Paul's Web Space 2.1

Edweek.org Sponsors Teachers College Debate, Produces Election Multimedia

The web site I manage, edweek.org, cosponsored and facilitated the live Webcast of a debate Tuesday evening at Teachers College between the top education policy advisers to the Presidential campaigns — Linda Darling-Hammond, an adviser for Sen. Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan, Sen. John McCain's top education adviser. Education Week also organized a post-debate panel discussion featuring an array of education policy experts and moderated by Education Week reporter David Hoff, which we videotaped for later viewing.

In addition to the complete debate and panel discussion, we created several clips of discussions on policy issues of interest to our readers, and posted them to related blog. Our Teacher Beat blog discussed teacher preparation and motivation in At Ed Debate, Sparks Fly Over Merit Pay, TFA, and the Campaign K-12 blog posted their impressions of Keegan's and Darling-Hammond's answers to the question Who's Going to Be Education Secretary?. Finally, our producers performed a word cloud analysis of the debate text – In a Word, 'Teachers' Are Center of Debate – described in the blog NCLB Act II.

Elsewhere, our web team created a cool online trivia game – How Well Do you Know the Presidential Candidates? – where you try to guess which candidate uttered various statements about education policy. Also included is a Voter's Guide comparing and contrasting McCain and Obama's positions on various education policy issues. We've collected these features and more on our new Campaign 2008 Multimedia and Interactive Coverage page, along with running Twitter streams displaying "Tweets" about the campaign in general (we're Twittering as @edweek2008elect), and specifically about the Teachers College debate — we created the hashtag #tcdebate for the purpose, which actually spent much of Tuesday evening atop Twitter's Hot Election Topics. These presentations have enhanced our coverage of the election campaign, and exposed our work to new audiences.

Labels: education, edweek, politics, tcdebate, Teachers College, twitter

   Link: http://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/campaign08/mm_coverage.html

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Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and the topic of action today is Poverty. Since I personally use the web for my activism and other forms of social action, I'll try to convey some ways that you can do the same.


First, there are two extremely easy ways to do a little bit to help eliminate poverty. The Hunger Site donates the proceeds of site advertising to charities that fight hunger in the U.S. and internationally. There is also a store where you can buy cool gifts and donate to fight hunger, and there are related sites that donate to child health and literacy, two other causes that impact poverty around the world. A similarly easy (but addictive) initiative to combat hunger is Free Rice, a game that rewards correct answers in vocabulary, geography, and other subjects with a gift of 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program.

If you want to give more directly to initiatives that help poor people improve their lot, there are many online charities that accept donations. Two of my favorite are also partnering with Blog Action Day. Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world; track your donations to Blog Action Day here.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is accepting donations through Blog Action Day partner Change.org. I have an account on that social action network, which is in the midst of a facelift, but I see a lot of energy being expended there and all over the net today, raising awareness and money in support of ending poverty.


Finally, the Blog Action Day site is full of ideas, including answers to the question "What can one person do?" Let's all try to do something today and into the future to end hunger, improve sanitation, fight disease, and everything else necessary to fight poverty around the globe.

Labels: bad08, blog, poverty

   Link: http://blogactionday.org/

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ONA08 Day Two - Tina Brown, Semantic Web

The main sessions of the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference were held September 12 (my birthday:) and September 13. First up was a keynote address by Tina Brown. Some may have wondered why Tina Brown – former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and author of a book on Princess Di – was speaking at an online news event, but she made it plain to see, offering an interesting take on what's missing in the online news space, and announcing her latest venture. This month she launched the Daily Beast, a news aggregation service that features content selected by 20 or so live editors, rather than utilizing automation to pick stories — offering content designed to appeal to "the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.” She was coy about details, but opened up a little more to Jeff Jarvis the night before. Not the most insightful talk, but it was interesting to hear the perspective of an old-school magazine type trying to navigate the waters of Web 2.0.

The first session I attended was a presentation by Marik Bide, project director of the Automated Content Access protocol (ACAP), a new European initiative that would provide the ability for news stories and other content to specify what uses are permitted. It's aimed particularly at search engines, but as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, seems to violate the basic tenets of the "link economy" that enable the Web to thrive. He was even harder on ACAP in his conference wrap-up, also directing criticism at ONA for emphasizing old-school news and its approach to the web rather than actively seeking our new types of news organizations and companies. Even though I work for an old-school newspaper, I've worked in the web and online space much longer, and I can see where he's coming from to a point. However, there were exceptions to his critique.

The next panel I attended, The Next New Metrics, tried to divine coming trends in audience measurement, beyond the page view. The most interesting presenter was Matt Cutler of Visible Measures, which specializes in measuring the consumption and distribution of Internet video; he stated emphatically that advertisers want more video – it consistently commands the highest CPMs and sells out inventory – so our charge is to create more video content, and presumably the money will follow.

Finally, I watched presentations of a couple interesting new developments in the Semantic Web space, first from Tom Tague of OpenCalais, a tool from Thompson/Reuters that enables automated tagging of content with rich semantic information — more semantic, but less of a "wow" application, at least yet, and available for free to all users. Then we heard from Tristan Harris of Apture, which gives publishers the ability to quickly link key concepts or details in their stories with a variety of multimedia and background information, all without leaving the page — less purely semantic, but with a more immediate payoff. This tool is available for free to bloggers and nonprofit publishers.

Labels: freeculture, journalism, metrics, ona08, semantic web, video

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/

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