I have not lost my interest in the issue of newspaper reading. Far from it. It is something I have spent a lot of time sorting through, for an obvious end: If I am going to coach students who need a certain knowledge of current events, I need a way to provide that knowledge. And at the same time, an expectation on my part that that knowledge should be provided by physical newspapers is, at best, wildly optimistic. I do come from a generational bias, of course. When I was coming up the ranks, reading the newspaper was the only way to conquer current events. There was no alternative. And I should add to that the idea that reading the newspaper smacked of adulthood. Kids didn’t read the newspapers, but kids believed that one day, when they were adults, they would. Reading the newspapers was a mark of adulthood, much like getting a mortgage and listening to Sinatra and eating olives. All adults seemed to do these things, but no kids. If you wanted to be an adult, you would have to train yourself. So, you did your best. You started to read the comics and the movie reviews, you opened a bank account with a little book that told you you were earning $1.23 interest a year, you didn’t grimace when “High Hopes” came on the transistor radio, and you kept trying to eat olives no matter how icky they tasted. Through this cloud of initiation, somehow, someday, you’d be a grownup. And, I will add, it worked for me. I can read the paper while simultaneously listening to Sinatra and eating olives, and my mortgage is paid automatically out of my checking account. You can’t get any older than that!
What we need to do in this discussion is cut through to the goal, then decide the best way to achieve that goal. That is, we have to get past the idea that students need newspapers to get to the idea that students need a broad base of information on current events—a general knowledge of the news—that they can draw on when they analyze resolutions. You certainly wouldn’t want to be in a position of never knowing anything that’s going on, and always having to begin research at a point of total ignorance. But if you know, say, the general political picture in the hottest African hot spots, like Zimbabwe, and a resolution comes along about African hot spots, well, at least you’ve got a clue about one horror story, and maybe more than one (in this case, how Zimbabwe has fed into South Africa’s problems). Mere intellectual curiosity is reason enough to want to know, a driving need to acquire knowledge plus maybe a concern for one’s fellow humans, but my goal is not creating that concerned, intellectually curious individual whole cloth, because the education system as a whole has that responsibility. I have only one part of that responsibility (and an extracurricular one to boot). I’m a debate coach; I’m just trying to save some steps when resolution analysis time comes up.
One of the things I’ve been touting about the physical newspaper experience is its serendipity. Serendipitous discoveries of stories lead us where we weren’t expecting to go, and we learn things we weren’t expecting to learn. But again, my goal cannot be the transmittal of all information, serendipitous or otherwise, or the total responsibility for molding the concerned citizen. I’m the debate coach; I’ve got to stay on that track. Still, there is more to debate information than the news per se. There is also, at least in LD, schools of thought and analysis that operate outside of specific events. Ethical concerns can be about some specific item, or can just be about ethics per se. If I can get that sort of information across to my students in addition to the news, that is a good thing in general but more importantly, a part of my job. So what I’m beginning to see is that the serendipity that I can provide is of this nature, so if I’m not attempting to replicate the newspaper, I can still nonetheless provide more than just a cut-and-dry news-clipping service. You can get that anywhere.
So I took on the idea of the Feed a month or two ago with the idea that I’d see how it went, and see if it fit the goals I was setting, which was to provide some material access to information akin to what I had been previously relying on newspapers for. At the same time, it would have to be something that was literally accessible to a plugged-in student, entertaining enough but mostly because of its continuing relevance, good enough to draw back the student despite other demands on his or her time.
Although I had followed the odd feed before, I had never attempted to create one. So I did have to figure that out as I went along. The temptation to throw in too much, to throw in interesting stuff outside the realm of the debate world, was initially strong. This might have been due partly to starting off with relatively limited resources of RSS material, and a feeling that I had to fill things up. Over time, however, I’ve refined my sources, and found plenty of new ones, so that the stuff that’s coming to me raw is at the very least potentially LDish (or, of course, Pffftish). Lately I’ve had no problem coming up with all sorts of articles, almost all of which would be valuable to the debater, even though I hardly expect every debater to want to read all of them, just as I personally don’t read the entire newspaper cover to cover. But even to the casual glance, the Feed should look relevant enough for someone to visit it regularly, and to be more likely than not to get hooked on it. And since there would be no point in my continuing to create it if I didn’t think it had value, I decided I would ultimately assign it officially to my own team if I thought it was working out, so it did really have to deliver.
The feed itself, in the final analysis, would tell us if it were worth reading. So, slicing into it at any moment ought to tell the tale. So let’s look randomly at the last few items and see if we’re doing what we need to do.
1. Giraffes are now kosher. Okay, that’s just interesting, and highly unlikely to come up in a debate. But it’s only one sentence. And Jews on safari may need to know this.
2. A think piece on the essentialist aspects of race. Unquestionably valuable analysis in our multicultural universe.
3. A map of the universe conceived by Homer. Totally useless, but again, interesting. I usually resist the temptation on these sorts of useless yet interesting things, but sometimes… I should have fewer of these in the long run.
4. Article on Apple’s business vis-à-vis the iPhone. It’s a good business article, and the sort of thing a Pfffter should have in the Pfffting head.
5. News article on (bad) farm outlook for the year. Given the international food shortages, we need to know this.
6. Opinion piece on unemployment on underclass youths. Obviously useful.
7. Transcript of Rowling’s Harvard commencement address on the imagination. Interesting but hardly essential.
8. What gay marriages say about gender roles in marriage. A news item, very useful given the gender politics themes of many cases nowadays.
9. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” going to the Supreme Court? Always a chestnut.
And that’s the top page, taken at random. 3 of the 9 could go, but they are serendipitously interesting enough to break the monotony. 3 of the 9 are essential. 3 of the 9 are useful. Overall, that’s a pretty good count. Any serious debater looking at this page (all the articles were added within a few hours of one another) would pick up at least a couple of important headlines, and maybe read one or two of the articles at length. And I think it’s been like that regularly.
So, yeah, I’m touting what I’m doing, looking at my handiwork and declaring it good. But it is good, and it keeps getting better as I refine the RSS feeds I get on my end, and curb my silliness instincts (and my taste for kosher giraffe). As I said in an earlier post, I am an editor by trade, after all. I’m simply plying that trade in a different medium than normal. And more importantly, I am achieving my goal of providing useful general knowledge for debaters. Does it replace the newspaper? Well, to tell you the truth, it’s a different sort of beast altogether, so the original issue of newspapers doesn’t matter anymore.
What I’m hoping for is, beyond the students to whom this will be a mandatory assignment, that others will have it in their bags of computer tricks, and consult it. If only half of the VCA looked at it fairly regularly, it would have an effect. So I will be sticking with it. And I hope you will too. Even if all you do is glance at it every day to catch up on the latest entries, I guarantee you will find something useful that you might not have otherwise seen, or gotten to so readily. If not, I will give you double your money back.
Good deal, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment