Mouse put a lot of work into her project over the last two months, but her e-zine on the solar system is published!  Unfortunately, I allowed us to fall quite a bit behind due to pregnancy fatigue and the birth of the baby, and she got a little frustrated as the deadline loomed and the work mounted.  She was not able to include some of the things she wanted to include, but did finish everything she thought needed to be included in an e-zine about the solar system.

The one article she felt bad about not including was one about the dwarf planets.  She really wanted to share about them, but she already was going to bed late enough the night before her project published…just like a real editor!  I hadn’t uploaded the pdf version yet, and the pictures still were not working in the magazine theme when she went to bed so I am anxious to see what she thinks of it when she wakes up.

We discovered that her favorite part of this project is managing it.  She loves emailing people, reading their submissions, searching for images and posting entries.  The writing, however, is not her favorite.  She is still struggling a bit, and needs help organizing her thoughts.  She said this afternoon as she was finishing up the last article that she couldn’t wait until next year when that part would be easier.  I guess she has been listening to me about how practice will make even difficult tasks easier over time!

Oh, and if you have time, check out her video on how to make a science journal.  It is her first one, and she was a bit nervous.

Her next issue is on the spring migration and your children are welcome to submit their articles about migratory birds, their nesting habits and how to attract them to your yard.

My daughter has been pitching blog ideas to me for some time, but I have been a little less than enthusiastic knowing just how much work goes in to a blog.  I had two prerequisites.  First, her spelling needed to improve to the point that editing it wouldn’t be a full time job for me.  Second, she needed to come up with a topic that would be sustainable over a period of time.  But she finally managed to pitch the right idea at the right time.  I’ve been trying to think of ways to focus more on writing and she came up with the idea of doing a monthly e-zine about science…The Science Mouse.

It seemed a perfect match.  And given the topic, I didn’t mind turning over half of her homeschool day to her new endeavor.  That’s right.  At the moment, we are doing bible, math and blogging.  That will change as she gains independence in her endeavor, but it really is amazing how much she has learned even before her first edition has been posted.

What is a blog?

The most interesting part of this to me has been teaching the blog as its own genre with its own structure and purpose.  She is actually writing an e-zine, which is sort of a cross between a blog and a magazine.  She has been looking at some different blogs and magazines to see how they are set up and has used that to inform some of her decisions.  She chose to go with self-hosted WordPress and spent some time thinking about her domain name.  Although this was essentially a gift to her, the little bit we have spent on setting her site up has not gone unnoticed.  And let me tell you, reading problogger with a ten year old is an interesting endeavor, but we’ll get back to that in a minute.

A flair for design

My poor Mouse spent hours looking at different templates for her e-zine and sorting through what plug-ins she thought she would need.  We are not worrying about coding at this point, and she only has a vague understanding of what a plug-in even is, but she is learning the basics of WordPress and trusting her mother’s advice on the rest.  She has learned how to insert links, position photos and a little about how to format the text.  For the first time, we have talked seriously about copyright law and she is beginning to see intellectual property on par with physical property as she thinks about what it would be like to have someone take all of her hard work without even asking.

She has learned about different ways to get images for her entries and quite a bit about photoediting as she and I designed her first cover.  When my parents come up for the birth of the baby, she is even hoping to come up with a sort of mascot to appear on every cover.

The art of the caption

Caption writing is an art in itself.  I never thought much of it until we sat down to write her first one.  I wrote a couple as an intern which were published in HydroReview, a magazine about hydroelectric dams.  They seem easy because of their brevity, but a good caption packs a lot of information into those few words.  That is something we will definitely be working on more in the future and I hope to see improvement as we take more time in future issues to concentrate on caption writing.

How to conduct an interview

Looking at some different magazines and blogs, Mouse quickly jumped on the idea of interviewing someone in the field for each edition of her magazine (provided we can find someone).  She already has an interview lined up for this issue and a likely candidate for the next, but before she actually started trying to think up questions, I think she thought this would be one of the easier parts of putting together her e-zine.  How hard can an interview be?  You just ask questions, right? For the first time, she is thinking hard about what kinds of answers certain questions solicit and trying to figure out how to ask questions that cannot be answered simply by “yes” or “no.”  She is also trying to think from her prospective readers’ perspectives.

Mouse, editor-in-chief

Mouse has had sort of crash course in the world of publishing.  She has learned about queries, deadlines, the need for a theme list and the importance of editorial guidelines.  She has been thinking about the kinds of features she would like to have in each issue, and how to create a sort of personality for her publication.  And her very first lesson was the difference between personal and professional emails.  My daughter loves smilies, pretty fonts and multi-colored text.  She was a tad disappointed to learn that these are not appropriate for a professional email.

Half the work is marketing

In a way, children are born marketers.  She is excited to tell her friends and relatives about her project, unlike me.  I’m always a little self-conscious about talking about my blog with people I know.  Mouse, on the other hand, wants to design business cards to pass out to any and everyone she knows.  And as I noted above, reading problogger with a ten year old has been interesting.  I read his blog occasionally, and take tips here and there, but “making money blogging” is not exactly my primary goal here.  I just want to improve as a blogger.

But now my little Mouse wants to come up with advertising rates, analyze her statistics and figure out a sort of marketing plan for her little project.  She has been learning about affiliate links and Google AdSense.  She wants to know more about search engines and how to help people find her e-zine.  She reads this stuff and wants to do all of it.  I’m just trying to pace her.  After all, somewhere in there, she has to write some actual content.

And did I mention science?

After all, it is a science e-zine.  She has been willing to write more than she usually will, and I have noticed an improvement in both her writing and her spelling.  I think mostly because now she cares and is actually paying attention to what she is doing rather than just trying to get through the assignment.  But she is also looking at the piles of books we check out from the library differently.  She looks at the illustrations and the text with an eye for whether or not it would be a good item to review.

Whether or not she has learned any more about the solar system than she would have had we just stuck with our normal routine I cannnot judge, but she has certainly taken ownership of her learning.  And that is all I have ever wanted from the beginning.

Oh, and if your child would be interested in contributing to her e-zine, she can be contacted via her contact form.  She has been developing a theme list and talks a little about what she is looking for on her about page.

homeschool homeschooling home education blogging

I have been doing a bit of reading recently about the internet, communities and the concept of virtual communities which develop over time.  The internet seems to offer an incredible ability for us to connect regardless of geographical boundaries.  To find information on a broad range of topics and often to find first hand accounts of how the stories we see in the news are affecting communities around the world.  To engage with people we might not otherwise ever talk to and find points of commonality as well as develop a certain level of respect for ideas we disagree with.

But I have found that the more I read other blogs, particularly political blogs, the more I appreciate my readers here.  It seems that in any serious discussion, there are two basic types of comments left: “Amen” or “You’re an idiot.”  There is very little meaningful or respectful discussion of any issue.

Maybe it is the nature of the blog and the internet.  A million voices are shouting through the noise and the easiest way to attract a following is to market outrage.  The e-newsletters I receive never merely outline an issue, provide some background and offer suggestions for organizing against an action.  Mixed in with this purported goal of the newsletter are hyperbolic statements about the end of America.  The end of homeschooling.  The end of the family.  The end of worker’s rights.

Everything is sensationalized.  There is never a middle ground.  There is always a call to arms.  And someone like me who generally believes that most of the consequences we get ourselves so upset about were unintended consequences of an action designed for good is passed off as “blind to what is really going on.”

Speaking about the recent outrage over Prince Harry’s comments about the Taliban and an Pakistani officer, Bookworm Room (via To Love Honor and Vacuum) puts it best,

The level of anger and hysteria about everything nowadays — absolutely everything — just puts me off, especially because it leaves no room to paint with the real brush of outrage.  If calling your enemy by a pejorative, or using a very low level slur in a sarcastic way to refer to someone who is obviously a comrade in arms, is exactly as horrific as using children as human shields, you’ve rendered your moral compass useless.  To use an analogy only those of us over 40 understand, if you play your records at 78 rpm, they all sound like indistinguishable gibberish.  We live in such a hysterical era.

Hysteria and outrage, not simple disagreement.  This incident can be exchanged with so many issues going on in our culture and our government.  That whole Subway thing?  Sure, if you were upset about it you don’t have to eat at Subway.  But the comparison to “Negroes need not apply” were a bit over the top for me.  The Motrinmoms thing?  I was all for baby wearing mothers to bring attention to the ads and to baby wearing in general.  But in the end it reached a level of outrage which went a little beyond rational.  Especially once I began to see blog posts popping up asking if Motrin’s actions were “enough” once they pulled the campaign.  Even the current outrage over CPSIA.  I am totally against this law, and believe that we do need to act against it.  But do I believe that our elected representatives are sitting around in darkened rooms thinking up ways to kill small business and take books away from children?  Hardly.

The Economist has an interesting article which Lynn of Bore Me to Tears linked in my comment box and I’ve been meaning to come back to ever since:

“We now live in a giant feedback loop,” says Mr Bishop, “hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”  The Economist

It doesn’t seem to be about community anymore, but about isolation.  The paths of communication between groups are getting narrower with the advent of the internet rather than broader, pushing us to the extremes of our political philosophies as there is a decreasing need to get along with anyone who disagrees.  We are in a “giant feedback loop” as American society becomes increasingly fragmented according to religious and political views.

There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme. Even clever, fair-minded people are not immune. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade, two academics, found that Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. Democratic judges become more liberal when on the bench with fellow Democrats.  Ibid.

At first, I thought what I was seeing on the internet was a combination of providing a platform for extreme views to be expressed and the lower level of social inhibitions in online communication.  But now I’m not so sure.  As it becomes easier to associate only with those we agree with, we are pushed to the extreme.  Outrage is cultivated and rewarded through attention, traffic and a following.

What could be an excellent tool for community building and crossing political and religious divides may actually be making those divisions deeper and more difficult to cross.

I must admit that I don’t quite get social bookmarking. I think it is because I have never really invested enough time in any one of the services out there to really see what it can do. At one time or another, I have signed up for a variety of social bookmarking sites and left most of my accounts dormant. A couple of you seem to have found me, however, as a friend request here and there over the past week has reminded me that these accounts exist.

So I thought I’d give it a try. As if I needed something else to occupy my time.

I am not sure whether y’all are just not all that into social bookmarking or I’m just incompetent being not all that into social bookmarking myself, but I could not find any of you anywhere. Even those of you who I am relatively sure have accounts somewhere. So I’m going to ask for a huge favor. I am going to list my multiple identities here and hope that y’all can find me on the social bookmarking site of your choice.

I would also really appreciate your impromptu reviews of the listed services or any others that you may frequent. Except twitter. No offense to all the twits or tweets or whatever they are. That sounds way to addictive and I’m just not going there. Ever. Not even to check it out. Else you might never see me again.

Facebook: Dana Hanley

StumbleUpon: principleddis

Digg: gottsegnet

(Obviously I missed that note about personal branding. I don’t even know why I have a different username everywhere. For that, I’d have to know what I was thinking way back when I set it up. And I don’t even know what I was thinking ten minutes ago when I started composing this post.)

GOPHub: danahanley

del.icio.us: gottsegnet

sk*rt: gottsegnet

I know there are a couple more at least, but I don’t even remember what they are, much less what I used as a username or password.

Like how could I forget these two?

MyBlogLog: principled1

Blog Catalog: gottsegnet

I like the idea of social bookmarking…of sifting through similarly minded people and finding what they think is interesting. But I usually don’t think about it. And then it takes too much time to fill in the little forms. That is why I like StumbleUpon so much. I downloaded the del.icio.us toolbar last night so if my husband leaves it, I may find I like it. Then I don’t have to worry about my browser crashing and taking my bookmarks with it!

Well, my unintentional break from almost all things computer has been sort of nice, but frustrating.  You don’t realize how much you use the computer for daily tasks until you do not have that option.

Our computer has been acting up and finally stopped working altogether yesterday.  My dear husband is working on it and hopefully will have it running again before he is called to work.

This time, I think I only lost my bookmarks.  I can live with that.  If he gets it running again, I’ll post tonight.  If not, my silence shall continue for another day or two.

If I tried to fix it, you might never hear from me again.

I have been busy playing with wordpress plugins and I think I finally found everything I could possibly want on my blog that is worth the time to figure out how to use. Until next week, anyway.

So I thought I’d give you all a quick tour of my new and improved site so you know what is here and what you can do.

I now have a contact page. If you have a question, suggestion or something you feel you need to say to me and not necessarily the whole world, you can do so right here from my blog. Just click on “contact” under my header and fill out the nifty little form.

I now have threaded comments. My primary purpose for this blog is discussion, and I think this feature aids that purpose. This will allow you to respond either to the post in the normal fashion, or directly to individual comments. Just click “reply to this comment” and your comment will be put under that comment with a slight indent and shading to help track discussions. It will only thread three deep for the sake of legibility, but subsequent replies continue to be displayed under the comment with alternate shading. In IE, you will also see a little symbol that allows you to collapse comments as you read them. [When you click "Comments," it will bump you to the start of the entry and you have to scroll back down to the comment section. Annoying. If anyone knows how to fix that, please help!! Thanks, Alex!]

You can now email links. Just click the “Share This” feature and type in the email address. I don’t know how often anyone ever uses that feature, but now I have it, too. I did have a neat plug in that allowed you to convert the post to a pdf document to print off, but it made the end of the post too messy.

I have an announcement feature. You probably really don’t care, but I thought I’d further justify the fact that I have spent two and a half hours on my blog without actually writing anything. I can’t even think of anything to announce. What kinds of things would you like to know?

• Random facts about my children?
• A recommended blog post?
• Notes from our nature journal?
• A mix?

Let me know. I’m sort of leaning towards featuring a blog post or two from my surfing, but I’m open to suggestions.

Other than that, consider this an open thread. Any plans for the weekend? How is homeschooling going? Reading any good books? Feel free to discuss this and more. And have fun with the threaded comments. I did, as anyone who subscribes to the comment feed might have noted.

I was going to do a Saturday School, but we are out of glue so we were unable to actually do the project I had planned.

If you have glue, you can do what we were going to do. Make toys. I suggest printing these off on card stock. It really is quite a fun little project.

While you are at it, you can find an old box and make some furniture.

Who needs that cheap Chinese stuff when you can furnish your home with cardboard and entertain your kids with paper?

If you haven’t decided who you are going to vote for, you can at least find out who your brain wants to vote for. This is the most interesting of the political candidate tests I’ve taken. You don’t even have to answer any questions related to what a president actually does. I found out my brain likes McCain marginally better than Clinton, but it didn’t seem to see much of a difference. Poor thing.

This is sad. A real life house of horrors.

A little school choice. What interested me more than the program was the reasons parents gave for participating. Mr. Dunbar, for example, moved his children out of his zone.

He said after-school care was a major factor in his family’s decision.

Who cares about things like quality teachers? Or those pilot programs only offered at certain schools? Proximity to daycare is all that matters. I am afraid convenience drives more education decisions than anything else.

And this is just weird. I knew it would eventually be possible. I’ve been intrigued by this technology since the early 90s…showing you just how long it has been around. I always figured the first application would be some military project, not a video game, but I guess the market still drives some things. Or the military is capable of keeping some of its secrets.

For you visual people out there, check this out: The interconnectedness of the bible visualized.

Oy!  And the Carnival of Homeschooling.  Have I really been that busy?  I guess so.  My astute readers have likely already finished reading it before I even got to linking to it, but there it is for any who have not.

Have any more good links to share? Feel free…

The wonderful administrator over at BlogNetNews.com put together our homeschool community page and it is now live!

Unfortunately, at present I know about as much about what you can do with it as you do. Unless you are Judy from Consent of the Governed who edits the Connecticut blogs. She knows way more than me. But I do know how to add a blog or edit a blog so if I made any more mistakes that I did not already find, please let me know!

If you have a homeschool blog and would like to be included, we even have a handy submission form now.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I will either answer them or add them to my list of things to ask someone else.

Via Here in the Bonny Glenn, an interesting post on blogging, motherhood and living in surburbia.

This strikes rather close to home for me, especially as I contemplate how to more efficiently manage my time to take on a project seriously that I have been playing at for years. Add to that a husband who may only be home for less than 12 hours ever few days, and you can see where the internet can begin to take on the role of surrogate social interaction.

This blog is a hobby for me, one which I occasionally get frustrated with. After all, I hardly pursue many other hobbies, such as sewing, knitting or crocheting, because there just is not much time left at the end of the day. And I do not have that finished project to hold in my hands when it is over. No scarf, hat or hanging for the wall.

So what keeps me doing it?

1) Social interaction.

Although I have only met two of you in person, I do feel as if I know many of you personally. Checking up on your blogs and interacting via email and comment boxes is like a phone call. Most of my close personal friends have drifted away in the course of several moves and major life changes and I do not really have anyone at the moment that I can just call up because I’m excited about the baby’s new milestone or frustrated because the day is just not going well.

2) A place to write.

I have written all my life, it seems. It is how I think through things. Sometimes, I do not even really know what I think about a subject until I begin to write about it. I collect my thoughts through my fingertips, and am occasionally surprised at where that leads me. It forces me to think my thoughts through, research and make connections I might not otherwise make through the course of the day. This blog has been much more satisfying and intellectually stimulating than the various journals and notebooks I have filled over the years. Because they were private, I never made an attempt at polishing them. I rarely looked anything up. They remain unfinished ramblings describing unfinished thoughts.

3) Intellectual stimulation.

Let’s face it. My oldest is nine. I love each of my children dearly. I love talking and conversing with them. Those conversations are each precious on their own, but they are not very stimulating. That is largely why this blog is not very personal and my personal blog is a little more neglected than this one. I like the social side of those kinds of posts, but I am not looking for that sort of affirmation as much. I am looking more for the convesation that I might normally have over a cup of coffee. Which generally will move quickly into world affairs. I like the discussion and the challenge. I’ve always liked friendly debate and have found a pleasant forum for such discussion.

4. A sense of community.

This is closely tied to the other three, but I really do enjoy the small voice I have in discussions which affect homeschoolers. I have been able to talk to homeschoolers all over the world: Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada…and despite our varying political and religious beliefs, there is something that unites us as well. Certain things we hold in common which evokes a similar feeling I had running into other Americans while I was living in Germany. All of a sudden, those “other” differences do not matter as much. There is a familiarity that goes beyond social and geographic boundaries.

What keeps you blogging? Or reading blogs if you have not actually started one?

_____

Cartoon from xcd.com

Wisdom for Sunday:

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler (p. 123)

Brought to you courtesy of Lifestyle Education through Discipleship and the “book tag.” According to the rules, I am supposed to include the next three sentences as well, but I like it as it is. And it is my blog.

This is actually what I like about blogging. It hinders passive reading. I question, ponder, reflect and can even discuss the things I read. This is why it takes me so long to read a good book. To me, the best books are not those that I cannot put down. They are the ones that I cannot wait to put down so that I can reflect on the ideas presented.

And now for the obligatory rules and links:

1. Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages.

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the 5th sentence.

4. Post the next 3 sentences.

5. Tag 5 people.

Five people, selected completely at random from my sidebar with no real thought involved because my husband is standing over my shoulder and wants the computer to do something for my birthday:

Domestic Divapalooza
A Woman On Purpose
My Domestic Church
Alasandra
The Opinions and Ramblings of a Wannabe Attorney

Oh, and to my much appreciated commenters: You have likely noticed some rather unsavory spam of late. Believe me, the little that got through is only the tip of the iceberg. In one night, the spam filter caught over 40,000, several hundred were held for moderation and a few got through. That seems to have stopped now. But I now have a lot of things which will flag comments for moderation. Please be patient and know that your comments will be approved as soon as I see them.