Nothing but pictures and slideshows and more photos and then some camera things. I’ve stared at so many photographs today I’m not sure what is in focus any more. This one is going in tomorrow’s presentation as the thrill of victory:

That was in 2008. Time flies. She’s gone on to college, made the dean’s list several times and probably graduated by now.

Twitter! For grades! It isn’t just for your breakfast anymore.

It hasn’t been about breakfast since roughly ever, but people that don’t understand it tend to default to such things. A television producer asked me once if I could learn as much about news on Twitter as I could on television. I told him of all of the tidbits I’d learned that day — there happened to be a plane crash and I knew as much or more as you’d get in a television recap of any story — and apologized for not knowing more; I hadn’t been online as much as I normally was.

I think I sold him. But I digress. There is a study that suggests “>Twitter is good for learning:

(C)ollege students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades.

“Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice,” said Greenhow, who also studies the growing use of social media among high-schoolers. “It’s changing the way we experience what we read and what we write.”

[…]

Greenhow analyzed existing research and found that Twitter’s real-time design allowed students and instructors to engage in sharing, collaboration, brainstorming and creation of a project. Other student benefits included learning to write concisely, conducting up-to-date research and even communicating directly with authors and researchers.

I have a Twitter paper that will be published later this year. It will be more about the communal nature of the tool. I look forward to telling you all about it.

I’ll be using this photo essay in class tomorrow. This is the story of a naval EOD who became only the 5th quadruple amputee survivor at Walter Reed, but also his long road back and the love he’s walking with once again. Amazing story, all right there in pictures.

That Buzzfeed piece has turned his friend and photographer, Tim Dodd, into a star. “The site went from boasting 220 views per day at its peak, to 36,000 views per day literally overnight.”

And then The Chive got hold of it. They say they’ve raised $250,000 for Morris in a matter of days.

Media law: SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte on the creep of Hazelwood:

When Hazelwood was decided, First Amendment advocates comforted themselves that the ruling affected only minors enrolled in K-12 schools – and then only in the limited “curricular” setting, such as a class-produced newspaper. That was a logical reading of the case and, as time has proven, an overly optimistic one.

[…]

The creep of Hazelwood onto college campuses is troubling because, in practice, courts regard Hazelwood as a “rational-basis-minus” level of review, under which censorship decisions need only reside in the deferentially viewed vicinity of reasonableness.

[…]

That level of control would be unthinkable in college, where principles of academic freedom are widely accepted to give instructors the latitude to air provocative and even offensive topics. But the inescapable conclusion – that a student could be disciplined for speech that would be constitutionally protected if uttered by a nonstudent – is equally unsustainable. If words are inappropriate for a college audience and might be confused for the government’s speech when uttered by a student, then they are doubly so when said by an adult authority figure.

Quick, fun read: Superman quits the paper.

Tomorrow I’ll use this picture as an argument for taking your camera everywhere:

Took that picture five years ago and remember it like it was yesterday. Not for the picture. I just happened upon that as I drove to a visitation.