Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself. - John Dewey
The Info
I'm 30, grew up in central Illinois, and went to school around here at UIUC. I moved back here a year ago planning to launch a nonprofit dedicated to mobilizing web activists to address digital divide and community development issues on the local level. However, the economic crash intervened, and I went to plan B, which is freelancing and working with local and regional nonprofits to help them use the web and social media more effectively. My biggest project has been goodWORKSconnect.org, which is a regional social networking site and knowledge base designed to foster collaboration within the nonprofit community in downstate Illinois.
Before that, I lived in Boston for five years after college and worked as a neuroscience lab manager for one of the local mega-research universities. My training is in the biological sciences, but I got hooked on the web early on, and I've intermittently done freelance and personal web design and writing/editing work for the past 10 years or so, and am now looking to take my passions for this medium and for civic life and make them into a vocation.
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@: jddunn at gmail dot com
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Margin Walker
Steeljaw Scribe | Flightdeck Friday: The Accidental (Circum)Navigator: This week’s Flightdeck Friday is a remarkable story of a flight crew caught up in the opening days of a world war and how they found their way back home -- the long way.
Harper's | Adam Davidson | Out of Iraq: The Rise and Fall of One Man's Occupation: A gripping tale of the adventures of a group of reporters who set themselves up in a house in Baghdad immediately post-occupation, and then lived through and reported on everything falling apart around them over the next year.
Eunomia | Mr. Tumnus, Fast Eddie And Misjudging Obama: Most people, especially journalists and pundits and even more particularly pundits on the right, seem to go through extreme mood swings when they talk and think about Obama. This is the tendency to swing between treating him, in John Kass' memorable phrase, as the Mr. Tumnus of politics to regarding him as the canny Chicago pol, the Obama David Brooks referred to as "Fast Eddie."
McClatchy | 11,000 Couples Later, Gay Marriage Largely a Nonevent in Mass.: Nearly five years after the state's Supreme Court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, the vitriolic battle that brought international attention and apocalyptic fears to Massachusetts is all but dead. Since the first marriages on May 17, 2004, more than 11,000 couples have tied the knot. They're busy mowing lawns and hauling kids to soccer practice, and the sky has not fallen.
Windmills Split Town and Families: For many, the realities of living with windmills are more complicated than clean energy and easy money. People have mixed feelings about the enormous scale of the project. They question what will happen when the 15-year agreements expire. There are concerns about the impact of turbines on bird and bat populations. Some accuse lawmakers of getting too cozy with wind developers.
GlobalComment | The War: Diary From Georgia: I am carrying an axe with me, just in case. No good against firearms, and the very thought of probably having to use it is revolting, but the axe-brandishing show may give time to kid and wife to slip through the back door if necessary.
Media Matters for America | Media Pick up Where They Left Off 8 Years Ago: This week brought signs that much of the media is set to resume the absurd and shameful behavior that defined the 1990s -- guilt by association, circular analysis whereby they ask baseless questions about non-scandals, then claim they have to report on the "scandal" because the White House is "besieged by questions," grotesque leaps of logic, downplaying exculpatory information, and too many other failings to list. If that happens -- if the media continue to behave as they did in covering Whitewater -- they will damage the country.
Salon.com | Juan Cole | The fall of Bush's man in Pakistan: Despite Pervez Musharraf's despotism and double-dealing with U.S. enemies, George W. Bush, John McCain and the GOP embraced him to the bitter end.
Informed Comment | Pakistani Reaganism Must End: The New Government must take on the Lashkar: Excellent background on Pakistani intelligence's cultivation of extremist groups to attack India over Kashmir, and how they've created forces they can't control that threaten to destabilize the whole region.
A Historian’s Craft | Only Collect: The work is: Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You're five years old. Don't presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it's just one line saying "Never read this again"; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship.
Rolling Stone | Matt Taibbi | Requiem for a Maverick: John McCain ran one of the most incompetent, schizo campaigns in history -- and for that we owe him big-time.
TechAtlas for Libraries: TechAtlas for Libraries is a free resource for libraries to support technology planning and management. The tools in TechAtlas will help your library through the technology planning process and also allow you to create a complete inventory of all of the technology in your library.
Newsweek | Expertinent: Why the Obama "Brand" Is Working: It's the way the campaign has folded the man and the message and the speeches into a systemic branding effort. Reinforced with a coherent, comprehensive program of fonts, logos, slogans and web design, Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand.
The Independent | Game Over? English Football at Bursting Point: Amid a frenzy of borrowing to pay the wages of international superstars– and build extravagant new stadiums – the most treasured clubs in the Premier League have been sold off to foreign investors. But as times get hard, English football could be sitting on a debt time bomb.
Vanity Fair | Joseph E. Stiglitz | Capitalist Fools: Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate over who's to blame. It's crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes-- under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II-- and one national delusion.
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