Media in Middle East & North Africa

Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did. "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said. Restrain me, quick, before I break something. Because there’s a missing element in this bit of sloppy science that makes me want to throw my beloved laptop through the window. It’s this: the freaking teacher. So let me correct this: “CLUELESSLY wiring classrooms for internet access does not enhance learning.”

It’s totally schooly, and divorced from the authentic uses we put this stuff to in that non-school place called the real world.

More pointedly still: Creating an opposition between "critical thinking" and "reading and discussing," on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

Those who know Khatami say he believes the council wouldn't dare disqualify him.

city vs. village in Iran — city voters being better educated and tending toward the liberal side; village voters more conservative.

Many conservatives have come to be critical of the controversial Iranian president.

The unanimous decision was prompted by Al Quds faculty members, who said they were disappointed that their joint projects with Israeli colleagues had failed to produce any tangible results and had caused friction with other Palestinian universities.

“If the two-state solution is as far away today as it was 10 years ago, there is no justification for continued academic cooperation based on reaching that solution,”

pressuring Israel to abide by a solution that ends the occupation, a solution that has been needed for far too long and that the international community has stopped demanding.”

“Dear Iranian nation, your children have placed the first indigenous satellite into orbit,” Reuters quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying in a televised message.“With God’s help and the desire for justice and peace, the official presence of the Islamic Republic was registered in space,” he said.

So, the fundamental premise of the need to endow newspapers and preserve them at public expense is that false information exists on the Internet? Of course it does, as it does on TV, on the radio (should we also consider endowing Rush?) in magazines, and in many, many newspapers. Which media would the authors like to choose as being least likely to contain false information? And which medium do they think did the best job of  bringing the lies and corruption of the Bush Administration to light — hint, don’t look at newspapers, Josh Micah Marshall and his Talking Points Memo website would be a much better bet.