Do you have an Internet Circuit?
I do.
I didn't label it that way until I read My Internet Circuit on Rob Cockerham's Web site Cockeyed.com. (I look at Rob's site once a week or so because it's full of interesting and humorous entries.)
Rob wrote, "When I visit the internet, I follow a route, I hit my favorites. I was going through life assuming that everyone else is doing this same thing, or something similar to it. But, once I got to thinking about it, I realized that this isn't at all true."
It probably isn't true, but a few dozen people wrote back to Rob about their own "Internet Circuits." And I realized that I had long used my own Internet Circuit.
Back when I first started using the Web, I built a home page containing the links I used frequently. The latest edition of that home page contains over 60 links. Seventeen of those links go to other home made Web pages (like "News & Stuff") that contain other links. ("News & Stuff" contains links to a dozen news sources and to another home made page of links to over 60 newspapers.)
The home page I use now is probably about the 20th edition I don't use all those links on that page every day. In fact some of them I now ignore pretty much all the time.
While drinking my morning coffee, I open up my home page and begin my Internet Circuit. The length of my circuit varies from day to day. Some days I have more time than others, but I follow the basics pretty consistently.
I usually start with Scene from My Life. Photographers from all over the world are invited to take a picture a day for a week and post them. It's a glimpse of everyday life, often from far away. Then I look at a couple of comic strips that are not in my local newspaper, a local community site, and at web cams from Mt. Washburn (in Yellowstone National Park), Grand Teton National Park, Glacier National Park, Mawson Station, Anarctica, and Oban, Scotland.
Sometimes I look at the photo blog of Wen Ling, ziboy. He's a photographer and painter in Beijing who posts insightful pictures of daily life in China's capital city. Some of those photos can be used as teaching tools.
After the fun and games beginning, I look for good articles in the online versions of the New York Times, the BBC World Service, the Guardian (UK), and the Washington Post. If I have time I look at the news sites of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Asia Times, The Economist, and the headlines at Google and Yahoo! news.
I usually check my 3 e-mail accounts and the site of a Yahoo! Group to which a few dozen of my former students belong. (I really enjoy keeping in touch with them and finding out where they have gone and what they've done.) I also now plan to spend a few minutes adding a blog entry here.
If I have lots of extra time, I go to my del.icio.us page which contains 70 more saved links, like Overheard in New York, Boing Boing, NOTPRON (the hardest riddle available on the Internet), Snopes.com, Post Secret, Numb3rs Blog, Gullible.info, and Guy Kawasaki's blog, Signum sine tinnitu. That doesn't usually happen until late in the day or early in the evening. And I usually only read a few of those at one sitting.
Should you follow my example? If you're teaching, you probably don't have time to do as much. (For instance, in retirement, I've cut my commuting time from 10 hours a week to none.) When I was teaching, my circuit was pretty much limited to reading news headlines and occasional articles at the New York Times, the BBC, and the Washington Post or researching specific topics.
I do think you ought to carve out a bit of time at least every couple days to take a look at sites you find valuable. And of course, you should share the good stuff with the rest of us.
You can send a note to the AP Government and Politics Electronic Discussion Group or you can share here at this blog and/or the "Teaching Comparative Government" online discussion site.
If you find something valuable and/or interesting somewhere (even things not on the Web), you can contribute in several ways:
- use the comment option here to add something to a blog entry
- join the blog (ask me how, and I'll invite you) and create your own entries
- create a new topic or add to an existing one on the discussion site
- send me a note about your discovery, and I'll add it to the blog and/or the discussion site
I'm still convinced that the more we share, the more we can help each other. And we all deserve the help.
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:23 AM
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