A Public-Sphere Teaching Site
Dear Habermas: Restructuring Information
Shout it out!
We're Restructuring
University of Wisconsin, Parkside (UWP)
California State University, Dominguez Hills(CSUDH)
Created: April 12, 2011
Latest update: June 24, 2011
E-Mail to Jeanne in L.A.
E-Mail to Susan at UWP.
AT LAST!
Reorganizing, Fixing Links, Finding URLs,
Updating Resources,
All Those Things We Couldn't Do
When Jeanne Was Still Teaching
Restructuring is complicated and will undoubtedly take a while. I complained recently to an author who was offering her site as expert advice on acquiring jobs in a given field. When she offered us her link for inclusion on our site, she was still putting the material up, one day at a time, as she could manage. She said nothing of that status to either me or Susan. That's unethical, folks. If you're gradually adding to your own knowledge base and the structure of your website, you need to let those to whom you're offering the advice, with such admonitions as "Subscribe," that this is advice in process of being gathered and written.
There's no harm in working day at a time. That's all most of us have. But it's deceitful to give the appearance that you've got it all together when you're actually just struggling day to day, like all the rest of us.
I know; I know. We've grown so used to deceit and egregious dishonesty and lack of accountability at all levels, that we seem to think "everybody does it, so it's OK." Just because it's really just a minor lack of disclosure, or it's just a little lie, or we can't go any faster. Whatever. No, it's not OK.
It's so not OK that I "rethunk" our own policy on informing our readers and participants of the extent to which we are restructuring. In our case, Susan and I have extensive experience in two state universitites, and many years of professional associations. But that doesn't mean that it might be relevant to your needs to know how and why we are doing this restructuring.So I'm taking my own advice. I'm plastering this information wherever I think you might come across it when you're using our site.
For starters, I went back and found one of the old animated gifs we used on most of our sites years ago, when we were all pretty much in the same fix as the young woman who couldn't go any faster than one day at a time:
That was so long ago I don't even remember who made the gif. Things were lots more primitive in those days, and cartoon animation wasn't as available to ordinary folks like us anything like the possibilities today. But that little gif sure told us you were struggling just like us. So I decided to fetch it back for a new and healthy future.
Years after our start, Susan and I can rely on our network of professional friends. Confident of our own status, we just weren't thinking about how difficult it is today for bloggers or would-be journalists or educators to differentiate themselves to new young users of the Internet. As we change over from newspapers to this whole new global media and communication world presenting itself in so many ways us older folks can barely keep up, it's time to go back to putting information out there, where no one can miss it.
Who's upholding the standards of journalism and honest and fair reporting on major issues that matter to us all? Newspapers have always done that for us.
Not only are we in a quandary about journalism; so also are we floundering in education and where and how advanced learning fits into this new global world. We're even in a similar predicament over the most effective way to improve the basic pre-baccalaureate educational performance of all out children, across income variances.
How do we get public education to match the priviliged private education of the wealthy? Or are we content to let life chances be that determined by family of origin and geographical birth right? And are our far-from-understood value choices on these issues going to affect the place of our citizen population in two or three decades from now?
If you've been following along with us as part of our most recent project on community outreach, you've read lots of times about how we're slowly developing the project. But there's not a sign plastered over the site, telling you that we're hard at work with development that matters as much as our expertise. I've been trying to get to it almost daily, and to put the plastered sign up in our Mission Statement. But I still haven't got there. And besides, what if you are looking for something and never bother to read our Mission Statement? By diverting you from the normal flow of one newsletter to the one just before it, I'm going to offer you this much fuller explanation.
But this, too, will have to be done one day at a time. What's New? tells you day by day what I'm writing and working with, and why. But you may not care what's new. Throughout this period of reconstruction, please check What's New? for updates. I've done my best to keep that file up to date. I don't doubt there will be mistakes and omissions. I hope they'll be few and minor, but please feel free to alert me if you encounter them:
References
- Frederick Jackson Turner and Frontier Theory Encyclopedia Britannica bio. Consulted by jeanne on 06.25.2011.
Turner's Frontier Theory Good brief explanation of Frontier Theory. Scroll about half way down the file.
- Community Books found a book on Community Books that discusses Turner's view of land grants for state Colleges. At least I hope. I bookmarked it. Great site. will have to explore it. jeanne
- Wisconsin Witness to the History and the Thesis (the Frontier Theory).
Brief, Very Brief, History of Site Development --- goes to about us, not here
We first uploaded Dear Habermas to Compuserve, in December of 1998, after we had done the same work with hard copies. Lots and lots of work at the expensive copy machine. The Web seemed so much more efficient, and cheaper. And so it was. Yahoo came along with Yahoo groups, and we were able to start a forum for posting and interchange of messages, shared with faculty and students.
Things kept getting more confusing. The Internet was growing by leaps and bounds. I had settled on Netscape Navigator for a browser because of the growing problems with viruses with Windows. Google came along somewhere in there. Not the browser, the search engine. Eventually I settled on Google as a search engine, as it, too, grew like Topsy.
Jonathan Lear, long ago was added to our list of important resources in understanding that not everything we do has a logical reason. (The Wolf Man and Knowingness) One of the best examples I know of our "need" to be rational and logical is my choice of Google as the primary search engine on this website. One day Google used a Juan Miró version of its search bar. I was so delighted, I immediately copied it and put it up for us. I don't know how long it was up, or even what it was celebrating. I've never seen it again, though it might have been up for a few days. I really can't remember. But I love some of Miro's work. I made that decision out of pure joy and fun. The choice itself had nothing to do with the relative effectiveness of Google and Yahoo as search engines. Sometimes we do things for good (or maybe bad) reasons. But sometimes "we just does," like Topsy "just growed."
Yikes! I've been at this for hours. 'Bye, until tomorrow. jeanne 06.24.2011
Liberal Newspapers:New York Times - Los Angeles Times - The Washington Post
The Boston Globe - The Chicago TribuneConservative Newspapers:The Wall Street Journal - The Washington Times - The New York Post
Manchester (N.H.) UnionLeader - The Oklahoman- Los Angeles County Library. Online service.
- World Cat Online search for finding books available in your local librairies. This may have become far more essential as funding for librairies is being cut. Check it out.
- PolitiFact.com
PolitiFact.com will give you extensive information on what's truth and what's rumor and what's not in news reporting and viral vidoes and e-mails. This is offered as a Public Service by the St. Petersburg Times, for which we thank them profusely. These are times for checking your facts.
- Farlex Free Online Dictionary:
The script that lets you double click on any word you want defined is not working properly. But the dictionary works very effectively if you type in a word and enter it, either here or on its own site. I'll try to fix this some time this summer, but for now, we've placed it on the Home page and on the first page of each issue. That's so you can always get to the dictionary by going to Current or Previous Issue, or by going to Home. Susan and I need this tool always available. We hope you do too. jeanne and Susan.
Dear Habermas
by Jeanne Curran and Susan Takata
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
