As Mr. Noon notes in his post on the New York Times blog, Tell the Raven is still a work in progress.  He hoped that the blog would help connect his students with other schools in Alaska, but so far that hasn’t happened–although they have been connecting with students in Australia.  I admire that the students are encouraged to write and share their thoughts, and that they have an adult mentor like Mr. Noon to review their posts and help them consider how they want to present themselves to their classmates and to the world.  The students get to learn about everything the Web has to offer, and have a guide to show them how to have a positive experience online.  For Mr. Noon, he gets to learn more about what his students are doing and what interests them in class, and of course parents get learn more about their children.  Everybody wins.

If you’re a teacher using multimedia in the classroom, tell us about it and share your ideas!

I think it’s pretty cool because it grabs my imagination. (I have to confess that it has the word “media” so prominently in the middle is somewhat validating)

Would love to hear what you guys think!

One can see how there are lots of pros and cons to Spinspotter. First, in true Web 2.0 fashion, its effectiveness is entirely dependent upon its users. I read a good amount of news about a variety of topics, and so far my Spinspotter tool hasn’t lit up once in three days. If Spinspotter doesn’t catch on, and nobody else is creating markers, it is almost entirely useless to me. One thing I do like is that encourages me to think critically about the news I’m reading, and provides an outlet for me to share my findings, all while demanding some level of responsibility on my part. I can’t flag just anything; I have to be able to name specifically what about it is spin, and since I can’t create a marker as an anonymous Spinspotter user, I am being held accoutable to a degree for my opinion. On the other hand, my marker appears almost immediately, which suggests to me that it’s not being reviewed by anyone for accuracy or appropriateness. So in theory, I could actually be using Spinspotter to create more spin–suppose I marked an article about the pro-life movement. I could choose any rule of spin I wanted to, and then use my explanation space to air my personal opinions on abortion. Should another Spinspotter user find the article, they would then be subjected to my invectives which may or not be have anything to do with the quality of journalism.

I’m all for anything that encourages a real understanding of media, and I think Spinspotter was designed with the intention that people ask questions about the news they read, and share their ideas with others. This is crucial to being an active and responsible citizen and human being, and I applaud the people at Spinspotter for their efforts. I hope that it won’t be too long for teachers and students to couple tools like Spinspotter with other multimedia classroom activities. Such critical analysis is needed more than ever; perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the tool has debuted just after the Democratic and Republican conventions, when candidates and their supporters are working overtime to make their cases for should be elected President in two months. It has always been too easy for those in the media to spin reality–we are, after all, imperfect humans with our own opinions and needs. Journalism itself is a great example of how anything that can be used for good can also be abused for ill purposes, and the possibility that Spinspotter could be used the “wrong” way is not a good enough reason not to use it. They have an incredibly talented journalism advisory board, and after all, it’s only in its beta stage. I have a lot of hope for Spinspotter and its potential to transform the Internet, making media literacy a part of our every day lives.

Kids under the age of 18 may not be able to vote, but that doesn’t mean they can’t participate in the election. There are numerous online sites out there that provide activities to try to engage youth in the presidential election. I’m skeptical of the aims behind some of these sites that come from major media companies, as I am with most things that come innocuously packaged from media corporations (NBC’s olympic coverage has been the single, greatest branding exercise of any one event and period of time). That being said, I think that some of the election web portals for youth have a real opportunity to engage our children about the election as well as explore the ways media are used to wage presidential campaigns.

Enter scholastic.com.

They have launched an interactive presidential election hub that invites both educators and youth to discuss, explore and critique the 2008 Election. I invite you to do the same. I particularly enjoyed the Create a Campaign Poster under Games and Quizzes, where students are asked to use images and text to convey a political message.

Now that’s right up our alley…

This is a “Wordle” cloud. Also known as a ‘cloud tag’, which is a way to label posts on a blog or pictures in a Flickr account and provide readers/viewers an easier way to navigate to content that matches their interest.

Wordle is a site that allows you to take your own blog, any website that has an RSS feed, or a bunch of text and create a cloud. The larger the word, the more instances of it in the blog/feed/text. They also have amassed a gallery of all the clouds that others have created. The one at the top of this post was created by an anonymous user on the term “media literacy”.

I’m fascinated by the use of these clouds. They deliver a message in a very interesting way, boiling down what someone says to content. It completely disregards context, dispatching with any notion of perspective or world view the author may have.

Does it present information in an important, revealing manner? It certainly presents it in an interesting and new way. To demonstrate this, the cloud on the left was generated when someone took Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia and the one on the right was generated from the text of President George Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address.  I think it’s interesting to compare the two. Eye-opening, no. But definitely a new way to engage someone in the discussion.

*due to technical difficulties, I was unable to create a wordle for The LAMP’s website – bummer!

I myself am not a particular enthusiast of typefaces and fonts, but a very smart review of FontStruct recently appeared in slate.com by Jason Fagone, who is a typeface enthusiast.  The article is well worth reading, commenting as it does on the role of typography in history and the power of how letters are designed, not to mention yet another Web 2.0 community that may one day be comparable to YouTube.

And if you ever doubted the power of typeface to send a subliminal message, take a look at this–if nothing else, it’s good for a chuckle.

Don’t throw them out.  There’s a better way to get rid of them.  For phones, many cell phone shops will take your old device and either recycle it or donate it to a charity.  The same holds true for computers.  Many neighborhoods also hold e-waste events from time to time, which serve as safe dumping grounds for anything electronic.

If you’re busy and can’t find time to get down to the store with your stuff, there are also websites like myboneyard.com, which will make the process ridiculously easy.  Register on their website and give them some information about what you’re recycling.  Not only will they send you a prepaid shipping label, they’ll send you a check for the current market value and wipe all your personal and private data from the computer, phone or PDA.   So get to it–you officially have no excuse!