The Brown case. Via SJCPL Lifeline, the weblog our of fine public library here in South Bend, comes the link to the National Parks Service site devoted to Brown vs. Board of Education. The website goes along with the National Historic Site located at Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, one of the segregated schools at issue in the landmark case.

The site includes several screens of bibliographic material, the Supreme Court decision, and information about related cases. It's a good model for an informative website based largely on bibliographic research. I found this key passage from the decision, with its powerfully simple, direct, and confident second sentence, there:

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. [0 & P]

Information economy. James Fallows argues on page 5 of the business section of this morning's New York Times that blogs are part of a restructuring of the economy of information. In his Techno Files column called The Twilight of the Information Middlemen [login required], he also says that much government-funded information gathering is making its way online, too.

"Blogs," he says, "represent the uncoordinated efforts of countless volunteer writers" and "offer real-time eye-witness testimony from people doing almost anything that some other person might find interesting." Like downloading of MP3 files, blogs are helping to challenge the usual economic value of information and disrupt the role played by middlemen, says Fallows. Among those who may have to change their ways in the new economy, he believes, are traditional academic publishers. The column concludes:

No matter how that battle turns out, the public will win the longer war. The Internet's impact on the value of information may still be in flux, but its long-term impact on middlemen is clear.

My own writing class this semester, linked with a mathematics class with the same group of students, took advantage of government sites to produce studies of two mathematical models for predicting ozone levels. We drew much of our general understanding of ozone from federal, state, and regional sites devoted to air quality and pollution, such as the EPA site, an Indiana state site, and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which serves the region that includes Los Angeles. I made a wiki page linking to these sites that student teams used to begin their studies.

This public information provided most of what we needed for the project, saving students the cost of an additional textbook or a copy center collection of articles. We adapted a unit model for teaching mathematical modeling we found in a book on environmental mathematics in designing this project, by the way -- I'll add the reference later. Near the end of the project major articles on ozone levels appeared in the national press, and students had the background to understand the new developments described there.

We'll rerun this project next spring with a new group of students. For that version, I hope to have the teams produce web-based reports rather than paper reports, and then we can see if they will be able to attract readers in the months that follow. [0 & P]