The world’s so damn complex. I’m always rooting around for possible homeschooling resources and today I found a number of education videos up at learner.org, a place I was unfamliar with. Don’t recollect how I happened on them, what exactly I was looking for at the time. So I selected one on history and maps and watched it with H.o.p. and translated into age-appropriate language for him, because he’s thus far pretty geographically unaware, despite my efforts, and so I have been at least planning over the next little while to keep talking of geography, to keep it somewhere in consciousness. And I was thinking this was a good thing to talk about with some map and video back-up, the idea of nations and politics having exploited maps and history. We’ve touched on these ideas before but some kind of video always helps. A picture moving across the wall behind me would help. So, we talked about it all, because in the history we do I also always talk about why some places have been emphasized more than others in American education and why some almost entirely ignored.
It wasn’t the best video in the world but it wasn’t as bad as all that. Basic introduction geared for older invidivuals which is why my translating for H.o.p., who (by the way) got his “The Amazing Pop-Up Geography Book” in the mail today and it’s pretty cool.
Then afterwards since we had finished a nice long day of getting stuff done–like more on early ancestor bipeds (he did a grand job reading today) and AVKO spelling (pretty good) and Singapore math (great!) and language and just a dollop of Babylonia and the ziggurats (don’t remember how we got into that) and always the essential drop of dinosaurs (plus some discussion on endothermy which got him started for some reason on how he’d heard on Brain Pop about exoplanets and was excited about that)–anyway, since we were done with everything I looked up the Annenberg people since it occurred to me, hmmmm, who’s funding this. Sometimes I think to look and sometimes I don’t and sometimes it just plain doesn’t matter to me but with this for some reason I thought I ought to look. What’s their agenda. Something about the whole shebang made me curious as to the who before I went any further into it.
Oh, yes, Walter Annenberg, the media mogul! But there I lie with the making like, “Oh, right!” because I had no clue who Walter Annenberg was (so sue me) though once I started reading up on it I realized and remembered bits and pieces from the 70s and my teen years. Walter Annenberg. Also the same Annenberg Foundation that funds FactCheck.org and the media school at SC and the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
Annenberg. But I have seen Factcheck used a number of times as resource by progressives and media touts as solidly bipartisan. Have I used them? I don’t remember using them as a resource, it’s always been other sources when I was doing checking, I think, I don’t recall clicking around the factcheck.org website much. And indeed when I do a search of my blog I don’t see where I’ve given Factcheck as a resource.
I’ve read the right claiming the Annenberg Foundation funded media school at SC is all left.
So I keep looking for more info and finally find that some do say that Factcheck.org does hold the left to a different standard than the right.
There’s the Dec 2005 article, “Judgment Reserved to Judgment Reversed; Swift Boat, NARAL ads show media double standard” at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, which includes this which caught my eye:
FactCheck’s partiality was further elucidated by its remarkable claim that Operation Rescue’s blockades “mirrored the nonviolent tactics used earlier by civil-rights activists.†Comparing blockades that physically prevented women from seeking abortions—that is, from exercising a right recognized by the Supreme Court as constitutionally guaranteed—to African-American protesters who pursued their own constitutional rights by sitting in whites-only areas is a bizarre analogy, more outlandish than anything that appeared in the NARAL ad.
Like I say, it’s a complex world. Always. Everything. Ever. I got no clue.
I’m going to be looking around learner.org and seeing what else they have up there which might be useful. After all, any online videos are ones I’d be watching with H.o.p. and translating, though if they’re all like the ones I watched this afternoon I’ll likely abandon the site.
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