Stephen's Untold Stories

Some very helpful information for those in need.

• http://docs.google.com/View?id=afpvcm3jcc7_23dgq7kjcv

Here are some other photos of the flooding we experienced earlier this week. Click each image for a larger version.

Here is the entire gallery.

We’ve had an unbelievable amount of rain the last week or so down here. Most area schools will be closed on Tuesday, and many roads are impassable.

Story from the AJC

This first shot is of some tennis courts in the area.

And these next three were taken from my parents’ back yard.

That car was washed down the hill.

Guaranteed to provoke some serious conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Brainpop has a nice 9/11 movie you can watch for free today.

• http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/ushistory/september11th/

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.   That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

Deven Black just made a very timely blog post that I wish more people would read.

My favorite part:

We need newspaper editors, reporters and columnists, television commentators, political pundits, radio phone-in hosts and their readers, viewers or listeners to do something.

STOP!

Stop exaggerating.

Stop misleading.

Stop blaming.

Stop making doomsday projections.

Stop name-calling.

Stop seeing a socialist around every corner while still planning to benefit from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Stop seeing a McCarthyite reactionary or Marxist revolutionary every time someone opposes something you support.

Stop treating Americans like morons, especially when they seem to want to be treated that way.

Stop treating Americans like morons, especially when they, in your humble opinion, act like morons.

Stop dumbing down your nation.

Read the rest here.

A very interesting story involving the State School Superintendent in Georgia and a million dollars she won and pledged to schools for children with special needs. I hope they get it.

The drama in U.S. Bankruptcy Court began in an unusual place: On a television game show called “Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?” with a chance to win $1 million.

State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox proved last August that she was indeed smarter and claimed the $1 million prize. Then, before a national broadcast audience, she pledged the money to scores of blind and deaf children who attend three state-run schools.

But three months later Cox and her husband, John Cox, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, leaving in its wake a slew of creditors embroiled in a tug-of-war with the state, which insists the cash should go to the schools. And, proponents for the students plan a protest Wednesday to demand the money.

“The state Board of Education contends Ms. Cox would not have been invited to the program other than in a position of playing for a charitable interest,” said Russell Willard, a spokesman for the Georgia Attorney General’s office, which is representing the Department of Education. “The monies won on that program should go to the charitable interests designated by Ms. Cox.”

Cox promised if she won, she would give the $1 million to Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon; the Georgia School for the Deaf in Cave Spring; and the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf in Clarkston.

Those three institutions are state-run and, unlike most public schools, don’t rely on local funding.

But Gary W. Brown, the Chapter 7 trustee assigned to the case, doesn’t see it that way. On July 31, he filed suit against Kathy Cox and Fox Broadcasting Corp., which airs the game show, to claim the money for the creditors.

Read the rest here.

Google celebrates this annual event. Anybody going to do a lot of watching?

Several districts in Georgia are either doing it or are looking into it. The reason? Saving money, of course!

What’s 11 extra minutes a day in class equal? Five more days of summer, according to a recommendation that would cut Fulton County’s school calendar to 175 days.

Georgia’s standard school year is 180 days.

The proposal — the first from a major metro Atlanta system — comes as the economy keeps its viselike grip on schools and the state slashes its public funding.

It goes to Fulton’s school board next week, although a final decision will not come for another two months as officials seek public comment. The board will meet at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday at Dunwoody Springs Elementary School, 8100 Roberts Drive in Sandy Springs.

Among the first to embrace the change were two small systems outside the metro area, which over the summer turned to longer daily hours and shorter years.

The 4,000 students in middle Georgia’s Peach County now attend school four days a week, which system officials estimate saves more than $407,000 in operations and transportation costs.

In rural North Georgia, Murray County officials went to a 160-day school year that starts after Labor Day. In turn, elementary school students get another hour in class and middle and high school students another 30 minutes — for a savings of $124,000 this school year.

In Fulton, teachers would still work 190 days. Early release days for students would be eliminated, becoming full teacher training days. If approved, the calendar would start with the 2010-11 school year.

Read the rest here.

Sad, but I wish her well.

When I was a first-year teacher fresh out of college, I got a lot of questions about my chosen profession. I usually said that I was inspired by my grandmother, who taught in the Boston public schools for 35 years. The real truth was that, like many of my peers, I had fallen in love with the idea of the job. Urban classrooms struck me as seductively gritty, and it only seemed right that I “give back” after spending 22 years in a suburban, Ivy League bubble. I rarely voiced this sentiment because I was afraid of sounding cavalier.

Four years later, the question I encounter is equally thorny: Why leave teaching? It’s not just a question about how I’ll pay my rent. Reformers have big plans to transform failing urban schools, and their work hinges on finding a way to keep strong teachers in the classroom. By throwing in the towel, I have become one more teacher abandoning her students.

So why am I leaving?

When people ask, I tend to cite the usual suspect — burnout. I just couldn’t take it anymore, I explain. I describe what it was like to teach students such as Shawna, a 10th-grader who could barely read and had resolved that the best way to deal with me was to curse me out under her breath. I describe spending weeks revising a curriculum proposal with my fellow teachers, only to find out that the administration had made a unilateral decision without looking at it. I describe how it became impossible to imagine keeping it up and still having energy for, say, a family.

My listeners nod sagely. They’ve heard my story before: An eager young instructor plunges into the fray only to emerge, disappointed and disillusioned, a few years later. In the era of Teach for America and urban teaching fellow programs, my journey is not particularly novel.

In 2005, the year I started teaching, nearly a third of new teachers in the District of Columbia were recent college graduates who had enrolled in Teach for America or the D.C. Teaching Fellows program. Statistics suggest that many of these recruits have already moved on. Nationally, half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years, and in urban schools, especially the much-lauded “no excuses” charter schools, turnover is often much higher.

But there is more to those numbers than “burnout.” That term is shorthand for a suite of factors that contributed to my choice to leave the classroom. When I talk about the long hours, for example, what I mean is that, over the course of four years, my school’s administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. One afternoon this spring, when my often apathetic 10th-graders were walking eagerly around the room as part of a writing assignment, an administrator came in and ordered me to get the class “seated and silent.” It took everything I had to hold back my tears of frustration.

The teaching itself was exhilarating but disheartening. There were triumphs: energetic seminar discussions, cross-class projects, a student-led poetry slam. This past year, my 10th-graders even knocked the DC-CAS reading test out of the water. Even so, I felt like a failure. Too many of my students showed only occasional signs of intellectual curiosity, despite my best efforts to engage them. Too many of them still would not or could not read. And far too many of them fell through the cracks. Of the 130 freshmen who entered the school in 2005, about 50 graduated this spring.

Read the rest here.

Many districts in Georgia have started furloughs for teachers. Naturally, many of them still come to work on their unpaid furlough days.

At Webb Bridge Middle School in Alpharetta most teachers will be working the last of three furlough days Friday.

Yes, working — without pay.

If the roll were taken, teacher attendance would be classified as “very good,” Webb Bridge principal Elizabeth Fogartie said Thursday. “They’re booked solid every minute.”

The teacher furloughs — believed to be a first for Georgia — are altering the schedules and paychecks of the majority of the state’s 120,000 school teachers. Some teachers are philosophical about the unpaid days. Others are plainly unhappy.

Michael Witt, a fourth-grade teacher at Alpharetta Elementary, is in the latter camp.

“They’re unpaid work days,” Witt said. “It’s horrible. That’s like telling parents you can’t go Christmas shopping, but you’ve got to get presents under the tree.”

He said he worked two of the three furlough days this week, only because he had so much to do.

“People worked, and they wanted us to work,” Witt said.

The furloughs are expected to save the state about $33 million a day and to cost the average teacher about $200 a day. They’re just part of the belt-tightening that educators are enduring.

Roy Sams, who teaches art and yearbook at the new Twin Rivers Middle School in Gwinnett, says “we don’t have the budgets that we used to.”

Sams spent part of this week hanging paintings and pencil art drawings he did over the summer to give an artistic feel to the shiny walls and “to kind of lead by example.”

“I’m going to have to do projects that are a lot cheaper and with supplies I get for free,” he said.

In Fulton County, school administrators weren’t purposely trying to get the dreaded days out of the way before school starts Monday.

“We didn’t really have a lot of options,” said Susan Hale, the district’s spokeswoman. “We were told they had to be on contracted work days that are non-student days.”

Read the rest here.

Pretty good stuff here.

I know the purpose of web filtering for schools, but if you’ve worked in a school lately you know how much of a joke they really are.

Web site filters in schools have had tremendous success in keeping one group of people from freely searching online. Unfortunately, that group is teachers.

Content filters are knee-high fences around the Internet: They may trip up older folks, but teens leap right over. Walk the halls of a public school, and students will readily share tips for evading filters, some of which would be good work-arounds for the Great Firewall of China. Recently, a student from Hingham, Mass., pointed me toward the Facebook group “How to access Facebook from school,” which has 187,000 members. Those members receive strategies on simple methods to surf freely at school. Put another way, every time school administrators patch one weak spot in their defenses, these kids are prepared to drill open a hundred more holes.

In a battle between overwhelmed school IT staff and a 187,000-member Facebook group, plus dozens of other filter-bashing networks, blogs and e-mail discussion groups, the smart money is on the students.

Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000, any school or library that uses federal funds to buy computers is required to install Internet filters. Such legislation may score political points, but it isn’t safeguarding students from online hazards. More often, filters hamstring teachers’ efforts to develop lessons that effectively prepare students for 21st-century challenges.

Ask teachers about how to get around filters and a frequent response is, “I have no idea.” The next most-common response: “I have no idea, but when I need to get to a blocked site, I ask a student for help.”

Read the rest here.

Shared with me by a friend.

This is the last ride of an American hero to his home town. Watch and consider and reflect what an incredible privilege that you are able to be part of it.

Killed in action the week before, the body of Sergeant First Class John C. Beale was returned to Falcon Field in Peachtree City, Georgia, just south of Atlanta, on June 11, 2009.

The Henry County Police Department escorted the procession to the funeral home in McDonough, Georgia. A simple notice in local papers indicated the road route to be taken and the approximate time. Nowadays one can be led to believe that America no longer respects honor and no longer honors sacrifice of the military.

Be it known that there are many places in this land where people still recognize the courage and impact of total self-sacrifice. Georgia remains one of those graceful places.

Below is a short travelogue of that day’s remarkable and painful journey.

http://blip.tv/file/2246058/

I know we all like to be nice and share just about everything, but I respect the wishes of a presenter who chooses not to do so. Here is a great post that illustrates this.

Recently,Chris Penn was asked whether he would post a presentation of his to the web, and he said, “No.”  I have a recording of that presentation, and I am also honoring his “no” and won’t be posting it or my notes to the web.   Why would people very involved in the podcasting community and in shraing, people who host events about group learning decide to say no and withhold information from others?  Chris got a lot of email from people who were upset with him for saying no, for imposing a limit.  Yet my question is “Why do you feel entitled to his presentation and intellectual property for free?”

People were getting upset that he decided he would not share his information out further.  Chris decided to say no, simply and elegantly.  He set a boundary, and people got mad, just like the two year old who’s told it’s bedtime.

My question is this:  If you aren’t willing to attend someone’s session, if you aren’t willing to give him your presence when he speaks, why should he give you his information later on?  What have you done to earn or deserve it?  And why should someone else like me, who may have recorded the session, make that material available to you?

The community doesn’t like the word No.  They will tell you it’s against the very nature of bringing people together to set up limits and boundaries.  But these are the same people who said No to getting up early, to taking in an experience even if it was inconvenient.  The no’s balance out perfectly, and harmony should be restored.

One of the challenges internet communities have is that the all-access pass of communication, 24 x 7, gives an illusion that anything you want should be yours.  And that simply is not true.

Read the rest here.

I would have to say that they certainly helped. Pretty impressive story.

Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.

In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release. Keeping 35 news organizations quiet was actually not the hard part – but staving off Wikipedia users from publishing the news? That was a bit trickier.

Through an elaborate and ongoing battle between Wikipedia editors and an anonymous contributor from Florida, the New York Times and the Wikipedia Foundation managed to keep the story quiet. For seven months, Wikipedia editors were in a constant back-and-forth with this user to delete news of Rohde’s capture off of the site. They were unable to contact the user directly, as s/he was anonymously posting on Wikipedia, and thus could not explain to the user why they were trying to keep the news quiet. Infuriated, the user threw insults at the editors who were deleting his addition, and blindly continued their futile fight.

All of this ended when Rohde and Ludin managed to climb over a wall and escape the Taliban’s clenches. In an interesting twist, the driver chose to join the Taliban and thus stayed behind, according to Rohde. This is a truly inspiring story, and the efforts of the Wikipedia editors and the New York Times are beyond laudable. In a recent tweet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that preventing the news from breaking may have saved his life. Regardless of the merits of this comment, it made Rohde’s escape more likely, and was a downright impressive feat of coordination by all parties involved.

Link to article.

Looks pretty accurate to me.

The historic Georgia Theater in Athens was heavily damaged today by a fire.

Firefighters were called at about 7 a.m. to the theater, located at the corner of North Lumpkin and West Clayton streets, when a man walking home through downtown smelled something burning and found smoke billowing from the theater doors.

Within an hour, the roof on the historic building had collapsed.

Dozens of big-name acts had performed at the Georgia Theatre — musicians such as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Prine and Jorma Kaukonen, not to mention Athens-based acts like R.E.M., Randall Bramblett and Davis Causey.

The theater originally became a music venue in 1978, when Sheffy McArthur built a stage in the building and opened the venue with Sam Smart and George Fontaine.

Link to article.

I’ve posted a couple of times recently about how I’ve finally started to “get” Twitter. Here is yet another reason I’m really starting to love this tool.

If you aren’t on twitter, you really should be. Not because it allows you to keep up with the daily goings-on of Khloe Kardashian (although it does!), but because we are seeing for the first time what happens when a government that needs to control information to survive can’t control information. Iranians are using twitter to organize, to share information, and even to discuss which routes to take to rallies to avoid confrontations with the police. Although foreign journalists have mostly been kicked out of Iran, we’re still able to get pictures like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this.

The regime has more sophisticated ways of stopping the flow of information, but so far at least the Iranians on twitter have stayed remarkably organized, and they’ve found ways to vet information. When false rumors have spread, they’ve been quickly debunked.

So, yeah. Twitter is not about what you had for breakfast, or Khloe Kardashian, or me. It’s about evening the playing field.

Link to article