The findingDulcinea Blog

Getting Acquainted With Blake Harrison of Flocabulary

Remember watching “Sesame Street” and learning the alphabet and some basic math skills? How about “Schoolhouse Rock” and learning the difference between an interjection and a conjunction, or how a bill becomes law? Did you forget how much fun learning could be?

Blake Harrison didn’t forget. Harrison, along with Alex Rappaport, founded Flocabulary, a teaching curriculum that uses educational hip-hop music to teach reading, vocabulary, math, science and social studies. The duo has taken their music on the road, held teaching workshops and created a current events series called The Week in Rap.

FindingEducation, a new tool that helps teachers save and share their favorite Web sites and assignments, spoke with Harrison about his inspiration for Flocabulary, how music enhances education and why teachers are seeing value in this unique approach. Read the full interview with Blake Harrison at findingEducation’s blog, Digital Teachers’ Lounge.

Sweet Sites | Finding News in New Places

Part of my daily role at findingDulcinea is to find news stories that are provocative, educational and informative. We take these stories and try to answer other questions readers might have about the topic. For example, North and South Korea appear to have reached a new chapter in their relationship since the death of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in August. But what of the countries’ relationship with the U.S.? How have relations fared since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950?

We choose stories from a variety of sources, and in our own stories, include information from an even wider variety. But how do we find such a diverse collection of headlines? Below are five interesting sites that I recommend to Web newshounds new and seasoned.

Current has expanded from being an online television station of provocative, user-submitted content; it is also a social bookmarking tool. Users post stories from all over the Web, and the selections speak to the users’ inquisitive eye for quality, thought-provoking stories.

DailyMe syndicates news stories from newspapers around the country, and allows you to customize your own start page. This is a nice full-text alternative to an RSS reader. See the whole story, not just the headline, and see stories in only the topics that interest you.

Smithsonian Magazine isn’t about breaking news or sensational stories; it covers big ideas on a range of topics, loosely categorized into sections such as “People & Places” and “History & Archaeology.” Last week, the magazine’s article on micronations prompted us to profile a few eccentric and innovative micronations in a feature called “What is a Micronation?”

Bing News is Microsoft’s answer to Google News. At first glance, there are a lot of similarities, but Bing has a column off to the left that reads your IP address and brings you local news. The design of the site is cleaner and easier to read, there is a special section for news videos and I often see headlines here that I don’t see elsewhere.

The Slatest is Slate Magazine’s top 12 list of news stories from around the Web. It’s frequently updated, stored for archival perusal and includes the top stories from major news sources in a separate box to the left.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

Remembering the Start of World War II

A war veteran stops by the monument of World War II casualties in Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

On Sept. 1, 1939, World War II began with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. This week’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the event saw diplomatic gestures between former enemies. The war killed 6 million Poles, Christian Science Monitor’s Elizabeth Pond reports from Gdansk, Poland, in an assessment of “old enemies” on the 70th anniversary. Half of them were Jewish.

Poland is the center of this year’s commemoration because it “suffered the highest ratio of war deaths per population.” But today, “Poles and Germans are friends and allies,” Pond notes, and another old foe, Russia, this week made efforts to denounce the Hitler-Stalin pact forged just before the outbreak of the war. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany described her country’s role in the atrocities of World War II at a ceremony yesterday, saying Germanybears an “‘eternal’ responsibility” for what happened, Bloomberg reported.

“There are no words that could even remotely describe the suffering caused by this war and the Holocaust,” Merkel said at the Westerplatte peninsula in Gdansk. “I bow before the victims.”

This week also saw British wartime songstress Dame Vera Lynn reemerging on the UK album chart at number 20, becoming the oldest living singer on the chart (she is 92).

As her Allmusic biography explains, the “mere mention of Vera Lynn's name evokes images of London skies filled with barrage balloons, and Britons riding out the German blitz in shelters and subway stations.” Wartime songs like “Auf Wiederseh’n Sweetheart” became hits in the U.K. and U.S., and Lynn became the British troops’ “sweetheart” when she travelled to entertain them, “often at great personal risk,” AFP explains.

Learn more about the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of World War II with findingDulcinea’s article, “On This Day: Nazi Germany Invades Poland, Starting World War II.” Then, read about the final day of the European portion of the war with “On This Day: V-E Day Ends World War II in Europe.”

Liz Colville
Senior Writer

What I Didn’t Know About Tiananmen Square

Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

In the spring of 1988, I traveled to China with a small group of other high school students and a much larger group of older adults. I’ve always liked to say that I learned more about American tourists during that trip than I ever learned about the Chinese. There were the two ladies who refused to eat anything but white rice. The woman who had to keep purchasing new luggage to fit all the souvenirs she was buying. Her daughter, who was so focused on videotaping everything, that she never seemed to look at anything with her own eyes. The man who thought it was funny to kick the back of my seat on every short plane flight, and who apparently decided that the very real machete fight that we inadvertently witnessed and which left one man with serious head wounds was light entertainment put on for his benefit.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have any encounters with the people who actually lived there. Unlike my trip the previous year to what was then the Soviet Union, no one tried to block us from making contact. The other students and I talked with young people on the streets of Shanghai who were anxious to practice their English, waved to an adorable, rosy-cheeked kindergarten class who chanted “Good morning! Good morning!” as we passed, ignored the desperate vendors who tried to sell us trinkets through the windows of our bus and watched an elderly woman with bound feet painfully limp down a flight of steps in the Forbidden City, leaning on the arm of a soldier.

Although my high school friends and I felt that we were obviously better behaved travelers and more open to truly experiencing the country than the adults with us, that did not mean that we ever really had a clue about any of China’s most pressing political issues. One peaceful evening in Beijing, we lay in the middle of Tiananmen Square and sang “You Can Call Me Mao,” parodying a song popular at the time, Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” A little more than a year later, that spot was overrun with protesting students, tanks and soldiers firing on civilians.

It was deeply upsetting to me that a site I associated with a silly memory became associated in the eyes of the world with such horrifying bloodshed. It’s equally upsetting that in the 20 years since, the Chinese government has made significant efforts to obliterate all recall of that terrible event, and have forbidden people to commemorate it in any way. During the days leading up to the anniversary this year, authorities have tried to block discussion about it on the Internet.

Learn more about what happened in June 1989 by reading findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

How Do I Know If I Have Swine Flu?

Photo: Ryan Remiorz/AP

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a global panic, er, we mean pandemic, called swine flu. Or, at least it was called swine flu until the name was changed to protect the innocent. (Pigs, that is.) It’s now going by the clunky but nonoffensive title of influenza A (H1N1). Thankfully, we’re all clear on one fact: You can’t get swine flu from eating pork.

Unfortunately, when people start to panic, facts are hard to come by. On Twitter, which has been heralded as a hub for so-called citizen journalists, not every post tagged “#swineflu” contained information that was accurate, or even worth reading. People using the Twitter search engine to find answers may not have been employing the soundest judgment.

But even the professional media was responsible for creating a bit of a scare. As one Huffington Post blogger observed, a few headlines reading “Death Toll Rising” can lead the innocent news consumer to feel like “there’s a plague on.”

And while there have been comparisons to the flu epidemic of 1918, suggesting that influenza A might be the next Spanish influenza, we won’t help ourselves by giving in to hysteria. Still, a trait shared by the two viruses is that they start out mild. Spanish influenza eventually got worse, and influenza A has that potential.

In short: We can’t stop paying attention. Somewhere in between panic and ignorance is a happy medium.

That’s why we decided to find five sites with reliable, accurate and comprehensive information about swine flu. Get all your questions answered about how the disease started, why it’s a concern, what the symptoms are and how swine flu affects travel. The only thing the article won’t tell you is where you can buy a surgical mask.

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Gay Rights in the Mainstream Media, Gay Rights in the Twitter Stream

Rep. Beth Bye of Connecticut holds her marriage license, the first issued to a gay couple in the state, on March 6, 2009. (Photo: George Ruhe/AP)

When Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot in November 2008, gay rights were not yet a mainstream topic. Ironically, when Prop 8 passed, support for gay marriage started to mount. Whereas once homophobia was considered “the last accepted prejudice,” people came out in large numbers to protest the ban, and the media covered it. More states started to push harder for marriage laws. Recently, Iowa and Vermont passed laws in favor of gay marriage, and the District of Columbia council voted to recognize marriage in other states.

Now, the media watch on gay marriage is so tuned in that The New York Times City Room blog published a piece yesterday about N.Y. Gov. David Paterson’s anticipated but unconfirmed plans to introduce a gay marriage bill. Ten years ago, homosexuality was still a taboo topic, but in the past year, most media outlets, and many Americans, take the importance of gay rights as a given.

But perhaps the best example of all was the fast spread of news about the so-called #amazonfail on Twitter. A handful of gay authors found that their books had been reclassified as “adult” on Amazon and therefore could not be found on search. A decade ago, I genuinely believe that those few authors would have been the only ones to know or care about that situation. But this weekend, #amazonfail became the most popular search topic on Twitter.

Amazon decided it was such an emergency that employees were called in on Easter Sunday to fix the problem. The fact that the mistake is being called a PR disaster tells me that somewhere along the way, this country’s attitude toward homosexuality has shifted. No longer is homophobia “the last accepted prejudice.”

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Using EncontrandoDulcinea as a Spanish Language Learning Tool

Even though encontrandoDulcinea is primarily designed for people who speak Spanish as a first language, or who would rather receive their news and information in Spanish, this bilingual site is also an excellent online resource for those who are trying to learn Spanish or improve their fluency in it.

EncontrandoDulcinea covers stories from the fields of science, politics, nature, health, history, art and international relations, and offers entertaining and informative articles for adults as well as educational material for younger audiences. The “On This Day” feature, for instance, highlights historical events that are of particular interest to the Latino community. As the articles are written in Spanish, they also provide an opportunity to practice reading in Spanish while learning history at the same time.

Considering the exponential way in which bilingualism in the United States is growing, it’s no wonder that more and more people are interested in improving their language skills.

The Instituto Cervantes, a nonprofit organization sponsored by the Spanish government, is devoted to enhancing the teaching of the Spanish language and advancing the culture of Spanish speaking nations. In the U.S., the Institute has venues in New York and Chicago. Whether you’re taking a Spanish course such as the ones offered at the Institute, or are practicing the language on your own, the articles that encontrandoDulcinea offers can be a great source of language practice.

Our Web Guide to Learning Spanish is also a valuable resource for those looking to learn Spanish or improve their skills via the Web.

Recession-Themed Shopping: Stimulate Your Taste Buds, Stimulate the Economy

The recession may be a bitter pill to swallow. But in the adversity inherent in an economic downturn comes opportunity for marketers looking to sweeten our lives with recession-themed products.

Among the products whose (figurative) stock is rising: FinancialCrunch.com, home of “Sweet Assets.” Mentioned in an earlier post on the findingDulcinea blog, the site allows consumers to slake their recession-tide cravings with a whole portfolio of confections including “Short Change,” a box of chocolate coins (above); “Nest Eggs,” a hollow milk chocolate egg filled with dark chocolate coins inside; and the “Stimulus Package,” guaranteed to provide happy returns.

Wash it all down with some bright green “Stimulus Soda.” The blue raspberry/pineapple-flavored concoction, which the makers dubbed “the nation’s first bailout brew,” tastes a bit like a Sweet Tart, according to NBC Chicago.

For weight-conscious folk looking to get a sour-sweet recession-themed punch, Design Glut’s Dow Jones handkerchiefs put the DJIA’s performance over the past five years right around your neck. Or place an online bid for some preppy-chic Lehman Brothers swag.

After all, bailout is the new black (or way to get into the black, at least).

Anne Szustek
Senior Writer

For sweet financial news during this recession, check out my daily column, Chin Up in the Downswing. To wrap your head around the subprime mortgage crisis, see our Web Guide to the Global Financial Crisis. To wrap your head in curlers, see either the year 1955 or findingDulcinea’s Web Guide to Beauty.

Qwidget: A Better Way to Comment

The comment section on most Web sites is an area of controlled, and sometimes uncontrolled, chaos. The great thing about the Qwidget, the comment widget that we use on all our news articles, is that it's all about conversation, not just commentary. The Qwidget is a project of the company Chat the Planet, which is responsible for critically acclaimed 2007 documentary "Hometown Baghdad."

The Qwidget asks you a question about an aspect of a story or blog post you've just read, as posed by the publisher of the article. You respond "yes," "no," or "maybe," and are then prompted with "Why?" You can then respond at greater length on the issue. As Phil Glockner of Scribkin puts it, “Think of it as a easy yes/no poll box that’s been pumped full of social media goodness.” After you input your response, you can look at everyone else's comments and respond privately to the people whose answers you're intrigued by. This is a great way to get to know your fellow users, as well as take part in an organized debate online.

The Qwidget calls itself "the conversation starter." Indeed, the Qwidget is worthy of a better description than "comment thread." Threads are easy to lose. But the conversations that happen with the Qwidget aren't. What I like most about it is that it encourages me to read thoroughly. It's not easy to answer a question about an issue like Mexican drug trafficking without having read an article attentively. Learn more about the Qwidget mission here.

Soon we're going to be rolling out the Qwidget in some of our features articles, where we often talk about timely matters that affect you, like the recession. We want to hear more of your opinions and hope to include them in some "people's choice" editions of popular feature articles like "5 Things Worth Spending Money On During the Recession."

Head to any of our news stories to see what Qwidget is like. After you answer your first question, you can create an account in a couple of easy steps!

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Spanish-Language News Sources on the Web

To live as a Spanish speaker in the United States means to live in a bilingual environment in which both Spanish and English play a role in everyday experiences and interactions. Compared to the many English news sources available for readers in the U.S., both online and in print, Spanish-only resources are limited. EncontrandoDulcinea is not only a news source in Spanish—it’s a bilingual tool, a way to guide Spanish-speaking readers to the best English resources the Web has to offer.

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, offers a comprehensive version of its original English site in Spanish that focuses on news from the United States and Latin America. The site also includes content on investments, people and lifestyle geared toward a Latino audience.

Similarly, El Nuevo Herald is a Miami-based newspaper that offers news entirely in Spanish on topics that would be of interest to the Latino community. The editorial tone of El Nuevo Herald is lighter than that of the Wall Street Journal, and includes news on entertainment, fashion, health and sports along with stories about politics and the economy.

The New York City newspaper El Diario is another excellent Spanish news source that provides news stories from the U.S. and Latin America with a focus on the New York City area.

At the beginning of March, encontrandoDulcinea started publishing news stories aimed at the Spanish-speaking Latino community in the U.S. The site takes a unique bilingual approach to news, providing original narrative in Spanish and then guiding the reader to trusted news sources in English. In this way, encontrandoDulcinea aims to bridge the language gap, making it easier for the Spanish-speaking reader to access English news sources on the Web.

Anita Gutierrez-Folch
Senior Writer

Follow encontrandoDulcinea on Twitter!