ABarlow

Well, for one thing, it is not journalism. When I wrote “The Pride and Reward of Falsification: Post-Objectivity as Post-Responsibility” for the recent book News with a View (edited by Burton St. John and Kirsten Johnson) centering on Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, I wasn’t thinking in terms of a specific, definable strategy, certainly not one...
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In preparing my talk on peer review for the MLA conference in Seattle last week, I forgot that few of my fellow academics have much familiarity with ‘gatekeeping,’ certainly not to the extent that journalists have, especially after the upheavals of the past decade. Though the situations are different (journalists working with a responsibility to the...
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Diane Ravitch: The Virtue of Admitting Error In a speech last week, education expert Diane Ravitch (and not for the first time) did something that our politicians are scared to death of doing: She admitting that she can be, and has been wrong: I said that I was wrong. I was wrong on every count. Testing...
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Oh, How We Justify! Oh, How We Turn Away! October 31, 2011 Yesterday, in partnership with Learning Specialist AE Dreyfuss, I presented a paper at “The CUNY Conference on Best Practices in Reading/Writing Instruction.”  We talked about a pilot project we are conducting using Fred Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction and the Peer-Led Team Learning concept.  The other...
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Jay Rosen provides a smell test for he said/she said journalism: There’s a public dispute. The dispute makes news. No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.) The means for assessment do exist, so it’s...
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When someone says: I had no dog in this fight Look out!  What they are saying is that they do (or did), but don’t want to admit it.  Personally, I have never seen any claim of impartiality that proved true.  I know, that’s a blanket statement, and I am sure instances could be dredged up where someone...
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At the start of “Good-bye, Teacher… “ Fred Keller quotes one version of that old doggerel: Good-bye scholars, good-bye school; Good-bye teacher, darned old fool! I learned it as: Good-bye pencils, good-bye books; Good-bye teachers’ dirty looks. It doesn’t matter; the point’s the same.  We were glad to get rid of teachers, for the summer,...
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