...My take on blogging and schools is this: Blogs will one day give parents and teachers ---and especially students--- a truly useful and community-oriented tool for expressing/sharing education concerns, ideas and happenings, etc. School-based weblogs represent [to me] the real-life fulfillment of what PTA meetings of days-gone-by once strived to be... but in a very fun, easy-to-use, organized and interactive way. The sooner the better

Well, it made me think that our press is in lockstep with the government, and that we're not hearing what the rest of the world is hearing, and it makes us so much less able to understand why there are so many people around the world that hate us. If we can't cover the results of the U.S. bombing campaign, if we can't hear that the United States is stopping food aid from getting to people who are starving and cold, then we're not getting the real story and the U.S. people will continue to think that the United States have liberated the people of Afghanistan and they're all overjoyed with us.

But early indications are that getting everyone onto the same page -- literally -- really helps achieve focus, and more than repays the time and effort invested. I'm convinced, more than ever, of the value of weblogging as an important new form of business communication.

If we are going to be stomping around the world wiping out terrorist cells from Kabul to Manila, we'd better make sure that we are the best country, and the best global citizens, we can be. Otherwise, we are going to lose the rest of the world.

“the very impediments to newsgathering and transmission in years past, the difficulty of composing the words — manual typewriters, setting type by hand — and delivering film, the time it took for stories to reach the street, the intervals between newscasts and paper deliveries all reinforced a process of deliberation and second thoughts that once were ingrained in the communications industry. Now,” it adds, “it is journalism on the fly. There is barely a moment for reflection.”

The single thing that startled me the most was the change in parents...The teachers simply do not have support from the parents in raising standards. My favorite quote in the book came from the principal when I was asking him about standards. He's quite desperate to raise standards. But he said, "Well, who's my constituency? Every parent says they want to raise standards, but the minute Johnny gets a C, suddenly they're not so hot about the idea."

"Nearly two years after the dot-com fizzle began, e-learning has emerged from the wreckage as one of the Internet's most useful applications."

"I don't believe that democracy and terrorism are relative things you can talk about, and I don't think there's any moral equivalence in those two positions." He added: "If that makes me a bad guy, tough luck. I'm still getting the ratings."