Ok…so you’re too lazy to actually go and create your own personalized search feed for New York Times content? (Go here and add source:new_york_times to your search terms. Tough, huh?) Well then this site is for you. The Annotated New York Times will supply you with hundreds of search specific feeds to Times content, including the ever popular subjects “bars,” “beer” and “bombs and explosives.” (I’m in a “B” mood…)

But here’s the best part: you can also get an RSS feed that tracks any blogosphere references to the articles included in the search specific feeds. So, you want to see what the Times is writing about education and schools? Here’s the feed. But if you also want to know what people are saying about what the Times is writing about education and schools, here’s that feed.

And you can do the same with your favorite New York Times authors.

Mercy.

And don’t forget that it’s easy to get around that “link to a story in the NYT archives” problem. You did know that bloggers (and anyone else if they know about it) have free access to the archives, didn’t you? Just take the original link and paste it into the form on the New York Times Link Generator page. It will generate (duh) a new link to the full story that you can actually view. Then, of course, you need to Furl it.

Should I be worried that this gives me chills? Amazing what we can do with information these days.

Most certainly to be added to the RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators v. 1.6…
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Pretty interesting article in yesterday’s USA Today on the growing uses of wikis in government circles. Get this:

The communities of practice wiki is not the only one drawing federal officials’ fascination. Patrick Hogan, learning technologies program manager at NASA, depends on a wiki site to program NASA software. An open-source program, NASA World Wind, lets users look at satellite imagery. They can peer into the Grand Canyon or follow the Nile River from its source, Lake Victoria, or leap over the Himalayas. Users in metropolitan areas can view street-level imagery. The program is popular, judging by the 2 million people who have downloaded it despite its 200M size.

And now those 2 million people — or anyone else — can suggest modifications to the program. A private enterprise, not affiliated with NASA, recently launched a wiki site called World Wind Central.

“These folks are not being paid by NASA at all and yet are providing a tremendous service to NASA,” Hogan said. The development community has donated hundreds of hours of coding effort, including a search tool for NASA World Wind’s 5 million locations and a mouse-over effect that simulates gravity’s varying strength worldwide, he said. Hogan routinely participates in the wiki and thanks outside developers. He has only a handful of full- and part-time employees, so he appreciates the free labor.

Wiki life is good, eh?
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So I guess you could say that I’m getting a bit defensive these days about people questioning the safety of using blogs in the classroom. Last week it was the Vermont principal. Yesterday it was the English supervisor at my school. Oy.

Let me first say that it wasn’t so much her as it was a reporter who had been contacted by one of our advanced journalism students who was looking for someone to mentor her in her Weblog. The reporter, who had not been previously contacted by anyone at the school, proceeded to call the English supervisor and proclaim that it put our school “in a very bad light” when we tell kids to contact people over the Internet that they don’t know. Oy-yoi-yoi.

I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up before the story was even half finished, and I launched into some intense, raised voice argument about how kids are doing this outside of school all the time and that isn’t it better that we’re doing teaching them about the responsibility that goes along with it blah, blah, blah, blah. Even though the girl has a different teacher, the supervisor wanted to know if I vetted mentors when I instituted the practice in the course three years ago. I told her my process was to find reporters through contacts and through links at professional organizations. And that I talked to my kids about various scenarios and what to do if any of them occurred. And that I trusted the kids to act responsibly. And that the idea that a pedophile was going to tell me as much if I had contacted him/her beforehand to see if he/she would be interested in being a mentor was, well, unlikely to say the least.

When I finally stopped for a breath, I could tell I was overreacting juuusssst a bit. Oy.

And so then tonight, what do I find but this article which asks the very relevant questions:

Are we creating kids hooked on instant gratification? With no sense of consequence for their actions? Who don’t know the difference between what’s private and public, and who are forever in search of an audience? Kids who don’t take deadlines and commitments seriously because they are in perpetual communication?

Sigh. These are toughies, and the article goes to great lengths to paint the very confusing picture of what all of this might be doing to our kids. The worst part is, as a source from Pew says in the story, we’re just going to have to wait and see.

Which begs the bigger question, one that I seem to keep posing more and more often…what, exactly, are we doing to help kids see that there are consequences for their actions online, that there is a big difference between private and public, that just because there is a whole universe out there that wants instant communication, there is still a great deal to be learned from persistence and commitment? How are schools modeling and teaching effective uses of the technologies that kids are immersed in?

Oy.
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