Media in Middle East & North Africa

In the U.S., you can advocate torture, illegal spying, and completely optional though murderous wars and be appointed to the highest positions.  But you can't, apparently, criticize Israeli actions too much or question whether America's blind support for Israel should be re-examined.

Blumethal also suggested that right-wing Israel fanatics in the U.S. are particularly interested in controlling how intelligence is analyzed due to their anger over the NIE's 2007 conclusion that Iran had ceased its pursuit of nuclear weapons. “It’s clear that Freeman isn’t going to be influenced by the lobby,” Jim Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of Inter Press Service, remarked to me. “They don’t like people like that, especially when they’re in charge of products like the NIE. So this is a very important test for them.”

Does anyone doubt that it's far more permissible in American political culture to criticize actions of the American government than it is the actions of the Israeli Government?

Around the world, an explosion in the number of fatwas - pronouncements by religious leaders intended to shape the actions of the faithful on everything from sex to politics - is driving efforts by prominent Muslims to rein in the practice. That's proving a nearly impossible task, given Islam's decentralized nature and the growing number of outlets for the edicts.

Muslims in Egypt seeking religious guidance may now turn to satellite television and the Internet for opinions from as far afield as Indonesia - unless they follow the fatwa issued in 2004 by the Dar ul-Ulum, India's largest Islamic seminary, that ruled Muslims shouldn't watch TV. With no pope or patriarch to arbitrate orthodoxy, "it's the nature of Islamic thought to have many options," says Abdel Moti Bayoumi, who heads the Islamic Research Compilation Center in Cairo. "But there are too many unqualified opinions being spread, and this is wrong." The result is what MENA, Egypt's official news agency, calls "fatwa chaos."

Mainstream Islamic scholars blame TV and the Web for the proliferation of pronouncements,

Does this jettisoning of time-honored titles mean that the paperless classroom is also lacking a creator, controller and grader?  Is the paperless classroom also a teacherless paradigm?  The answer is in some regards, yes.  I have removed myself from center stage.  I have relinquished the need to control every class.  I have stopped seeing work as stagnant…completed and submitted by students and then graded by me.  I have let go of my need to pre-plan months at a time, in favor of following the path that unfolds as we learn together.  My classes are not, however, teacherless, just less about the teaching and more about the learning.  The students know that I am ready and willing to be student to their insights, that they can teach, create, control and even evaluate their own learning.

In the absence of my control, the students have many choices to make

Teachers often say that modern students are lazy.  I have long felt that as the shifting winds of technology began to gain force, we teachers were the ones who were unwilling to do the work of rethinking our roles and meeting the students were they were learning already.  Rethinking paper as the primary tool of class is a step in the right direction because it forces a rethinking of the how and why of teaching and learning.

The number of those who have cyberaccess in Egypt, according to a 2008 government report, reached 9.17 million citizens, out of roughly 80 millions. This is a huge leap from the only 650,000 users we had in 2000. Still, this is a minority in the present time. But just like its Indian counterpart, the Egyptian mainstream media is obssessed with what goes on in the blogosphere. Local media outlets–whether they are Independent, opposition, governement owned, or privately run–regularly monitor blogs, facebook groups, web forums, and report on what goes on for their newspapers, TV and radio stations. Journalists are also hooking themselves up to Twitter and Jaiku to follow what the activists are tweeting and texting about. Many bloggers are also journalists, who have access to the mainstream media and can push for their stories and campaigns to get wider coverage. Of course this means we get on occasions tons of bullshit, negative and sensationalist reporting, but in all cases if a story now goes on some blog, or you launch a campaign on some website, you are more or less assured this will be picked up by journalists in the mainstream media who still have a wider audience than internet browsers.

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) - an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

building a community around the statusphere - the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.

learning today is becoming increasingly peer-based and networked

notions of expertise and authority are being redefined

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced a new million-dollar scholarship program to help Palestinian students enroll at Palestinian and American universities.

“a larger pool of capable young men and women from places like the West Bank and Gaza”

The development of fictive kinship will likely be key to the development of resilient communities

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as "middle of the road" or "conservative." Such people aren't likely to stay up late at night arguing about Mary Daly's "Gyn/Ecology" or even Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

"I have stood before classes," he tells me, "and seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn't sell books. 'Then why are we reading him if he wasn't popular?' "

"We chose the medium of animation to try to get viewers to recognize the humanity of the residents of Gaza,"

The visibility of University Bank in Islamic financing has brought it, among other things, pillorying by Rush Limbaugh.

The sense of religious and communal obligation has its fiduciary advantages to Mr. Ranzini. Besides carefully vetting prospective home-buyers, and besides having a well-educated, professional clientele among American Muslims, he has customers for whom default would be almost sinful. Indeed, there have been only a handful of failures among University Bank’s observant Muslim clients.