Balanced and insightful views from a source I deeply trust:

A Review of Verizon and Google's Net Neutrality Proposal | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Oddly enough, I'm back on a couple of Google apps like Calendar because Anna wanted to re-establish our calendar sharing there (and my iCal import wasn't working well enough for her). Marriage > Principles, I reckon. Plus the new GMail interface is pretty and my students all use my Google Voice number and it works so well and Google Reader is so much better than anything else and I can edit Google Docs on my iPad... ah, stupid entrapment.

Huh?

Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered « OOO: "Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site."

"Maybe not so much" as my daughter would say. Just had to share that gleaming nugget from a post full of misguided righteous indignation over a common occurrence on the "social" web. I've never gotten much into the crazy world of online politickin' despite my activity in our precinct (currently serving as Vice-Chair, former Chair). Seems to me that instead of politics and religion, we should be uncomfortable when "social media" and politics start getting intertwined. /rant

Thomas and I have rebooted the Thinking Baptists podcast:

Thinking.FM - ThinkingFM - Thinking Baptists 10: Tent Pole in the Temple

Here is the mp3 (btw, when is someone going to make a good HTML 5 enabled podcast player? I don't want to waste time/resources on a Flash player since they aren't iOS supported and you can't play them on iPhones or iPads in the browser). We'll be doing the show on a weekly basis (looks like Monday or Tuesday night) again, so head over to the still-developing Thinking.FM site and grab the RSS feed if you'd like to subscribe. We should be back in iTunes shortly. I'll keep you posted.

Ah, America... obama.mp3

Fantastic article on cultivating creativity in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

"Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions."

Amen. Made me tear up when I read that portion as I reflect on my incredibly inquisitive preschool daughter and her 1,000 questions-a-day rate compared to the resistance many of my 8th Grade students have to asking questions. I hope she never changes. Ever. Nullius in verba and all that. However, out of the ruins that have become our nationalized education system at large, I see tiny daisies of local promise sprouting up. We're on the verge of a major educational reform that will occur from the ground up. It won't be an overnight process, but my childrens' children will grow up with a very different system of education that is based on creativity, critical thinking and sustainability. Viva la revolution and here's to the crazy ones.