Give me truth-telling over more transparency

The flourishing community of Web-based blogmeisters – some of them skilled journalists, many of them fervent partisans – is transforming the climate in which ideas are floated and tested…. One recurring theme in Internet comment targets the unwillingness of journalists in mainstream media (known as MSM, generally a pejorative) to admit to having opinions of…

Evil, Evil, Evil

Evil, Evil, Evil (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) For the past few days, this blog has been getting comment-spammed one or two times per hour, and my network of student blogs is getting hit with spams that contain URLs with increasingly crude language. I’ve spent over an hour today, and between the two different sites (and two different…

My Four Minutes

The key to a successful defense is not answering the questions they ask you, but figuring out how to give them the answers you have prepared, no matter what questions they ask. The same, I understand now, is true of television or radio interviews. If they aren’t soliciting the answers you’ve rehearsed, you have to…

Game on!

There’s a hot concept called “stealth education” that says it’s possible for people to play a game because they enjoy it and “accidentally” learn stuff along the way. Unfortunately, the concept has yet to prove its worth with the pre-teen and teen community. But what if educational games rivaled the quality and game-play of today’s…