Thursday, January 4, 2001

tech.life@school | Joyce Kasman Valenza

Web sites put current events in context

As students travel through grades six to 12, we try to engage them in exploring the major issues of the day, such as health care, crime, foreign policy, and race and gender relations.

Young people need to analyze the opinions of others and come to their own reasoned conclusions if they are to participate fully as informed, responsible citizens.

But for many students, reading a newspaper or a magazine article is like walking in on a lengthy conversation. Students have no context to understand what came before. Anyone who has tried to summarize a complicated situation, such as the current violence in the Middle East, realizes that it requires a firm grasp of history and scores of points of view. So it is useful to find resources that provide background.

A number of gateways now pull it together for students, and for teachers preparing to discuss complicated issues with their classes.

My favorite starting point for current-events research is Multnomah County (Ore.) Library's Social Issues page. Not only does it collect and annotate the best links, it also sorts the links by ideology and offers a collection of primary sources and government documents to support the Web sites. The site is at http://www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/homework/sochc.html

Public Agenda Online: The Inside Source for Public Opinion and Policy Analysis is a rich, one-stop shopping area for issue analysis and context. Each issue section is divided into two parts. Understanding the Issue offers an overview; a digest of recent stories; facts and trends presented in graphs; three perspectives on the issue; links to facts, findings and perspectives; links to the key players; and suggested further readings. The Public Opinion area includes sections on how the public defines the issues, major proposals, discussions of who should decide; and areas of public consensus and demographic division. It is at http://www.publicagenda.org/

SpeakOut.com, another of my favorites, claims to be "the Web's most comprehensive public policy resource and community." The Special Reports section is especially rich in context. One of the most recent reports, "Crisis in Israel," gathered a map, news, links to organizations, policy papers, and opinions from the site's huge Issues Library. SpeakOut.com also offers handy links to special-interest organizations, advocacy groups, and think tanks, as well as links to governments, media, and businesses. The site is at http://www.speakout.com/

Though developed for journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review Resource Guides, at http://www.cjr.org/resources/, have much to offer students. The site offers general links to advocacy and interest groups, nonprofits, even writing guides. Each report is a comprehensive guide to research on an issue. Rebecca Perl, author of the report on tobacco, notes that her part of the site "grew out of a year of reporting on tobacco issues for National Public Radio and the Center for Investigative Reporting." The tobacco report links to key players such as Philip Morris Cos. Inc.; federal agencies interested in tobacco; the e-mail addresses of experts; information on tobacco and minorities; and the relationship of tobacco to economics, taxes and trade.

The National Center for Policy Analysis: Idea House, at http://www.ncpa.org/, is a nonprofit public policy research institute. Its Web site "offers a wealth of analysis, debate, and in-depth research from around the world." Don't miss the Publications area, with its lengthy research studies, or the Both Sides section, which presents a huge assortment of articles, pro and con, on more than 20 broad topics and hundreds of subtopics.

Students interested in the media will appreciate Current Awareness Resources via Streaming Audio & Video, a gateway to audio and video resources compiled by Gary Price of George Washington University. My favorite area is the Speech and Transcript Center, the perfect starting point if you are searching for quotes from broadcast news or political speeches. The site is amazing in its scope, offering local, state, as well as international transcripts. Looking for a speech by Gov. Ridge? You're likely to find it here. The Web address for this site is: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/audio.htm Documents in the News identifies a broad spectrum of issues and archives content back to 1995. It is at http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/docnewsnew.html Issues such as the Kursk Russian submarine sinking, gasoline prices, or the Microsoft antitrust matter are linked to major news stories, government documents and court decisions - the types of documents students are not likely to discover in an average Web search. The AIDS in Africa report, for instance, featured fact sheets from the United Nations and the State Department, a four-part series from the Boston Globe, and a variety of conference proceedings.

Political Resources on the Net, at http://www.politicalresources.net/, offers a tour of global politics, by region or by country, gathering together links on political parties, organizations, government and local media. You'll find a wealth of resources in the archived Political Site of the Week.

The University of Michigan Documents Center offers an array of background readings for debaters: http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/debate00.html

Naturally, students are interested in those issues close to their own lives.

*edWeek.com: Hot Issues, at http://edweek.com/context/topics/issues.cfm, allows students to read background essays on such topics as school violence, uniforms, gender equity and tracking. The essays are linked to definitions of educational terms, related Web sites, organizations, and stories from the archives of Education Week and Teacher magazines.

Poynter.org's Links to the News, at http://poynter.org/dj/shedden/, gathers a manageable group of resources on most major stories. Poynter's Middle East Violence report links to news, peace documents, maps and background materials related to all the parties involved.

Editorials are wonderful resources for identifying and sorting points of view. The Opinion Pages site, http://www.opinion-pages.org/, claims to provide the "best access to the most current editorials, opinions, commentaries and columnists from English newspapers and magazines on the World Wide Web." The site offers a search of more than 200 letters-to-the-editor pages, and is reindexed every night. Editorials are also browsable by categories: political, business, technology, sports, health, and arts and leisure.

Politics1.com: Directory of Political Debates and Issues at http://www.politics1.com/issues.htm is published as a "nonpartisan public service to promote fully informed decision-making by the American electorate." Its value reaches beyond election time. The site links to sites advocating a variety of ideologies. It links to all sides on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, the environment and international trade, and links to and labels points of view for an impressive gathering of organizations, think tanks, and resource sites.

And guide students to Yahoo's various impressive gateways for current issue research: Yahoo: Government: Political Issues, at http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/U_S__Government/Politics/Political_Issues/; Yahoo: Society and Culture: Issues and Causes, at http://dir.yahoo.com/society_and_culture/issues_and_causes ; and Yahoo: Full Coverage, at http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/fc/

And for a greater array of clickable links, visit my site at http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/inqlinks.html

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