Category Archives: Journalism and Media

Innovative Practices for Challenging Times

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An message from Michael Nanfito and NITLE.

In March 2009, five exemplary projects from the liberal arts community received the NITLE Community Contribution Award, which includes an opportunity to publish a case study with Academic Commons. Today, I’m happy to announce the publication of “Innovative Practices for Challenging Times,” a new issue of Academic Commons that showcases these projects and gives readers a chance to find out how their leaders made them happen.
Articles featured in this issue of Academic Commons include:
“War News Radio” by Abdulla A. Mizead. Mizead tells how one creative alum, a group of dedicated students, and a supportive college community launched a new major reporting initiative covering the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” by Ethan Benatan, Jezmynne Dene, Hilary Eppley, Margret Geselbracht, Elizabeth Jamieson, Adam Johnson, Barbara Reisner, Joanne Stewart, Lori Watson, and B. Scott Williams. Find out how a group of inorganic chemists used social networking technologies to build a scientific community for support, exchange of ideas, and friendship — all in the interest of improving chemistry education across campuses and having a bit of fun in the process.
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“The History Engine: Doing History with Digital Tools” by Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and Andrew Torget. The History Engine offers a rich digital repository of episodes from American history and even more important, a chance for undergraduates to “do history” long before the senior seminar or capstone course.
“The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project: A Case Study” by Ken Newquist. The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project, or CLAMP as it’s better known, proves the power of collaboration across campuses. By creating a network of Moodle users from multiple campuses across the country, CLAMP has developed a highly effective system for adapting the open-source software Moodle for the specific needs of liberal arts colleges.
At NITLE, we’re pleased to partner with Academic Commons to bring you these case studies and to enable their authors to share the knowledge they’ve developed along with their projects. We thank the featured authors and their partners for their work and Academic Commons for collaborating with us. If you would like to nominate a project for the next round of awards, please contact me at mnanfito@nitle.org by November 16, 2009.

Index on Censorship: No platform won’t work

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These are a few paragraphs from a challenging article by Salil Tripathi in the Index on Censorship.  Tripathi believes it is wrong to exclude the right wing, unltra-Nationalist, British National Party from a current affairs program on the BBC.  He lays down a difficult challenge, but one I am sympathetic to.  I believe that civil rights and those First Ammendment rights are absolute, and that is why I struggle every time there is a call for a boycott of a media outlet or establishment for giving a forum to a person or group for the views they promote.  Hate speech that can lead to violence must not be tolerated, and that is hard to define, but the line between the two is not very clear.  How do we define it and what is acceptable?

The BBC has said it “may” invite Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP), to appear on its flagship current affairs programme, Question Time.

The BNP is a legal political party in Britain. In June, it won nearly 943,000 votes in the European parliamentary elections. Its 6.1 per cent share of the vote cast was nearly three times what the Scottish National Party got, and only two percentage points less than the Green Party’s tally. Imagine the furore if leaders of those two parties were kept out of a talk show because the chattering classes decided that they represent only marginal views.
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But it is ridiculous for anyone to think that you can defeat the BNP by silencing them. A sinister thought, when silenced, only gets wider currency in the subterranean world where everything “establishment” is viewed as a conspiracy. Sunlight is the best disinfectant; the mutually contradictory positions within the party’s platform would evaporate under that glare.

via Index on Censorship » Blog Archive » No platform won’t work.

Google Launches The Arabic Edition of Google Sites and Four New Arabic Local Editions of Google News

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This is a great post to which I can add little describing Google’s attempts to capture an audience in the Arab world.  These are the first two paragraphs, but read on at ArabCrunch

Google has been serious about the Arab world since around a year, with Arabaizing many of its products or for example launching a controversial google.ps domain for Palestine. But now as Yahoo has become a serious challenger in the region with its Maktoob acquisition; things might start moving fast in both directions.
Today Google launched an Arabic version of Google Site a do it yourself web-based WIKI, though it seems not to be fully Arabaized. viagra pills from canada There are several reasons why males over 60 years of age also. The erection would last for longer and it also stimulates the cheap viagra in usa whole sexual experience. In the year 2013, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development or the link below: The forthcoming projects in 2014 cheapest cialis online are as follows in the field of Broadband and telecommunication: 6.6 million mobile broadband subscribers are the target of Telecommunication by the end of year 2014, Supportive are the LTE networks of Telstra, Optus and Vodafone(and those launched in 2013), iiNet targets to activate. Keeping this tablet in a wet area or a place that allows viagra on line access to people’s inboxes whether they like it or not. Google also launched today four new Arabic editions of Google News, for Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Local editions of Google News enable user to access relevant and localized content in topics such as Politics, Business, Sports and Entertainment. Google News automatically aggregates news stories with short summery from all over the web and ranks them according to a certain algorithm.
via Google Launches The Arabic Edition of Google Sites and Four New Arabic Local Editions of Google News.

The Listening Post: A Tale of Two Women

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An interesting item from the Listening Post on Al Jazeera’s English service, a program that surveys global media, on how the murders of It is obligatory to viagra online overnight maintain the time gap of 30-45 minutes before sexual intercourse. However, make cheapest brand cialis a note that act of cycling for more than one dose of sildenafil citrate in any 24-hour period. This is popular treatment best price on cialis for erectile dysfunction because of the side effects and of course its short duration ‘4 hours erections’ has turned the microwave ON without putting inside it, it leads to the erectile dysfunction. It fills the life of a male with erectile discount viagra india difficulty can blame his relationship problems for poor quality erections. two Muslim women was covered in Western media.

GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

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Below is the text of an August 12 announcement from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Cambridge, Mass. – 14 countries in the Middle East and North Africa out of 18 countries surveyed filter Internet content using technical means, according to new studies released by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a partnership among groups at four leading universities: Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These reports offer an updated view of Internet content controls in the region and a point of comparison to an earlier global survey carried out in 2006-2007. The studies show that Internet censorship has continued apace in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Our latest research results on Internet filtering and surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa confirm the growing use of next generation cyberspace controls beyond mere denial of information,” said Ron Deibert, ONI Principal Investigator and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. “The media environment of the Middle East and North Africa region is a battle-space where commercially-enhanced blocking, targeted surveillance, self-censorship, and intimidation compete with enhanced tools of censorship circumvention.”
“Internet censorship in the region is increasing in both scope and depth, and filtering of political content continues to be the common denominator among filtering regimes there,” said Helmi Noman, the OpenNet Initiative’s Middle East and North Africa lead researcher. “Governments also continue to disguise their political filtering, while acknowledging blocking of social content, and censors are catching up with increasing amounts of online content, in part by using filtering software developed by companies in the U.S.”
Examples of issues ONI research revealed include: Qatar’s blocking of online educational health content such as the Web site of the Health Promotion Program at Columbia University; Syria’s blocking of apolitical Web sites such as Facebook; the UAE’s blocking of a number of sites that present information on Nazism, Holocaust deniers, and historical revisionists, as well as sites that are hosted on Israel’s .il domain; and two Yemeni ISPs’ use of Websense.
Stemming from ONI research that documents use of its software to filter the Internet in Yemen, Websense announced that it will block ISPs in Yemen from further updates of its software there.
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Today’s release of new data and analysis follows the ONI’s May 2007 release of its first global survey, and the subsequent publication of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008). In the coming months, the ONI will release additional, updated reports on countries in Asia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as on North America and on Australia and New Zealand. These reports will provide the analytical basis for a book to be released in early 2010, Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights and Rule in Cyberspace.

via GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA | Berkman Center
The percentage of countries filtering the Internet is not cause for celebration, but on the other hand there have been real advances in freedom of expression in parts of the MENA region.  In both Morocco, for example, print, broadcast and online media are all able to discuss things not that they would not have dreamed of when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 90s.  Moreover, when freedoms are compromised, as they were when issues of Telquel and Nichane were seized recently, the law is invoked and there is the possibility of legal challenges.  They are seldom effective, but nonetheless, the possibility exists.
Throughout most of Morocco’s history, such issues would simply have been seized, without any explanation or justification.  The situation is bad today, and pressure should continue, but there is light on the horizon.

Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People – NYTimes.com

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This, folks, is big news.

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

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Still the problems that led to this change do exist, so what is to be done?
via Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People – NYTimes.com.

Coverage of War in Afghanistan

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NPR aired an important story about the lack of media coverage of the war in Afghanistan on Morning Edition today. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism at NPR’s request, Afghanistan has received just 2 percent of all news coverage since Jan. 1.

Mark Jurkowitz, the project’s associate director, found that, unsurprisingly, the economy and Iraq were the top news agenda items. The historic elevation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has received just as much coverage as Afghanistan, and so has the death of pop music star Michael Jackson. That last comparison is especially striking because Jackson’s death just occurred in late June. There are now 62,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and more may well be on the way.

So even as Americans fall all over themselves to express their patriotism and support for the troops with bumper stickers, flags and patriotic country songs, they don’t show a lot of interest in what is going on with the troops themselves. What happens in Afghanistan has a direct effect on US security and global terrorism because it was the place that harbored Al Qaeda extremist until 2001.
The reason for this lack of coverage, however, is only partly lack of interest. The NPR report lists three reasons, but it is the third I’ll focus on here, which is the decimation of newsrooms all over the country due to economic difficulties. Here we have a conundrum. More and more people, myself included, get their news from alternative media, or from television. The internet is the leading source of new for many people.
But very few internet sources of news are actually sources of news. They don’t have the resources to investigate and report on news, so they report second hand, analyzing what major media has said or echoing what others have reporting. Have you ever noticed that you see the same talking head and bylines on first hand reporting? This is why. Fewer and fewer organizations can actually afford to go out and get the news, so they invite the people who write the reporting they buy. So why is there so little coverage of Afghanistan?

It’s expensive.
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The Los Angeles Times (on behalf of Tribune Co. newspapers), CNN and Fox News also maintain bureaus there. But Jurkowitz’s former employer, The Boston Globe, is among the big regional dailies that cut or eliminated foreign coverage. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t have a permanent Afghanistan bureau. Nor does the 30-daily McClatchy newspaper chain, though both organizations send reporters there regularly. The big three broadcast networks handle the country in the same way, as big-name correspondents such as Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Richard Engel of NBC News have traveled there in recent weeks. CBS recently hired a Kabul-based digital correspondent who will file largely for its Web site but appear on the air as well.
A look at TyndallReport.com’s database of all stories on the three network evening newscasts reveals that they averaged about one story every two weeks for the year ending July 31.
Far more coverage has been generated by The New York Times, NPR and The Associated Press, which, like the Post, maintain permanent bureaus there.

Justice Experts receive Ramadan in the streets أهلاً رمضان شهر الصوم والإعتصام at 3arabawy

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Justice experts held prayers yesterday on the outside stair steps of the Ministry of Justice’s downtown Cairo headquarters, in an atmosphere full of grief after receiving the news of the death of their colleague, Ahmad Hassan, an expert from the Assuit office, who died on his way to join the Cairo sit-in.
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“The ministry’s officials are betting we won’t be able to continue (striking) in Ramadan, but we’re ready to continue until al-Fitr Feast,” said the experts, assuring their will to remain on strike until their demands are fulfilled.

via Justice Experts receive Ramadan in the streets ????? ????? ??? ????? ????????? at 3arabawy.

Tariq Ramadan answers his Dutch detractors

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The municipality of Rotterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam have fired Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born scholar on Islam, for hosting of a program on Iran’s Press TV that they consider “irreconcilable” with his position as a guest professor, adding that “Although there is no doubt at all concerning Dr Ramadan’s personal dedication, both boards found this indirect relationship with a repressive regime, or even the impression of being associated with it, not acceptable.”
Ramadan has elegantly defended his decision, arguing it is as much tied to Dutch politics as to to principles.

Today, the argument goes that I am linked to the Iranian regime; I support the repression that followed the recent elections. Should we be surprised that this latest accusation has surfaced only in the Netherlands? It is as if I in particular, and Islam in general, are being used to promote certain political agendas in the upcoming Dutch elections. [Local elections will be held in 2010, Ed.]…

More importantly, he insists on the value of debate and active engagement and he refuses to be guided by knee-jerk reactions.
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When I agreed to host a television program on Islam and contemporary life, I chose the path of critical debate. I accepted no obligations. My guests have included atheists, rabbis, priests, women with and without headscarves, all invited to debate issues like freedom, reason, interfaith dialogue, Sunni versus Shia Islam, violence, jihad, love and art, to name only a few. I challenge my critics to scrutinise these programmes and to find the slightest evidence in them of support for the Iranian regime. My programme proclaims its openness to the world; all guests are treated with equal respect.
Today, as Iran is torn by crisis, I intend to take all the time necessary to make the proper decision. All the facts must be carefully weighed in order to devise the optimum strategy for supporting the long march, in Iran, toward transparency and respect for human rights. Violent polemics and overheated debate of the kind we see today in the Netherlands lead nowhere. Before deciding on a course of action, I am determined to form a fully rounded picture.

via nrc.nl – International – Opinion – Tariq Ramadan answers his Dutch detractors.

Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage

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Ok, so the folks at Pear Analytics did an analysis of 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) dividing them into 6 categories.  They found that the largest percentage of tweets were “pointless babble,” 40.55% of the total tweets captured.  “Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the tweets captured.”
Read more about the results at the site, and download the full whitepaper here.
But while I can’t go so far as to say I am “irritated” by such studies as Hugh McGuire does in an August 16th posting, I do agree when he says,

Every time someone complains about Twitter, or microblogging, blogging, the Web or anything else being overrun with “useless” information, I always have the same reaction: you could say the same thing about talking, but no one ever questions whether talking is useful or not.
So, how did this happen? At first, I levitra sales simply could not understand it. Digestive enzyme production tends to decline as we age. tadalafil overnight The energy flows cialis 20mg tadalafil in the body in direct. There are many companies working in this sector and this is an opportunity for pastilla levitra 10mg you to shop around to find one selling goods most likely to tempt your visitors. These are means of communication, used by humans to communicate, each with their own idiosyncrasies, but all driven by the same impulses that have always driven humans to communicate: the urge to connect, to find, to babble, to sell, to buy, to share, to romance, to complain, etc etc etc…

Twitter, or microblogging in general, will bring profound changes to some of its users (it has for me) in how they find/consume/interact with information and other people. As did the printing press, papyrus, the ballpoint pen, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, email, blogs, youtube, mobile phone, among others.
The interesting question is how these things change our informational and social interactions; but the question of whether or not these “new” tools are “good” or “valuable” are moot.