Social Journalism and Education

Woody Lewis at Mashable writes that on-line social media have replaced the traditional newspaper/magazine media as sources of fast breaking on-the-ground news.

To grasp the power of social media think of the citizens who caught the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD 30 years ago. They could have turned off their cameras and called 911 or the LA Times but did not. Todays citizen advocacy and investigative blogs play a similar role. Lewis explains:

The Web is now the sole distribution channel for newspapers that can no longer afford to publish hardcopy, and those that don’t follow the best practices of social media may see their brands marginalized in cyberspace as well. Social journalism, an extension of those practices, is now an essential component of any news organization’s strategy.

Citizen journalists post photos of fast-breaking events, and cover stories from a different angle than legacy news organizations, but it’s the premeditated watchdog or advocacy role that defines a social journalist. Another factor is the network effect: people using social media to communicate and collaboratively produce content. Editors are still important, but the pieces are shaped by crowd dynamics and the velocity of information.

Lewis' post runs through the past-present-future of social media and is worth a close read. He sees advocacy blogs with an investigative bent as playing a major role going forward.

Take-away

Progressive educators frequently complain about the educational coverage in news and the retrograde policies pushed by even progressive politicians. On-line educational journalism by teachers and students, documenting school conditions and amplfying the voices of concerned teachers and students, would offer a counterpoint and a pressure for change.

Blogging Tips

The Commission on Social Issues and our blog, Social Issues, aim to help scholars and progressive educators contribute to the discussion and resolution of social, cultural and educational issues.

Blogging is an important channel of communication about these issues. The public, engaged scholar-intellectual of today can get ideas circulating by joining the blogosphere.

Social Issues will frequently share ideas about blogging, and encourages its readers to blog, both here at SI and on their own.

We have already mentioned Chris Garrett as a source of great ideas on blogging.

Another source is Lorelle VanFossen, who blogs at Lorelle on Wordpress. Although much of the content is about the wordpress blogging platform, Lorelle is full of great ideas about blogging and writing in general.

In her post today Lorelle writes about the popular author Peter McWilliams and his motivational books Life 101 and Do It, demonstrating how McWilliam's style and approach to his topics offer great lessons for bloggers.

She says:

Blogging is about confidence, confidence in your subject matter and self-confidence that keeps you returning to your blog, persistently publishing . . . Blogging is about overcoming your fears. It’s about making mistakes and learning to live with it. It’s about the courage to say what needs to be said, no matter what anyone else says or thinks.

Life 101 and Do It! address the issues of what gets in our way and stops us from moving forward, especially when the path is a creative one that requires courage and faith in our abilities. It’s so easy to turn back when someone says something nasty . . . or insults your expertise

All of us hoping to advance progressive ideas in our conservative and frequently corrupt society have something to learn about the courage to move forward.

Citizen Journalism

The website Helium is partnering with various public interest groups to sponsor awards for citizen journalism on a number of topics of interest to members of JDS.

As it is the prime mission of the Commission on Social Issues to encourage citizen journalism among JDS members, this project should have special interest.You may remember Dewey's abortive collaboration with Franklin Ford, his complaint that the mainstream media were mostly scandal sheets failing to get behind lurid stories to the social processes responsible for them, and his complementary desire to bring more of the newspaper business into philosophy. So here is one already organized outlet.

Here is the lead from Helium:

Are you a real citizen journalist?
Helium's Citizen Journalism Awards cover a broad spectrum of issues: technology against world poverty, presidential candidates' health records, protecting animals by eating stem-cell-grown meat and the conflicts along Columbia's borders.

Show us your skills and get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers.

Here is more:

The time has come to rethink what it means to be a journalist. If you have what it takes to research topics and issues, lend an objective voice and write compelling articles, then you are a citizen journalist. Helium is bringing together the worlds of traditional news reporting and community-based journalism to create a site that citizen journalists call home.

Are you ready to report and write? Helium encourages you to report everything from local issues happening in your town to pressing global and environmental issues. As a citizen journalist writing at Helium, you’ll get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers. Here’s where to build a diverse portfolio of top-quality articles to help jump-start your career.

Guidance for Writers from J.K. Rowling

Caroline Miller at Positive Psychology Digest provides an inspiring post on the Harvard commencement address of J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.

In addition to a link to a video of the address itself, a video which will certainly be endlessly viewed in the coming months, Miller provides a very useful summary.

Briefly, Rowling hit on the following themes:

1. Don’t be afraid of failure. Rowling described herself as an utter and complete failure as she set out to write the only thing she’d ever wanted to do – tell an engaging story about a young boy named Harry Potter. At that point, she was extremely poor, a single mother, and a disappointment to herself and her parents, who had not wanted her to experience the same poverty they’d experienced, as well. With nothing left but her authentic heart’s desire of writing, Rowling said that she went after her dreams with gusto because she’d already lost everything external, and there was nothing left to lose anymore.

2. Treasure your friends. Rowling implored the audience to tend to the friendships they’d made at school because she noted that these relationships were what sustained her.

3. Use your imagination to have empathy for others. This part of Rowling’s speech was the most powerful and memorable by far. In moving terms, she described her job at Amnesty International when she was in her twenties, and how she’d seen courage and compassion exhibited by the Amnesty International workers on numerous occasions. She asked everyone in attendance to use their intellectual talents to do more than accumulate money or possessions, and to instead imagine the pain and plight of those less fortunate to be generous with their time and energy.

Many academic authors long to have a wider audience for their thoughts, and an opportunity to make a real difference in life. We need to turn our souls from the very real but limited allure of academic recognition and start learning how to write for those wider audiences.

Making SOCIAL ISSUES a Useful Blog

Chris Garrett, a trustworthy source of blogging advice, offers very helpful tips about how to make a blog useful .

He notes that some readers will be regulars, while others will have come to the site through a link while searching for:

1. Specific information
2. A solution to a problem
3. News and commentary about current events
4. Ideas, concepts, tips, education
5. Further details of the information they have found
6. General information on the subject area

Keeping this in mind supplies us with a checklist of six types of useful posts.

Chris adds that to make the visitor happy, a blog post should:

1. Promise benefits in your titles and headlines and actually deliver on it.
2. Make your navigation suit the missions your readers are on.
3. On your homepage provide links for first time visitors who want to explore and long time visitors who read via the web and not RSS.
4. Individual articles should provide the content they promise, then provide links to more on the same subject.
5. Add clear signposts to all your best or most publication-defining "flagship" posts, while keeping your visitor on the scent of their hunt with series, related articles and category links.

Dewey's Experimental Logic and the Scholarship of Engagement

John Dewey's experimental logic is neatly outlined in the three chapters on the stages of thought in Studies in Logical Theory. These three stages are useful in thinking about the scholarship of engagement.

On Dewey's account, actors are caught up in the stream of human events. Some of these are moving along without much friction, and thought is primarily qualitative and intuitive. Others are meeting with resistance or generating conflict. At this first stage, thought is more or less effortless and it not itself the main focus of consciousness. (Dewey will later call this stage that of primary experience).

But hesitation from resistance or conflict brings thinking to the center of consciousness. Thought sets out to map the situation, define problems, establish inquiries, gather data, consider the relevance of on-the-shelf knowledge, and draw and confirm conclusions. (Dewey will later call this secondary experience).

This second stage ends when thought knows where it stands. The third stage begins as the results of thought are placed back on the table of primary experience, along with other factors considered relevant by actors in the situation, as resources for finding a way beyond hesitation, beyond resistance and conflict. The results of thought can then be evaluated as instruments in restoring balance, in restoring the flow of experiernce.

In Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, Dewey considered the institutional setting of thought. The research university is the primary institutional home of the second stage of thought. In disciplined inquiry thought generates its own problems, which generate new lines of inquiry or even entirely new disciplines. Logic, epistemology, statistics, research methodology, are all among these tertiary contexts of thought -- thought serving those other areas of thought that serve primary experience.

The ramifications of thought within the university are vast and unpredictable. However, the results of these tertiary disciplines must be judged by how well they open up and contribute to work in e.g., sociology, psychology, and geography. Just as sociology is the study of society and its problems and conflicts, logic is the theory of inquiries in the various fields and disciplines. And the results of thought in these secondary disciplines must similarly be judged by how well they contribute to restoring the flow of primary experience by aiding actors in moving beyond hesitation and getting on with their affairs without resistance and conflict.

As Dewey puts it, the test of thought lies outside of thought. That is, work within university disciplines is subjected to a double test. First it must meet the staandards imposed by the approved methods within the discipline. The work does not yield "results" until that happens. But then these results themselves must be tested in the flow of experience that lies on the other side of the second stage of thought. It is in this sense that knowledge is good only if it works in experience.

This framework assigns two roles for the scholarship of engagement.

On the input side, problems framed for inquiry must be sensitive at some point, and in some way, to the real world needs that give rise to disciplined thought. There must, in other words, be a scholarship of engagement at the input point, at the border between the first stage of thought and the second, that influences the research agenda. Scholarship regarding the economics of the world food supply, in other words, must be alive to the doubts, hesitations, resistances and conflicts which make the food situation unbalanced or disturbed. There must be scholars in the field, so to speak, with in-person, face to face knowledge of farmers, hungry people, refugees, multi-national corporate decision makers, non-governmental organizations and social movement activists.

There also has to be a scholarship of engagement at the output side. This is a scholarship of translating academic knowledge into knowledge resources for practical ends, working with knowledge users, discovering what is useful and what is notin practice. And then communicating those discoveries back into the academy in such a way as to modify the research agenda so that subsequent academic work won't remain sterile and irrelevant.

The test of primary experience does not apply to each and every inquiry within academia. At the input stage it is the research agenda that is subject to this test. At the output stage it is the collective results of a field that are tested in this way. Within academia, that is, within the second stage of thought, there are all manner of internal inquiries, which may arguably be necessary to take up the problems of the world and move towards potentially useful conclusions confirmed by accepted methods. But if academic knowledge is to be more than a sterile game, it requires a scholarship of engagement to test its worth in primary experience and redirect it if it fails that test.

Writing to Make a Difference and Change the World

Tired of writing to hear your own voice? No longer excited to see your name in print and want something more?

Two books offer advice about how to make a difference and change the world. Both address the concerns of engaged scholars.

The first is Writing a Book that Makes a Difference, by Philip Gerard. It's designed to help you find your own big idea, check out its worthiness, develop it, and connect to the reader. Written in 2000, it does not touch on the new media formats such as blogs and e-books. It is strictly about writing books.

The second is Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher, author of (among other influential change books) Reviving Ophelia. Pipher's book is to my eye simpler and more direct, perhaps because she devotes a lot of attention to the sorts of simple and direct communications found in blogs, short articles, and op ed pieces.

If you want to un-learn the writing habits of academia and learn new ones that allow you to connect and make a difference try one or both of these valuable guides.

Letters to the Times on Genes and IQ

This is one post in an on-going series on writing letters to editors.

The New York Times today (December 16, 07) publishes a series of letters in response to Richard E. Nisbett's Op Ed article " All Brains are the Same" from December 9th. The original article and the letters focus on the relations between genetic endowment, intelligence, and IQ.

These letters are exemplary (with the exception of one which is flat out stupid, accusing Nisbett of political correctness). They are worth studying because they demonstrate how informed comment can cut to the heart of issues discussed in the public arena and really make a profound contribution.

Stephen Murdoch, a historian of IQ, writes:

I.Q. tests were created in the early 1900s before scientists had sufficient understanding of the brain or genetics. They were cobbled together with no real intelligence theory — and they have changed very little over time.

If we want intelligence tests, we need to devise new ones based on actual scientific theory rather than Victorian and Progressive Era puffery.

Paul Coleman, a senior Alzheimer's researcher, writes:

It is not the genetic DNA in a cell that determines what a cell is and how it performs; it is, rather, which genes are turned on and when. Turning a gene on or off can be controlled by a wide variety of factors in life: toxins, learning, disease, hormones, drugs, diet — the list is numberless.

We now know enough about the fine structure of the brain, the proteins involved and the roles they play in learning, cognition, memory and other components of intelligence to understand that the DNA of genes are, generally, many steps removed from determining these capacities.

From Scholarship to Public Policy at the American Studies Association

The American Studies Association (Philadelphia, October 11-14) organized a session called Democratic Vistas: How Can American Studies Scholars Engage with Public Policy. Here is a summary of the talks.

1. Nicolas Bromell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and The History Democracy Project.

The right has its think tanks, which serve as direct channels for conveying scholarly ideas to policy makers. You all know these think tanks; they are constantly in the news. The think tanks on the left are less effective and hardly known.

Nick wrote to John Podesta, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for American Progress and former Chief of Staff to President Clinton, who said that no academics were doing much of policy relevance on the left; the right is able to draw on its scholars but the left is not.

Why does this gap exist? Nick suggested several reasons, including these:

(a) While left-oriented scholarship has been successful in transforming the intellectual view of the USA, it has been presented only to other scholars and students. No attempt has been made to give it a policy handle that policy people could grab hold of. One thing that progressive scholars could do is ask the question "what are the policy implications of this work?"

(b) The left has been thrown off base by the onslaught from the right during the last decade.

Nick then described the History Democracy Project. This project grew out of a conference at the Organizagtion of American Historians in 2006. The project has started with "baby steps": a conference scheduled for January on history and policy, bringing together historians and policy people focused on foreign policy, and another one planned for the future on immigration policy.

2. Mae Ngai, Columbia University

The right flourishes because of money, funding from the government, from private foundations. The democratic party has been in the hands of neo-liberals; few democratic policy makers have any interest in the left's point of view. Progressive knowledge production has also been inefficient; many topics are studied, few are politically hot at the moment. The question is how to parley scholarship into a current policy conversation.

Mae used her own work to illustrate this problem. She is an historian of immigration to America through 1960. Even to start being able to make her scholarship public, she had to teach herself about current immigration policy. Her point was that even those in the most relevant scholarly fields still have a lot of extra homework to do just to be able to talk about current matters.

Mae has done three things to make her scholarship public:

(a) Workshops for school teachers wishing to teach units about immigration and its connection to multiculturalism;

(b) Talks to policy groups. She spoke at a symposium on guest-workers sponsored by the Farm Workers; many congressional staffers were invited but none came. However, more than 50 people from inside-the-beltway NGOs showed up. Her takeaway from this was that it was naive on her part to imagine herself speaking directly to policy makers, but it was possible to speak to lobbyists for NGOs that do speak to policy makers.

(c) Op-ed articles for the press. Being a historian gives you a good angle for writing op-ed pieces. Editors want a usable past. But editors also want ideas that are not too radical. History can help generate the right sorts of ideas. For example, with all the hysteria about amnesty for illegal immigrants, a historian can say "we used to do things like that, it didn't work out so badly, its not off of the national bandwidth." Still, it is not easy to get op-ed pieces placed. Her university press office has been helpful. Her agent helped her place an op-ed in the LA Times. She's also had articles in The Nation.

3. Patrick Bresette, Demos (A progressive 'Action-Tank')

Demos was founded in 2000 in response to Bush v. Gore. Its first issue was naturally election reform. Then it took up the issue of expanding economic opportunity: how people can get into and stay in the middle class.

Demos then took up the issue of the loss of faith in "public knowledge" -- the distrust in government, in regulation, in taxation. So the question was "how can we change the anti-government image that neo-liberal groups have instilled in the public? In addressing this Demos has partnered with other advocacy groups.

Patrick has become impressed with the power of what he calls "deep cultural narratives" in shaping public thought. He has pulled back from the idea of "the informed public", the idea that a better informed public will make wiser decisions. Citizens need a better story, a better deep cultural narrative, not better information. As examples of current narratives in the media, Patrick
mentioned the story lines about "bickering politians" and about "wasting government money". Such narratives give publics pegs upon which to hang current news events.

The current consumer orientation of citizens, the question "what's in it for me?" places civic argument on the wrong track. Even public advocates fall into this trap, employing arguments of the form "this is good for you because . . ." But whenever progressives buy into this story line they lose, because the story further entrenches the idea of individualism as opposed to solidarity in the public interest.

Progressive scholars have to study and come to understand how this kind of consumer citizenship thinking arose. And they need to look at alternative cultural story lines that have actually brought people into the public as citizens not consumers. In thinking about this Patrick has been assisted by the work of former labor secretary Robert Reich.

Comparing two generic story lines, "the benevolent community" and "triumph of the individual" we need to find and build narratives based on the former. This will take conscious activity, identifying current topics where scholars know the history and can convincingly create such narratives.

The John Dewey Society, through the Commission for Social Issues and in other ways, can make common cause with organizations like the History and Democracy Project and Demos. And it can also partner with other scholarly societies like the American Studies Association in keeping questions about scholarly contributions to the public alive in the academy.

Five Rules For Bloggers

The Primary Task of Social Issues is to encourage scholars and educators to communicate with concerned publics about social, cultural and educational issues, and to assist them in so doing.

OK. How do you do that??

We will seek useful guidance from our experience, books, and the web and other blogs

In this post entrepreneur guru Tim Ferris (The Four Hour Workweek) offers five useful tips for bloggers

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/09/26/the-top-5-uncommon-timesavers-for-bloggerswriters-plus-video-of-me-kissing-a-hairy-coo/

1. Decide how you’re measuring success before writing a post—what’s your metric? Form follows function.

2. Post less to be read more.

3. Define the lead and close, then fill it in.

Decide on your first or last sentence/question/scene, then fill in the rest. If you can’t decide on the lead, start with the close and work backwards.

4. Think in lists, even if the post isn’t a list.

5. The best posts are often right in front of you… or the ones you avoid.