaware, blowing to bits our assumptions about the way the world works… The explosion, and the social disruption that it will create, have barely begun.”
On Tuesday, October 23, 2012 from 11:00 am-12:30 pm, in the McKenzie Auditorium on MassBay’s Wellesley Hills campus, the OneBook schedule of events kicks off with a discussion with Hal Abelson, MIT computer scientist and the author of Blown to Bits. The title of Dr. Abelson’s lecture is “The Internet and the First Amendment: Making laws about changing technology.
Dr. Hal Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT. In 1992, Dr. Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows, in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to teaching and undergraduate education. Dr. Abelson was recipient in 1992 of the Bose Award (MIT's School of Engineering teaching award), winner of the 1995 Taylor L. Booth Education Award given by IEEE Computer Society -- cited for his continued contributions to the pedagogy and teaching of introductory computer science -- and of the 2012 ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education.