Andy Carvin
Encyclopedia
Andy Carvin is National Public Radio's senior product manager for online communities. Carvin was the founding editor and former coordinator of the Digital Divide Network
, an online community of more than 10,000 Internet activists in over 140 countries working to bridge the digital divide
. He is also an active blogger as well as a field correspondent to the vlog
Rocketboom
.
Carvin lives in Silver Spring
, Maryland
.
and raised in Florida
, Carvin is a graduate of Northwestern University
(Class of 1993). While working for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
in 1994, he authored the website EdWeb: Exploring Technology & School Reform, one of the first websites to advocate the use of the World-Wide Web in education.
In 1999, he was hired by the Benton Foundation
to help develop Helping.org, a philanthropy website that eventually became known as Networkforgood.org. At the December 1999 US National Digital Divide Summit in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton
announced the launch of the Digital Divide Network
, a spin-off
of Helping.org edited by Carvin.
In 2001, he organized an email forum called SEPT11INFO, an emergency discussion forum in response to the September 11 attacks. Following the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004, he created the RSS
aggregator Tsunami-Info.org, and served as a contributor to the TsunamiHelp collaborative blog.
In January 2005, Carvin began advocating mobile phone podcasting as a tool for citizen journalism
and human rights monitoring; he called the concept mobcasting. Utilizing free online tools including FeedBurner
, Blogger
and Audioblogger, Carvin demonstrated the potential of mobcasting at a February 2005 Harvard blogging conference and at The Gates
, the Central Park
art installation created by the artist Christo. He later demonstrated mobcasting as part of a collaborative blog called Katrina Aftermath, which allowed members of the public to post multimedia content regarding Hurricane Katrina
. For Carvin's work on mobcasting and the digital divide, Carvin received a 2005 TR35
award from Technology Review
, awarded annually to the 35 leading technology innovators under age 35. Carvin has also been honored as one of the top education technology advocates in eSchool News magazine and District Administration magazine.
In May 2006, Carvin began serving as host on a blog called learning.now on PBS
. According to Learning.now's website, it explores "how new technology and Internet culture affect how educators teach and children learn. It will offer a continuing look at how new technology such as wikis, blogs, vlogs, RSS, podcasts, social networking sites, and the always-on culture of the Internet are impacting teacher and students' lives both inside and out of the classroom." Learning.now is part of PBS TeacherSource, PBS' educator website.
In September 2006, Andy Carvin became a staff member at National Public Radio as their senior product manager for online communities. He is now senior strategist at NPR's social media desk. Since his arrival at NPR, he has been working to develop a new online strategy for the organization, including citizen journalism, social networking and user-generated content
.
An avid Twitter user, the popular revolution in Tunisia in late 2010 caught Andy Carvin's attention when the microblogging service "seemed to explode" with messages about an uprising. Carvin had traveled extensively in Tunisia, had many contacts there, and was able to develop others. Over the course of the following months, Carvin developed a large following on Twitter (30,000+ followers) who came to rely on his messages and retweets of news and information developing in uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Carvin's curation of Twitter feeds as well as traditional wire services have generated a great deal of interest in the journalism community. He has given interviews about his news curation of citizen journalism on blogs, journalism sites, as well as main stream media sites. See: Twitter Feed Evolves Into a News Wire About Egypt, Curating the Revolution: Building a Real-Time News Feed About Egypt, #gave4andy: Andy Carvin and the ad hoc pledge drive, NPR's Andy Carvin on Tracking and Tweeting Revolutions, Covering breaking news around the world: Lessons from Andy Carvin’s Twitter experience, The Revolution Will Be Tweeted, Andy Carvin and Twitter's New Journalism, SXSW 2011: Andy Carvin – the man who tweeted the revolution. PBS Newshour interviewed Andy Carvin about his journalism style in February 2011.
In March 2011, Andy Carvin and his Twitter followers utilized crowd sourced research to debunk false stories that Israeli weapons were being used against the people of Libya. "Israeli weapons In Libya? How @acarvin and his Twitter followers debunked sloppy journalism."
By April 2011, The Columbia Journalism Review was wondering, Is This The World's Best Twitter Account? and dubbed Carvin a "living, breathing real-time verification system." The Washington Post called him, "a one-man Twitter news bureau" in NPR’s Andy Carvin, tweeting the Middle East. His hometown paper, Florida Today, published a profile saying that he has a "global impact," and that he provides, "a unique window into the unrest sweeping across the Middle East."
A few days before a foreign policy speech on the Middle East by Barack Obama in mid-May 2011, the White House contacted Andy Carvin and asked for him to co-host a Twitter interview chat with a White House official. Poynter.org writes about "Why NPR’s Andy Carvin moderated White House Twitter interview about Obama’s Middle East speech," when NPR had refused to allow the White House to specify particular reporters in the past. Mark Stencel, NPR's managing editor for digital news said that Carvin was, "uniquely suited" for the role.
On Sunday, August 21, 2011, as Libyan "Freedom Fighters" rolled into the city of Tripoli, Libya in a bid to oust Moammar Gaddafi from his 42 year rule of the country, cable news stations in the U.S. appeared unprepared to cover the breaking news event, but Carvin tweeted over 800 times, "recording the oral history in real time." He was profiled in Britain's Guardian newspaper as "Andy Carvin: the man who tweets revolutions."
Journalism Awards: Special Distinction Award, Knight-Batten Award for Innovation for his Twitter reporting, July 2011. Link
Digital Divide Network
TakingITGlobal in Toronto, Canada produces and coordinates the Digital Divide Network , which is a spinoff of . The network seeks to narrow the digital divide...
, an online community of more than 10,000 Internet activists in over 140 countries working to bridge the digital divide
Digital divide
The Digital Divide refers to inequalities between individuals, households, business, and geographic areas at different socioeconomic levels in access to information and communication technologies and Internet connectivity and in the knowledge and skills needed to effectively use the information...
. He is also an active blogger as well as a field correspondent to the vlog
Vlog
Video blogging, sometimes shortened to vlogging or vidding or vidblogging is a form of blogging for which the medium is video, and is a form of Web television. Entries often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images, and other metadata. Entries can be recorded in one take...
Rocketboom
Rocketboom
Rocketboom is a daily vlog produced by Andrew Baron that was most recently hosted by Meme Molly until August 25, 2011. Joanne Colan hosted from July 12, 2006 until April 17, 2009. In the intervening time between Colan and Molly, Caitlin Hill hosted a few episodes in April 2009...
.
Carvin lives in Silver Spring
Silver Spring, Maryland
Silver Spring is an unincorporated area and census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It had a population of 71,452 at the 2010 census, making it the fourth most populous place in Maryland, after Baltimore, Columbia, and Germantown.The urbanized, oldest, and...
, Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
.
Biography
Born in BostonBoston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
and raised in Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, Carvin is a graduate of Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
(Class of 1993). While working for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a non-profit corporation created by an act of the United States Congress, funded by the United States’ federal government to promote public broadcasting...
in 1994, he authored the website EdWeb: Exploring Technology & School Reform, one of the first websites to advocate the use of the World-Wide Web in education.
In 1999, he was hired by the Benton Foundation
Benton Foundation
The Benton Foundation is a nonprofit organization set up by former U.S. Senator, William Benton and his wife, Helen Hemingway Benton. Its present chairman and CEO is their son, Charles Benton....
to help develop Helping.org, a philanthropy website that eventually became known as Networkforgood.org. At the December 1999 US National Digital Divide Summit in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
announced the launch of the Digital Divide Network
Digital Divide Network
TakingITGlobal in Toronto, Canada produces and coordinates the Digital Divide Network , which is a spinoff of . The network seeks to narrow the digital divide...
, a spin-off
Spin-off (media)
In media, a spin-off is a radio program, television program, video game, or any narrative work, derived from one or more already existing works, that focuses, in particular, in more detail on one aspect of that original work...
of Helping.org edited by Carvin.
In 2001, he organized an email forum called SEPT11INFO, an emergency discussion forum in response to the September 11 attacks. Following the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004, he created the RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
aggregator Tsunami-Info.org, and served as a contributor to the TsunamiHelp collaborative blog.
In January 2005, Carvin began advocating mobile phone podcasting as a tool for citizen journalism
Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...
and human rights monitoring; he called the concept mobcasting. Utilizing free online tools including FeedBurner
FeedBurner
FeedBurner is a web feed management provider launched in 2004. FeedBurner was founded by Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. Costolo, a University of Michigan graduate, became CEO of Twitter in 2010...
, Blogger
Blogger (service)
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...
and Audioblogger, Carvin demonstrated the potential of mobcasting at a February 2005 Harvard blogging conference and at The Gates
The Gates
The Gates was a site-specific work of art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The artists installed 7,503 vinyl "gates" along 23 miles of pathways in Central Park in New York City. From each gate hung a panel of deep saffron-colored nylon fabric...
, the Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
art installation created by the artist Christo. He later demonstrated mobcasting as part of a collaborative blog called Katrina Aftermath, which allowed members of the public to post multimedia content regarding Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
. For Carvin's work on mobcasting and the digital divide, Carvin received a 2005 TR35
TR35
The TR35 is an annual list published by MIT Technology Review magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.Some of the most famous winners of the award include Larry Page and Sergey Brin , Linus Torvalds , Jerry Yang , Jonathan Ive , Mark Zuckerberg...
award from Technology Review
Technology Review
Technology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...
, awarded annually to the 35 leading technology innovators under age 35. Carvin has also been honored as one of the top education technology advocates in eSchool News magazine and District Administration magazine.
In May 2006, Carvin began serving as host on a blog called learning.now on PBS
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
. According to Learning.now's website, it explores "how new technology and Internet culture affect how educators teach and children learn. It will offer a continuing look at how new technology such as wikis, blogs, vlogs, RSS, podcasts, social networking sites, and the always-on culture of the Internet are impacting teacher and students' lives both inside and out of the classroom." Learning.now is part of PBS TeacherSource, PBS' educator website.
In September 2006, Andy Carvin became a staff member at National Public Radio as their senior product manager for online communities. He is now senior strategist at NPR's social media desk. Since his arrival at NPR, he has been working to develop a new online strategy for the organization, including citizen journalism, social networking and user-generated content
User-generated content
User generated content covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies. It entered mainstream usage during 2005 having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles...
.
An avid Twitter user, the popular revolution in Tunisia in late 2010 caught Andy Carvin's attention when the microblogging service "seemed to explode" with messages about an uprising. Carvin had traveled extensively in Tunisia, had many contacts there, and was able to develop others. Over the course of the following months, Carvin developed a large following on Twitter (30,000+ followers) who came to rely on his messages and retweets of news and information developing in uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Carvin's curation of Twitter feeds as well as traditional wire services have generated a great deal of interest in the journalism community. He has given interviews about his news curation of citizen journalism on blogs, journalism sites, as well as main stream media sites. See: Twitter Feed Evolves Into a News Wire About Egypt, Curating the Revolution: Building a Real-Time News Feed About Egypt, #gave4andy: Andy Carvin and the ad hoc pledge drive, NPR's Andy Carvin on Tracking and Tweeting Revolutions, Covering breaking news around the world: Lessons from Andy Carvin’s Twitter experience, The Revolution Will Be Tweeted, Andy Carvin and Twitter's New Journalism, SXSW 2011: Andy Carvin – the man who tweeted the revolution. PBS Newshour interviewed Andy Carvin about his journalism style in February 2011.
In March 2011, Andy Carvin and his Twitter followers utilized crowd sourced research to debunk false stories that Israeli weapons were being used against the people of Libya. "Israeli weapons In Libya? How @acarvin and his Twitter followers debunked sloppy journalism."
By April 2011, The Columbia Journalism Review was wondering, Is This The World's Best Twitter Account? and dubbed Carvin a "living, breathing real-time verification system." The Washington Post called him, "a one-man Twitter news bureau" in NPR’s Andy Carvin, tweeting the Middle East. His hometown paper, Florida Today, published a profile saying that he has a "global impact," and that he provides, "a unique window into the unrest sweeping across the Middle East."
A few days before a foreign policy speech on the Middle East by Barack Obama in mid-May 2011, the White House contacted Andy Carvin and asked for him to co-host a Twitter interview chat with a White House official. Poynter.org writes about "Why NPR’s Andy Carvin moderated White House Twitter interview about Obama’s Middle East speech," when NPR had refused to allow the White House to specify particular reporters in the past. Mark Stencel, NPR's managing editor for digital news said that Carvin was, "uniquely suited" for the role.
On Sunday, August 21, 2011, as Libyan "Freedom Fighters" rolled into the city of Tripoli, Libya in a bid to oust Moammar Gaddafi from his 42 year rule of the country, cable news stations in the U.S. appeared unprepared to cover the breaking news event, but Carvin tweeted over 800 times, "recording the oral history in real time." He was profiled in Britain's Guardian newspaper as "Andy Carvin: the man who tweets revolutions."
Journalism Awards: Special Distinction Award, Knight-Batten Award for Innovation for his Twitter reporting, July 2011. Link
External links
- Andy Carvin's personal website
- Digital Divide Network
- PBS learning.now (blog)
- EdWeb: Exploring Technology & School Reform
- The Gates @ Central Park
- Mobcasting (blog)
- Katrina Aftermath (blog)
- TsunamiHelp (blog)
- Mind the Gap: The Digital Divide as the Civil Rights Issue of the New Millennium 1999 essay by Andy Carvin, Multimedia Schools magazine
- Andy Carvin's twitter feed