Like millions of other Americans, I too, anticipated and watched CNN's Black in America. Prior to watching the documentary, my Ethnic Studies background provided me with knowledge on what the program attempted to address. In college, I was constantly reminded of how my undergraduate education would teach me how to "think critically." Similarly, my mom advised me to take all things with "a grain of salt." Consequently, I viewed the documentary from this framework. I knew even CNN's resources and "experts" would not be able to expose everything there is to know about the "black experience" (as if there was only one experience) into a two-part series, but only touch the surface.

I retook methods courses this past year, as I am adding special ed. to my child dev/elem. ed. credential. Practice helps me with mastery, and I didn't want to glimpse new knowledge and drop it, so I made categorized lists of useful websites for teaching.

History/Social Science and Info Tech are probably the most useful to this group, or scholarships (for both young folk and re-entry folk). Info Tech is pretty catch-all, includes computer science, web 2.0, engineering k-12, social networking, politics. (Some politics in hss, too.)

Feel free to skim and use anything you can or pass it on.

...according, at least, to Ben Stein's (!) upcoming 'documentary' Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. This is the type of movie where, the more you read about it, the more you're convinced it's an elaborate prank on the part of the Colbert Report. Allow me to quote a snippet from the website's own summary, and tell me if you can discern this from a Colbert Report segment:

"Big Science has expelled smart new ideas from the classroom...what they forgot is that every generation has its Rebel!"

The smart new ideas? Intelligent design. Just check out the website.

Oh boy.

Join me after the break, won't you? There'll be the trailer, and it'll be fun. I promise.

I posted this in my campus newspaper, The Daily Campus, in response to a convention/workshop the Discovery Institute is holding on our campus this weekend. There has been a lot of protest from our Natural Sciences, Anthropology departments and has caused a 'war of words' in various online and print outlets between the Institute and said departments.

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This weekend Dedman Law School's Christian Legal Society will be hosting a controversial and well-known institute that preaches a religious message masked in a capsule of pseudoscience.

The Discovery Institute is one of the nations leading political action groups. It fights to create a theistic world view that corrupts science to fit the doctrines of evangelical and literal Christians who are unable to reconcile their religious beliefs with the material world.

A controversial document (reported as the Wedge Document, a 1998 internal memo) stated the Institute's goal was to "drive a wedge" into "scientific materialism" in order to divorce it from its purely observational and naturalistic methodology and stop the deleterious effects of evolution on Western culture.

Hello, Ni Hau, Bonjour, Hola, Salve! My name is Ben Wells and I am a YP4 Fellow at Southern Methodist University in the hot and humid state of Texas. Forgive my late arrival to this blog, I promise I do have a good excuse. I have had the amazing fortune of studying abroad in China for a little under a month now, but I'm back in good ol' Mei Guo (or the USA as we call it).

Originally I was going to write about Chinese student activism and involvement that I gathered from my limited exposure in China but that will have to wait for another post. After surfing the web this afternoon I came across a little nugget that was too good to pass up. Apparently the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has released a document stating that the AP had incorrectly stated the accuracy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in this article. After reading this I was upset to say the least. To understand why you must first know something about me - I adore Carl Sagan and his guarded philosophy of skepticism used to weed out pseudo (and junk) science. The annoyingly diverse and long running political debate on global warming is enough to get any adoring Sagan fanboy's knickers in a twist.