Category Archives: College Students
Kids tuning in to community conversations?
#VT – … my kids, reading over my shoulder, decided they too want to be in-the-know. So they’ve both signed up for FPF, without assistance from me.
My 14-year-old daughter wants to help find lost cats for neighbors; my 11-year-old son looks forward to finding out about yard sales where he can find electronics bargains.Maybe they’re not unique, but I thought it was a tribute to what you’ve created that these members of our youngest generation have added your service to the few they subscribe to — and one that, as a parent, I trust is “safe” for them to read!
From a mother and Front Porch Forum member in Essex.
Need gift ideas for college graduates… ask the neighbors
#VT – A few weeks ago I posted on Front Porch Forum to get ideas for gifts for two girls graduating from college. I received wonderful responses. Thank you so much. The gift idea I chose was to get paintings from a local artist Nancy Stone. She did the most beautiful “pet” paintings for the girls and at such a reasonable price. I am so thrilled, I had to share. 🙂
Posted on FPF in Williston today by Linda.
Tweets from a Birmingham jail?
Malcolm Gladwell opens his Oct. 4, 2010 New Yorker article…
At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell
Magic Number
A guest post today from Front Porch Forum’s most recent hire, Jamie Seiffer. Take it away, Jamie…
For those of you familiar with De La Soul, y’all know that three is the magic number. For those of you unfamiliar, check this out. Three is the magic number for us because that’s how many pairs of tickets our friends at Higher Ground have graciously donated to Front Porch Forum. As a result, all of our neighbors (that’s you!) have the chance to enter a raffle for a FREE PAIR OF TICKETS.
Grammy award-winning hip-hop group De La Soul is performing at Higher Ground August 21. If you’d like a shot at a pair of tickets all you need to do is comment on this post.* You can post about whatever you want – how you use FPF, why you like De La Soul, an awesome show you’ve seen at Higher Ground, whatever – any comment gets you an entry into the raffle (limit one per person).
Here at FPF we use this blog to keep our neighbors (and everyone else in the blogosphere) up to date about Front Porch Forum happenings. These include unique success stories, updates about our progress/expansion, and fun raffles like this De La promo. La la la la lah, this is a D.A.I.S.Y. age.
*TO ENTER: Comment on this blog post below by 7 PM EST on Aug. 20. Comments on Facebook will not get your name in the hat… you must comment at http://frontporchforum.com/blog Winners will be selected at random on Thursday night and will be notified via the email address attached to your comment.
Jeff Jarvis takes on “hyper local”
Jeff Jarvis blogged about his latest ideas in “hyper local”… some interesting points, including the comments. Here’s Bob Wyman…
The obvious question is: “Why isn’t Front Porch Forum integrated into the BurlingtonFreePress.com site or the sites of the New York Times, WSJ or other newspapers that serve those in your community?”…
Programmer-Journalists and Local Social Capital
Rich Gordon writes today about his journalist-programmer program at Northwestern’s journalism school. He’s looking for a project idea…
For more than half a century, newspaper readership has been declining – and so have a variety of other indicators of civic and community engagement, such as participation in PTA’s, membership in bowling leagues and turnout on Election Day…
What I’ve been wondering about is whether new technologies can, in any way, help rebuild social capital among people who live in the same community. We know that online communities enable people with common interests to build powerful connections even if they are halfway around the world from one another. I’m intrigued by the possibility that we could apply these online community tools to strengthening local bonds.
It’s also hard to ignore that when conversations about the news occur on the Web, they often turn ugly — or, at best, fail to advance the discussion beyond ranting and raving…
Evidence that local media can play a role in fostering community conversation can be found in newspaper history. David Paul Nord’s fascinating book, “Communities of Journalism,” for instance, describes many instances in which newspapers served as community forums…
Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com – [argues] that online communities can foster isolation and division by enabling people to connect only with those whose characteristics and attitudes are like theirs.
What I might challenge our students to do is come up with ways to improve online conversations about the news — to build social capital and raise the quality of these conversations.
Of course, this is what Front Porch Forum is all about!
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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