I Mentioned My Trip to Stonehenge a Few Blogs Ago and invited you all to tell your schools and the teachers you work with. Anita Beamon at University High School in Normal, IL took me up on that. We began talking about how I could get questions from students to bring with me to the [...]

Have You All Seen the Cover Story in the Atlantic Monthly? www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google I happened to see it in a friend’s beach bag, and read it as fast as I could. Nicholas Carr is making a two-fold argument — that the technology through which we receive information (words, print, TV, the internet) actually influences how we process [...]

Speaking With Your Readers Is Always Useful One of the values of being on vacation around friends is that the age of kids you are around gets shuffled. At home in the suburbs, school and activities dominate so much that I mainly meet kids similar in age to mine — with a sprinkling of older [...]

Last Year I Wrote a Consider the Source Column from Stonhenge I told about the research Mike Parker-Pearson is doing there, and my visit with him. Well I am going back for a very quick visit to see how the excavations have continued since last year. Eventually this will make its way into a book. [...]

Learning Is Pleasure We are away from home, so my wife, my 8 year old, my 3 year old and I each had to decide which books we wanted. so I decided to look over our reading lists — and I saw a theme. Marina just finished writing a new YA novel and dove directly [...]

If Can Find the August 8 Issue of the TLS, Turn to Page 14 There is a "Commentary" by Tom Holland — an expert on the Roman Empire — on a new show about Rome in the age of Hadrian, now at the British Museum. Holland loves the show, and for reasons that relate directly [...]

I see WIP as being about the content of books-in-formation. But Vicki wrote to tell me about a way she is turning a book into a multimedia project that I thought you all should know about. This is an ideal marriage of different forms of media — I hope it suggests other such partnerships to all of us. [...]

The Unreliable Narrator As I immersed myself in research on George Catlin, I began to get two different impressions of the artist-adventurer–one a self-portrait, the other a portrait drawn by historians and biographers. Catlin’s letters from the frontier, published in New York newspapers in the 1830′s, were filled with lively descriptions of the Great Plains [...]

I felt that Susan’s Response to "Anon" deserved a full column, not just a "comment." Anon raises interesting and difficult questions – as I hope I had.  I can understand how a book that shows the “sensitive side” of people who commit heinous crimes might be hard to take.  In my view, in order to [...]

I Spent An Hour Yesterday doing a UStream chat with Kevin Jarrett www.ncs-tech.org/ Kevin is very active in the world of K-8 educational technology — in all of its aspects from virtual worlds, to gaming, to how-to-teach-kids-to-type. Through him I learned about a teacher in Long Island who has six private islands in Teen Second Life [...]