A few articles have surfaced that counter the NYT article about internet literacy amongst youths from Sunday.  The Washington Monthly tells us long-form non-fiction is needlessly overwritten.  In other words write less.  And, Digital Journal furthers the notion that literacy is changing.

I’m a firm believer that education, as it is currently conceived, doesn’t do enough to help students navigate the world of information.  Libraries and schools, as information nexus, haven’t been given the funding or opportunity to embrace the future or adequately prepare for it.

The internet has altered the way that people process information, find information, share information, and schools by still relying on books as their fundamental source for knowledge/information have failed to engage students in a way that the internet does.  It’s a losing battle until they change their mode of attack.

I guess, in many ways, this longish piece in the New York Times this morning looking at the internet and literacy has also failed.  It’s a 3,000 word (estimate only) look at how teenagers process information, which inevitably is dubbed “reading.”  They argue that kids no longer no how to read or even bother to do so because of the internet.  Oddly, the whole point of the article: that kids don’t read in a linear fashion anymore.

Ironically, I didn’t even read the entire piece, but skimmed through it looking for relevant parts, interesting points, etc.

Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Just because kids don’t read in a linear fashion anymore doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t read.  It’s just that they’ve changed the way they want to access information.

So why would you republish the article in a newspapery linear fashion?  Wouldn’t it have been more bold of the NYT editors to repurpose the print article and illustrate their point by creating a multimedia extravaganza?

The old maxim about not judging a book by its cover somehow seems succinct here.

What everyone has lost sight of in the madness of the New Yorker’s satirical cartoon of Sen. Obama dressed as Osama and Michelle Obama dressed as a member of the Black Panther Party is the actual article about Obama’s swift rise to power.

It’s a long article, almost 18-pages, which is enough to think that no one commenting on the <sarcasm> insane reprehensibleness </sarcasm> of the magazine’s cover won’t actually read the damn thing. Which is a shame, for it’s a thoroughly researched and enlightening portrait of an ambitious/ruthless politician knocking on the door to the nation’s highest political office.

As Nate from FiveThirtyEight put it, “Well, no shit he’s ambitious. For any American to go from a relatively unprivileged childhood (or a privileged one for that matter) to be on the doorstep of the Preisdency by the time he’s age 46 requires a perfect storm of luck, intelligence, and ambition. Obama has ample amounts of each.”

He goes on to say that after finishing the article, it’s more notable for what it doesn’t say about Obama. In that he’s sort of a boring politician - not driven to ascend to the White House by some Oedipal complex (like Dubya) or the desire to get blow jobs (like Clinton).  He’s just. Sort of. Ambitious.  And unafraid of tossing those aside whom he has no use for anymore.

The upside is that he is intelligent, without being an academic; he’s not radical by any means (hence the irony of the cover); and finally, he is in no way corrupt.  Something of a bonus considering how utterly corruptible and morally bankrupt the last president has been.   Though I suppose Dubya’s legacy shouldn’t enter into this article.

As for the cover, yeah it’s provocative and certainly makes for easy water-cooling fodder. But its downside is that the discussion seems to end at the cover and not what’s on the inside of the magazine. Which is a shame because Ryan Lizza has really done his homework. Can’t wait to dive into this one again on my lunch break.

So just to counteract the last list of bloggers we gave you from Playboy, here is a list of the most influential. It’s a good list, even if we don’t think that the Huffington Post is a blog or Arianna Huffington is a blogger. Neither is true and I wish that the new media would stop with those descriptors. Still, Huffington should be #1 for what she has created with her internet media company. It’s nothing short of amazing.

Boston.com has rolled out a new photo blog during the past month called, appropriately enough, The Big Picture.

For those who were fascinated by Life Magazine or National Geographic as kids, and let’s be honest who wasn’t?, what Alan Taylor is doing over at the digital domain for The Boston Globe is nothing short of amazing.

Andy Baio of WAXY interviewed Taylor to get some behind the scenes information regarding one of the best new blogs on the internet.

Tell me a little bit about your curating process. Are you browsing the wire randomly for amazing photos and building a post around it, or do you start with the story you want to tell?

A little of both. Browsing the wire is really fun, and leads to some incredible finds. If there’s a specific story I want to tell, I’m at the mercy of what I can find. Sometimes there’s a lot, other times, not. For instance, I’m dying to do some “daily life” entries about Iran, but the wire feeds I have available have almost no images from there at all, other than photos of Ahmadinejad — but that’s not what I’m after. I try to stock up for a rainy day too. I have some stored searches, some favorite photographers, some perpetually interesting subjects, and so on. I’m trying to automate the gathering as much as possible.

How’s the response been? I’ve seen the buzz in the blog world and the over-the-top positive comments in every one of your posts.

Yeah — totally unreal. Over-the-top positive response. More than I expected for sure. Internally, externally, everywhere, people are being really thankful to me. I need to make sure (with some link-love in my upcoming blogroll) that the response gets directed to the photographers as well. I’m just a web developer with access to their photos and a blog — they’re the ones out there working hard to get these amazing images. “Photographers” here is a loose term, encompassing photojournalists, stringers, amateurs, scientific imaging teams and more.

Taylor spends about 2-3 hours putting together a post, which usually includes a collection of photos and a short background blurb.  He posts 3 times per week on current events like Sadr City, the floods in Des Moines, Ethiopian food shortages, The Boston Celtics victory parade, California wildfires, etc.  What he does is surf the wire for the best photos and puts together a collection. The technical side of how he does it is fascinating as well, but you should really read the entire interview and go look as his blog.

It’s not hard to believe that a programmer has tapped into one of the best innovations in online publishing this year.  It’s just a shame more newspaper sights aren’t trying new things.  [The Big Picture]

Whenever I watch one of those Pygmalion type of movies, where the intelligent, fiery and adorably optimistic wallflower is turned into a sexy bombshell (see: just about every Hollywood movie) because logic dictates that you can’t be both sexy and smart if you’re a women, I inevitably shudder in revulsion.

(Non-random aside: Rachel Leigh Cook was fine damn it as the dorky art student! Why did Freddie Prinze Jr. have to get all up in her business and turn her into generic white girl?)

Thankfully, ladies, Newsweek is here to tell that it is indeed okay to be smart and sexy.  We’ve known it all along, but now that Newsweek says it’s okay to be a geek, we don’t have to keep this secret in the closet any longer.

The Nerd Girls may not look like your stereotypical pocket-protector-loving misfits—their adviser, Karen Panetta, has a thing for pink heels—but they’re part of a growing breed of young women who are claiming the nerd label for themselves. In doing so, they’re challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels. In fact, calling them “nerd” is no insult at all—the Nerd Girls have T shirts emblazoned with the slogan. The crew includes Cristina Sanchez, a master’s student in biomedical engineering (and a former cheerleader) who can talk for hours about aerodynamics. Caitrin Eaton, a freshman, asked her boyfriend for a soldering iron last Christmas. Juniors Courtney Mario and Perry Ross giggle when they talk about what fascinated them most about “No Country for Old Men”: how did the assassin’s air gun work?

See, smart and sexy.  Glasses are not necessarily included, but they are a nice touch.  Like Tina Fey above.

These girl geeks aren’t social misfits; their identities don’t hinge on outsider status. They may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls—and they’ve made that part of their appeal. They’ve modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on “30 Rock” is a “Star Wars”-loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who’s garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called “Math Doesn’t Suck” and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google—and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley “Sexiest Geek Alive” pageant. They tune in to shows like “GeekBrief.TV,” a daily Web series hosted by 26-year-old Cali Lewis, and meet friends at Girl Geek Dinners, the first of which drew more than 600 women. However they choose to geek out, they consciously tweak the two chief archetypes of geeks: that they’re unattractive outcasts, and that they’re male.

I wish these ladies had come along when I was in high school or college.  Strangely, the Nerd Girls have their own reality show coming out … so the synergy between the “trend piece” and the reality show seems appropriately suspicious.

And yes, we realize that including a salacious picture to accompany the article sort of defeats the purpose of not objectifying women but what can you do.  They’re smart and sexy!  For me, it’s all about Natalie Portman who wrote a Harvard thesis on neuroscience or something.  But Tina Fey could make me laugh so that has it’s bonus points too.

Thoughts on sexy and smart women?  This is a trend I can get behind, instead of championing boring and insipid like Paris Hilton or LiLo.

[Revenge of the Nerdette]

Back in college, probably under the influence of drugs (just kidding mom!), I was fascinated with the idea of using a typewriter to create stories where I would write the first part and then pass it along to a colleague roommate whomever happened to be flopping in the house at the time.

The best part about the experiment is how seriously or unseriously people would take the endeavor and especially once you got the story back and realized that at some point your detective noir thriller somehow turned into a post-apocalyptic zombie survival story and the main character was killed off in chapter three and existed in corporeal form only. (Yes, I’m looking at you Elias Christeas)

I’m glad I’m not the only one out there that finds this form of collective story telling enjoyable, exciting, and nay, a bit dangerous. For the characters, not so much for the authors involved.

Underland Press is taking that concept and has created the “wovel” - a web-novel - in which the author creates a short installment, published on Monday, with some suggestions for where the story could go (that might have helped me avoid zombies and the death of the main character); readers then vote on the direction through Thursday; and the author creates the next installment to be published on the following Monday. At its heart, this is serialized storytelling, in the vein of Charles Dickens or other authors from a century ago.

The first wovel, The Living by Kealan Patrick Burke is certainly worth reading. You know if you like zombies, which ordinarily I do, just not when they show up in a detective noir and eat the main character. Not that I’m bitter or anything. Below is the first page of the first chapter of The Living. The entirety so far is eight-pages. FYI, I voted green when I got to the end.

The night was a symphony of whistles and gunshots.

Inside the dimly lit apartment, the old man stood by the door. He was not old enough to have lived through a war, and didn’t expect to live through this one. Though he didn’t count courage among his virtues, he had accepted the notion of his imminent death with curious calm. For what was there to fear? This was not a world he recognized. It hadn’t been for some time. Instead it had mutated into a kind of hellish garden in which neither God nor nature prevailed. When the time came, he would be glad to leave it.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Whines and pained whimpers from the bed behind him.

In the dim glow from the lantern the man’s face was a thousand years old, appearing to be more rock than flesh. The thin shadows on his sunken cheeks were like spilled ink running from his eyes. He turned and said, “Hush, Maddy.”

Behind him, the keening faded to a whisper.

A gentle knock on the door, little more than the brush of a knuckle against the surface. The old man put his cheek to the cold wood. Listened.

“Joseph?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” came the reply. “Open up.”

Relieved, the old man did.

Not to be outdone by the wovel is Rootclip. This is video storytelling, voted on by readers. So far there are three chapters completed our of six. If you’re video is selected for the final chapter, you’ll win $500 and go to the Traverse City Film Festival to meet Michael Moore. If your video is selected as a chapter you’ll also get $500 Visa gift card but no Michael Moore.

Submissions should be about 60 seconds long. Below is chapter one.

Apparently everyone in NY media thinks this is a must read. And for certain circles, yes it is.

But if you don’t particularly care about Gawker or Emily Gould or what it’s like working in NYC media or the blogging world or becoming a micro-celebrity, then this NY Times magazine article probably isn’t worth reading.

I found it to be well-written, and she is maybe a bit harsh on herself. One surprise is that this wasn’t a mudslinging piece, which I assumed it would be.

She deserves lots of credit for not dragging her coworkers, specifically Josh Stein (read the article and you’ll know what I mean, the two had an office fling and he wrote a magazine article basically tearing her a new one for sharing too much), into the mucky muck. It’s always refreshing to see someone take the high road.

At my old job, it would have taken me years to advance to a place where I would no longer have to humor the whims of important people who I thought were idiots or relics or phonies. But at Gawker, it was my responsibility to expose the foibles of the undeserving elite. I felt liberated — finally, a job where I could really be myself! Never again would I have to censor my office-inappropriate sentiments or shop the sale racks at Club Monaco for office-appropriate outfits. But at the same time, I wasn’t quite convinced that the system of apprenticeship and gradual promotion that I’d left behind when I left book publishing was as flawed as establishment-attacking Gawker made it out to be. I’d been lucky enough, in my publishing job, to have the kind of boss who actually cared about my future. At Gawker, I barely had a boss, and my future was always in jeopardy. In my old job, I’d been able to slowly, steadily learn the ropes, but now I was judged solely on what I produced every day. I had a kind of power, sure, but it was only as much power as my last post made it seem like I deserved.

Sometimes I worried that I’d been chosen not in spite of my inexperience but because of it. Hiring women in their early 20s with little or no background in journalism was a tactic that worked for the site’s owner twice before, and I expected to be a victim of the same kind of hazing my predecessors were subjected to as they learned how to do their jobs — and how to navigate New York — in public. I’d once heard someone refer to us as “sacrificial virgins,” which didn’t seem too far off.

Also, the comments are worth reading since they really bring out the venom.

[The New York Times - Exposed]