Like hundreds of thousands of folks, I signed up for Code Year in January. 2012 was the year I was going to learn how to code.Except I didn’t. Well, not like that. Not via a weekly email that pointed me to Codecademy lessons on Javascript and whatnot. I’m not the first to confess that I’ve failed to follow through on this particular New Year’s resolution. New York Magazine’s Kevin Roose just published a “Public Apology to Codecademy." So here's my review of my own Code Year. [...]
Top 100 Reasons Why I Hate Lists
I hate list posts. It's a pet peeve of mine. I realize I must be alone in this as I see folks write and tweet list posts all the time. It drives me up a wall. There are some folks who do this intelligently -- I think of Larry Ferlazzo and Richard Byrne, for example, who compile long lists of resources. But as they do so, they explain why they finds them to be valuable. For most blogs (and I'm talking here less about individual educators' blogs than I am ones run by a publisher like Mashable), list posts are a cheap and dirty way to garner traffic. [...]
Parodying the Tech Blogs
My former RWW colleague Jon Mitchell revealed Friday that he’s the person behind the tech blog parody Twitter account @nexttechblog. “So what?” is a perfectly acceptable response here. If you’re not a tech blogger (or journalist or media-watcher of some sort) you probably don’t care about a parody account that mocks the kinds of stories we tech bloggers churn out. I think you should care. I mean, I’ve seen you retweet some of the vacuous crap we write. [...]
Journalism, Politics, and the Information Gap
I haven't worked out all my thoughts here. That's why this is posted to this blog and not (yet) to Hack Education. I think there's a ton to be learned for journalists from Election Night 2012 (and from the Presidential Campaign more broadly). Social Media. Data Journalism. Filter Bubbles. These aren't just lessons for political journalists, but (I want to argue) for education and technology writers too. [...]
The Day After the Election (2004)
At some point in my life I'll write everything down that I haven't blogged already. I'll go through my blog archives and dig up the stories that my memory has (thankfully) diminished. But I wrote this yesterday, even though "the morning after" this year's election felt pretty triumphant for me. I do know how personal despair can interweave with political despair... [...]
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Audrey Watters is an education writer, rabble-rouser, rambler, recovering academic, lifelong learner, serial dropout, part-time badass, mom.
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