So my mentor, Emile, sends me google alert news feed updates every once in a while that are pretty good food for thought. I use google Alerts and Legislative updates as well, but if you’re interested in being active in the participatory democracy we live under [which I’m going to lecture you right now that you allllll should be!!!] You can have google send you alerts, called google alerts, that comb through the masses of news produced online and email you back results based on topic tags that you preset… so if you’re interested in music news, you can tell google alerts to send you emails from the search inquiry ‘music’ or ‘Beyonce’ or ‘Intellectual Property Rights’, or all 3, and It’ll spit back like 10 stories per email. It’s great! I would highly advise, though, setting the frequency to once a week on the alert emails, or your inbox will be bombed, clogged, jammed shut. Of course, if you accidentally set an alert to daily, you can go back and reprogram it to weekly, or change an alert search inquiry, or tell an alert to search for ‘only the best’ stories. The alert account settings are yours, attached to the email account, and always reaccessable. And to conclude my tangent on the virtues of Google Alerts, here’s a link to them if you want to get started being alerted right friggin’ now!!!:
You can also get email alerts set up with your state legislatures and the federal government for specific categories of legislation for an even deeper level of democracy awareness:
Personalized Michigan Legislation Updates!
Anyway, were was I? Oh, so Emile will help to keep me updated on education news as well, and sent me one of his google alerts on an article about charter schools. Apparently, Michigan has a high concentration of charter schools, and along with school district difficulties and decades of some mismanagement problems, Michigan, accompanied by Texas, are considered the ‘Wild West’ of Education Reform. Texas also has this weird grip on the school textbook industry, but in a weird way, I found it a little exciting when Emile informed me that I was studying Education Reform in the ‘Wild Wild West’… big fish down the road, I guess!
