Talking to Jeff Lebow of World Bridges at dinner on Thursday sparked a great discussion on how to get students discussing current events. The Internet is an obvious great resource for an Inquiry based process of students form questions for research, evaluate online sources, create content, discuss and taking action on an current issue. The challenge for educators is to facilitate that process. For my masters project, I developed http://trackcurrentevents.org to help facilitate this process. While I think Tracker is a great resource, there are so many web 2.0 options out there that can do so much more.

One site that I see a lot of potential is http://voicethread.com/. Voicethread allows people to upload pictures, video, and documents and then have a community easily comment on each of the items. If I had all the time in the world I would go back to developing Tracker to include more web 2.0 elements like voicethread uses.

My thoughts on an ideal website for current events? A mashup of voicethread, digg, newsvine, twitter and tracker. The overall idea is that people login and can either create or participate in a tracker based on a current issue. Anyone can submit a news article, picture, video or document to a tracker, and based on votes the article gets moved up the queue of the tracker. For each item in the tracker, a voicethread like discussion takes place. An option to only follow comments within your own network would allow people to narrow their audience in a popular tracker.

This is just an abstract of what I would like to see created someday. I programmed and tested http://trackcurrentevents.org in grad school when I worked for a grant project that paid me to produce my masters project. It was some of my favorite work I’ve ever done. I would love an opportunity to go back to development, testing and presenting the project. My ideal “day job” would have me working only 2 or 3 days a week. Jeff, you have a great thing going at World Bridges! Keep it up!