Added two sites to the Best Practices list: Charlie Lowe’s Writing About Digital Culture class at Florida State University, and the U. C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism site on Election 2002. Both are news Web logs, and both just reinforce the whole Newswire and MLK News concept of facilitating real journalism with real audiences for students.
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I really liked the Newswire experiment that I ran in my journalism classes. Sifting through the feedback I got from my students, most of them seem to have enjoyed the process and learned something from it. (Of course, there were dissenters.) I’m looking forward to expanding on the idea in the spring when I teach journalism again.

Although very similar in concept, The Annenberg Onlinejournalism.com site linked above offers a little twist on what we did. Students there write their own stories/summaries which are subsequently edited and then posted. There is more in the way of summary and linking, which shows a bit more reporting than I asked my kids to do. But we could take it a step further without too much trouble. What if students find the stories for their beat, do the summary, link to relevant re-sources about the topic, dig for both sides of the story, peer edit and then post? They could even do some local reporting on the topic.

When I see this, the more I think about doing just one Web log in media class instead of smaller group ones. Stories are submitted in different categories similar to the USC site but offered with some pertinent research to go along with it. We’d have five posts a day dealing with various topics, but the authors would have to do more than just summarize.
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“Dear Parents,

The first book we will be reading in Modern American Literature is The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Published just this January, it is a story about a young girl living in South Carolina during the 1960s who is trying to escape an abusive father and find out the truth surrounding her mother’s death. It’s a beautifully written story that has garnered many great reviews from critics and students alike.

This year, we’re inviting you to read along with us! We’re going to try to form the first ever Secret Life of Bees Parents’ Online Book Club. All you need to participate is a desire to read the book, an Internet connection, and a bit of spare time to share your thoughts in writing. We’ll pose some questions for you to respond to, and hopefully we can start a dialogue about the book…”

Seventy kids total…any guesses on how many parents take us up on it???

Caution…angst ahead.
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I voted for the Green party candidate for Senate here in NJ yesterday. He got 2%, but it felt good anyway. Over the weekend I caught about 20 minutes of the debate between Lautenberg and Forrester and came to the conclusion that the former was just a crotchety old coot and the latter had no clue. Neither of them stood for any of the issues important to me, the environment, campaign finance reform, full civil rights, corporate accountability etc. So I voted for Ted Glick, who had no chance of winning but at least represented my own beliefs.

And I guess that’s the hardest part about what happened yesterday. I’m obviously out of step with mainstream when it comes to what the priorities are in this country. Call it hubris, but I think I’m right (correct) on these issues. I think most of the country must be asleep or under the influence. I just cannot fathom how people cannot see what is happening, or how the cannot care enough to try to change it.

We have a president who lies at his convenience. In a country where white men account for maybe 30% of the total population, white men make up over 90% of Congress. Poverty is on the rise. Crime is increasing. Over 15,000 Americans were murdered last year (not including those lost on 9/11). We’re running out of natural resources. Anyone with enough money and a pretty face can buy his way to a Senate or House seat. And on and on…

But who cares. Let’s make it easier to get guns. Let’s set up some oil rigs up there in Alaska…that’ll show those Arabs. Let’s keep the minimum wage at $5.50, and while we’re at it, let’s give the rich folk and corporations more tax cuts. Let’s send our young men and women into a war that has little to do with terrorism and everything to do with oil futures. Let’s throw even more money into an already corrupt political system. Let’s keep driving toward getting rid of a woman’s right to choose. And let’s thump our Bibles and do it all in the name of that old, bearded, white male God who’s obviously approving of all of this up heaven.

I’ll tell you this: Jesus would not have been elected yesterday. He’d wear his “Love thy Enemy” button and be heckled from the podium.

The good news is that according to my fuzzy math, I’m guessing only about a third of eligible voters in this country went to the polls yesterday. With all of those “close” races, that means that somewhere around 20% of those eligible to vote actually elected the winners in most races. Sad, but in some weird way helpful. There’s a lot of people out there not being heard.

Which leads us to the Democrats, who showed themselves to be the spineless, leaderless, visionless group of knuckleheads that we all hoped they wouldn’t be. My only hope is that this will be a wakeup call to someone in that party to start doing some podium pounding of his (or her) own and point us in some kind, any kind of alternative direction.

There are a lot of people and causes still worth fighting for. Like these people, who in the shadows of our president’s alma mater have to live in tents because they can’t find work. Or the 12 million children in this country who miss meals every day. Or the fact that if SUV’s got 3 miles per gallon more, we wouldn’t need Middle East oil at all. Or that Clean Election Laws in Arizona actually worked! It’s time to get busy.

It’s time because I look at my kids and realize I really don’t have a choice. I’ve been doing little things, buying electricity from a company that generates energy from renewable sources, bringing home my groceries in canvas bags, refilling my plastic coffee cup every morning, installing new shower heads and faucet filters, recycling, consuming less, eating closer to the earth, all in an attempt to minimize my footprint on the Earth. But I have to do more, get more politically active and fight for their future.

I read a recent poll that said two-thirds of Americans don’t think their kids lives will be better than their own. If we just sit back and watch this happen, there’s little doubt that will come true.

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VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

Early and often…
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Let’s see, we’ve got personal, student, class, book, newspaper, group, AND now, introducing DEPARTMENT! (Gulp!) Here’s the first peer response…

“Hi Will, Thanks for setting this up. It’s a great idea. I have a question. I noticed there’s a Hunterdon Central weblog creation page. Can I set up a weblog for my class through this as well? Do I need permission from anyone first?”

See Will smile…
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There is only one good approach to approach bottoms up KM development…
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I’ll compile this into a more salient post at some point, but here is some feedback from my journalism kids regarding the use of Web logs in the class.

Ok…just for the record…nothing earth shattering here, but…cutting and pasting from MS Word…bad. Cutting and pasting from Wordpad/Notepad…good.

Ed my tech guy says giving kids access to Wordpad is no problem. So it looks like the solution is if students have posts that they have created in Word, they must first save them as text only files, then open them in Wordpad or Notepad, and then copy and paste into Manila. A bit cumbersome, but a workable solution for now.

Ironic thing is I downloaded and installed Microsoft’s own plug-in to clean the HTML and it didn’t work either. Even though the option to “Export to Compact HTML” appears, it gives me an error every time: “Compile Error in Hidden Module”. Uh, yeah, I can figure that one out…

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says it’s permissible for a great nation to go hunting for Hussein by killing the people he holds hostage, his own people, who have no choice in the matter, who have done us no harm. Unprovoked, the noble sport of war becomes the murder of the innocent.”

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So finally warming up to this whole RSS thing, getting the kinks out of the code, getting Amphetadesk up to speed with a little help from an add-on from David (no troubles this time.) Getting all the feeds from Pat and Karen and Brian and others all in one nicely organized space (though for some reason I can’t get Seb‘s to work!?!). Talk about a time saver! EZ drop down lists of posts, easy to read and click through to if I want. So now I can get all my favorite Web loggers in one place and use Manila Express to post to this space from the same spot. I think I’m getting the hang of this.

Now, one step further, of course: set up all my students and committee Web logs in an aggregator and make it one-stop reading instead of opening up 24 separate ones or clogging my mailbox with update notifications. If I see something I want to respond to, just click through to the site and discuss away. Think of how easy it would be to compare the efforts of the kids since all their work on a particular assignment would pretty much be side by side on one page. That is an awesome concept, and would be a MAJOR step in the right direction in terms of the pressed for time issues.

But this validation issue is stopping me cold. Currently, I can’t get any of my kids’ Web logs to validate because of the apostrophe and quotation mark issues that we were trying to solve, with little success, earlier. Not sure if it’s because they are copying and pasting their posts from Word (which is what I urge them to do.) If so, I need to find a formatting fix, or I need to try David‘s Tidy program again (gulp). Any other suggestions?

And so it goes…
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