Monthly Archives: June 2010

“Education Is A Global Religion”

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

So says Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the London think tank Demos, speaking at a TED Salon in London. Effective education, he says, works by “pull” not by “push” — which is antithetical to traditional Western educational systems.

However, I think his points about the need for extrinsic and intrinsic motivators are just as important in the “modern” world.

Look at the graduation rates in the U.S. system (2007). True graduation rates have often been masked because reported data were for the percentage of a senior class who graduated; thus that data point did not include all of those who fell by the wayside before the senior year or before entering high school. Continue reading →

CNN Drops AP

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton notified staff of the move Monday, writing that “the content we offer will be distinctive, compelling and, I am proud to say, our own.”

I find it fascinating that in an era of shuttered bureau offices and laid-off journalists … that a major media company would chose to abandon AP which, at least in name, is a cooperatively-owned business.

Also, CNN is launching CNN Share, Walton wrote, as a way to “aggregate editorial content and facilitate easy distribution and sharing across platforms.”

Maybe the era of jointly-owned reporting assets is past. It seems to me as though shared reporting makes more sense in today’s fractured news environment, not less sense.

Obama’s 90 Percent Clean Up Promise: That’s Not What He Said

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Updated with Wordle of the speech
Two articles have clashed in my brain with a resounding cacophony: a Tribune Bureau/Seattle Times headline screamed Obama vows 90% cleanup of oil this summer and, in Nieman Reports, Douglas Rushkoff asserted that “There’s More To Being A Journalist Than Hitting The ‘Publish’ Button.”

I read the Obama story slack-jawed because no where, no where, did the reporters (there are two in the byline) challenge the promise made in the headline. It was classic journalism-as-stenography, I thought as I read:

The president vowed that the administration and BP would clean up “90 percent” of the oil before the end of the summer. But he also spoke of damage to the Gulf region that would linger for years.

Heck, I might have swallowed a 90 percent clean up promise, if I were just now tuning in to this story. Or if I were just a blogger, an “amateur” biased “to the immediate” as Rushkoff describes the Internet in his 1076-word paean to traditional (whatever that is) journalism.
Continue reading →

AT&T Collapses On First Day Of iPhone4 Orders

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

From Gizmodo: AT&T’s online ordering system collapsed today, with Apple and AT&T sales folks reverting to tried-and-true technology: paper. They had to write down pre-order requests.

I corroborated the collapse of the online ordering system, by logging in to my AT&T account and attempting to negotiate the pre-order option. Note that AT&T is providing a telephone number for “non iPhone related upgrades” but gives no number for iPhone-related upgrades. This snafu affects all upgrades, not just iPhone4 pre-orders.

Continue reading →