Haha! Only that last one is true.

So I don’t work as an exotic travel writer. I don’t think anyone actually has that job. It’s one of those fake careers that some jerk invented to make you feel like crap about your lame job. Like beer taster or Lamborghini test driver.

But I actually have done a fair amount of traveling. What I do is go to American schools with international-beat reporters to talk to kids about the issues. Give you an example:

Ameto Akpe, a Nigerian writer for BusinessDay, a print daily out of Abuja. Ameto visited DC and St. Louis area schools with me (and spoke at Harvard) during a three-week trip to the US that was built around the DC Environmental Film Festival, held here in March.

Ameto has shed considerable light on the scarcity of clean drinking water and good sanitation in Nigeria, focusing on Makurdi, a city in the south that sits on the banks of the Benue river. The contrasts are stark: Nigeria is a relatively wealthy nation, with oil and gas exports enriching its state coffers, yet its infrastructure is in a sorry state. And Makurdi, with the voluminous river flowing around it, is unable to provide its citizens with safe water. Kids are dying from preventable, treatable diseases like cholera and dysentery because they are forced to draw their family’s drinking water straight from the river, which in addition to the city’s public drinking fountain also serves as its communal toilet.

Here’s a PBS NewsHour report by Steve Sapienza, who also traveled with us to St. Louis to talk to students:

Most American high school kids cannot find Nigeria on a map, and have no concept of what life might be like there. So you might say it’s a bit of a challenge for a Nigerian — or anyone — to explain a complex issue like water and sanitation access, which has its roots in a terrible lack of government accountability, in one class period. But that’s what we were up to.

Ameto, with the patience of Job, explained the pressures and contradictions that underlie these problems. As she pointed out to the kids, these issues are increasingly common in the developing world, and are likely to become even more pressing as people flock to cities that are ill-prepared to serve them safely.

We did about 20 school visits in urban St. Louis, rural Illinois, Washington, DC and suburban Maryland. How did the kids absorb it? Tough to say, but I saw a lot of interest and heard some great questions. Maybe they’ll be hungry to learn more.

A word Ameto often used in her class presentations was “however” — I think that says a lot about the difficulty in presenting these issues accurately.

There is wealth in Nigeria. However…
Makurdi is on a huge river. However…
Government officials have built a new sanitation plant. However…

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), an educational organization consisting of representatives from business and government founded in 2002, has sounded an alarm bell: “There is a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces.”

This declaration is troubling but likely comes as little surprise to most educators, and to readers of this publication.

What may surprise you, however, is that P21, a group whose strategic council includes, among others, Apple, Disney, Ford, and Verizon, recommends peace education as a critical higher-level skill that should be woven into the core subjects we all recognize.

I’d caution that the authors don’t use the term “peace education.” Instead, they speak of “global awareness,” which they define in the following way:

“Learning from and working collaboratively with individuals representing diverse cultures, religions and lifestyles in a spirit of mutual respect and open dialogue in personal, work and community contexts.”

Does that sound like a decent working definition of peace education? I would say so.

The P21 program has gained some ground over the last decade. Fifteen states, including Illinois, Ohio, and North Carolina, have partnered with the organization, adopting frameworks and assessments based on those devised by P21.

The movement has gained the attention of a number of educators. They, too, were alarmed, but for a different reason. In response to what they saw as P21’s emphasis on skills at the expense of knowledge, more than thirty prominent academics and thought leaders, including Diane Ravitch and Randi Weingarten, formed the Common Core in 2007.

“Skills,” noted the Common Core signatories, “can neither be taught nor applied effectively without prior knowledge of a wide array of subjects. Attempts to teach skills apart from knowledge have failed repeatedly over the last century because they do not work. Unless it is fundamentally revised, the program put forth by P21 also will fail.”

The Common Core recommended a renewed commitment to teaching history, the arts, literature, civics, and language — subjects its members consider critical pieces of a complete liberal arts education.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, released in 2010, is not directly affiliated with the Common Core but is in close agreement philosophically (the Common Core has devised curriculum maps based on the CCSS). More than 40 states are in the process of aligning their educational programming with the CCSS, and P21 has published a toolkit to help educators align the CCSS with its own skills-based framework.

I will not go into the criticisms of the CCSS, except to say that it has presented challenges to educators already struggling to meet the mandates of the 2001 No Child Left Behind act. Both P21 and the CCSS have their detractors, as, of course, does the current state of education in the US.

I do not pretend to have a panacea, but may I make a suggestion? Student journalism based on a solid understanding of global issues neatly synthesizes many of the recommendations of these groups. It is also a powerful program for peace education.

I spent nearly ten years teaching journalism to 11th and 12th graders at Washington International School (WIS), a K-12 independent school in Washington, DC that teaches the International Baccalaureate curriculum. The school had a strong journalism program with dedicated students who gave up weekends to lay out their newspaper because the school day was consumed by the IB’s own core programming and the school’s deep commitment to multi-lingualism.

Journalism was a non-IB elective, an optional weekly class that appeared on the schedule along with physical education and chorus. Despite its relative unimportance in the curriculum, the journalism the students produced demonstrated a powerful base of global awareness on subjects from failed states to education in post-earthquake Haiti to de-facto segregation in Washington, DC.

Much of this found its origins in the work the students were doing in other classes, but unlike standard class assignments, it was by its very nature interdisciplinary, made to be consumed by a general public, and, indeed, published. And, unlike the heavily scripted CCSS exemplar units, the work was student-directed, collaborative, and actually interesting to the students. (And probably a lot more interesting to read than their class work.)

The tools they used to publish their articles and videos were industry-standard systems, such as the Adobe Creative Suite and Web technologies including Ning and WordPress. They used Google Analytics to track their work and AdWords and Facebook to promote it. They worked as a team, not just within their school, but with students in other schools in the US and overseas. In other words, the skills they learned were congruent with P21 recommendations, but it was knowledge, the primary concern of the Common Core, that lent substance to their journalism in the first place.

The average American high school student is not fortunate enough to attend a school with global awareness (which I’ve tried to suggest is approximately synonymous with peace education) built into the curriculum, as it is at WIS. Most kids are not up on international news, and in any event do not have a core of knowledge about the world to help them make sense of it. They are at an educational disadvantage, poorly prepared for the complex global problems they will surely inherit. What can we do to make these students global citizens?

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, where I am education coordinator, is a non-profit journalism organization that has funded more than 200 international reporting projects since its founding by Jon Sawyer in 2006. These projects seek to shed light on under-reported global issues such as fragile states, women and children in crisis, and food security. The work has been published in major news outlets, but is also available for free on the Pulitzer Center website at pulitzercenter.org.

Our educational mission is to bring this work, often in the person of the journalists themselves but also through innovative online outreach, into classrooms to explore the issues with students and help them understand how these international conflicts connect to their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. We think good international journalism that presents complex issues through intimate stories revealing our common nature, rather than showing the “other,” is a powerful way toward wiser, more compassionate kids.

And when the kids, having absorbed these lessons, can be empowered to contribute their own observations to a global conversation through their school newspapers or, better, online student journalism outlets such as the Student News Action Network (www.studentnewsaction.net), we have something more powerful still: peace education that aligns with the knowledge emphasis of the Common Core, as well as the skills emphasis of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

1. Bringing journalists into classrooms to talk to kids about their work — from covering the tuberculosis epidemic in Moldova, to Haitian families rebuilding after the earthquake, to desertification in China.

2. Working in a digital-first journalism organization with people who know what that means.

3. No longer being saddled with a “techie” label, so now I can just enjoy technology without being a helper monkey.

4. Working in Dupont Circle.

5. Crazy awesome photojournalism decorating in my office.

Dive Bermuda operates out of a private bay owned by the Fairmont hotel chain. Photo by Mark Schulte.

Caribbean divers generally don’t kill fish, but the lionfish has been targeted with good reason. It is a particularly rapacious non-native species that was introduced to the area in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew broke an aquarium in Florida and washed six into the Atlantic. With fanning fins, jutting spines and vivid stripes, it’s striking to look at, but the lionfish’s insatiable appetite makes it a serious threat to Caribbean fish and crustaceans. In just over a month, a single lionfish can wipe out most of a reef’s fish population.

“They literally eat themselves to death,” said Anne-Marie, one of the dive instructors on our boat. She said it was unusual to find one so large around Bermuda, and supposed it had eaten thousands of reef fish. Bermuda divers sometimes capture them and bring them back to the local aquarium for dissection. She said a recent specimen was found with dozens of grouper fry in its stomach.

A red lionfish in Thailand. The one I saw in Bermuda was very similar to this. Photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase.

So there we were, awkwardly drifting in what is essentially an underwater cave, watching Victor slowly approach the motionless lionfish, flashlight in one hand and a modern trident in the other. With impressive aim, he speared it from about four feet away.

Kind of cool in a childish sense, maybe. But I didn’t take up diving to watch people kill fish, and while the lions are undoubtedly a major threat in an ecosystem that doesn’t need more problems, watching that stunning animal slowly die in front of me was a strange and very sad experience.

I guess that would be okay if this guy were Abby Wambach, captain of a team that’s about to head to the World Cup. But he’s not. He’s “Mark Schulte,” random soccer guy you’ve never heard of. Nobody’s updating his page and he’s not even on a professional roster at this point.

Yet Google’s pretty sure you’re looking for him, not me. I’m insulted. Watch out Mark Schulte, I’m gunning for you!

I guess I can understand why the people who designed the program might want to avoid classes in WordPress theming, CSS3, HTML5 and JQuery: they’re difficult to teach well, and let’s face it, they’re difficult to learn and hence might reap the kinds of harsh evaluations that my classmate Ian and I explored in our final class of the program.

And maybe there are other reasons, but American should not tout its IJ program as cutting-edge while omitting serious exploration of these modern web technologies. Interactive journalists should know this stuff.

So this is my summer of code. I’ve started by building a custom theme on top of wp-framework. You’re looking at it now. In the months ahead I’ll continue to tweak it, bringing in as much specialized CSS, JQuery and HTML5 as it makes sense to do.

I’m mostly relying on Chris Coyier’s excellent tutorials for my training. Check them out at css-tricks.com.

As you might imagine, there is huge demand to see my Photoshop hack work in one place (ahem), so I threw together the home page graphics I’ve made this year for the Student News Action Network and dropped them into zoom.it. (Please bear in mind that this is a compilation of jpegs that are only 350 pixels wide at 72ppi, so it doesn’t take long to scroll too far in.)

And here’s a view of the same images using JQuery masonry. Re-size the browser window to see the bricks adjust.

The New Yorker's Eustace Tilley, that old weirdo, is chasing more than butterflies these days.

Roughly coincident with the New York Times’s paywall rollout in late March, the New Yorker is conducting an experiment on Facebook. But unlike the Times’ arguably more conventional approach, which is to require that online readers who access more than 20 articles per day subscribe on a weekly or monthly basis, the New Yorker’s wall goes up before you read even one article. The article in question, the only one available under these terms, is a longish piece by novelist Jonathan Franzen.

Of course, a Like wall isn’t really much of a wall at all, since it doesn’t cost users anything to Like Facebook content, and you don’t have to register. (Except on Facebook, and who hasn’t done that yet?) And even though it might be a bit of a stretch to ask users to Like something they haven’t even seen yet, the Facebook experiment is an intriguing extension of the magazine’s online marketing effort — especially in consideration of the publication that’s conducting it, not to mention the author of the piece and its subject.

There's no Like wall in front of New Yorker publicist Alexa Cassanos'
profile pic.

‘Deep’ thoughts

Alexa Cassanos, a publicist at the New Yorker, told Poynter that the primary aim of the project is to “find fans of long-form journalism,” to which end the magazine has also been selectively releasing some articles from each week’s issue on its website, along with chats and multimedia content. Cassanos told Mashable, “we want to engage with people who want to engage on a deeper level,” a seemingly elliptical statement that’s also more than a little amusing in light of the act that’s meant to represent this “deeper engagement.” What is more superficial a level of engagement than clicking a Like button?

Still, if the New Yorker is looking to spread the word about its (increasingly boutique) editorial mission, Facebook may be the best way to do it quickly, if not well. It’s widely considered among the more effective ways to conduct any viral marketing, at this point, so why not use it to find new readers, even if those are readers of a magazine generally associated with reading experiences that run to the hours, rather than the seconds or minutes a person might spend on most Facebook content?

Yeah, but do you like me like me?

The Like button, simple enough in concept (it dates 2009, when it was nearly launched as the Awesome button), is deceptively powerful. Like makes it easy to spread information, sometimes idiotic and simple, sometimes profound and complex, to huge numbers of people very quickly without any one user investing more of himself than it takes to click a mouse. Mark Schulte likes Einstein’s theory of relativity! And with its recent usurpation of the “become a fan” and “share” functions, Like is now a one-stop-shop for syndicating content through Facebook.

Hip hop superstar Lil' Wayne garnered more than 200,000 Likes in an hour, a Guinness record.

But how effective is it, really? Especially at tasks like expanding the audience of people who enjoy spending significant chunks of time reading rambling pieces about personal discovery? (Franzen’s article describes a journey he took to a remote Chilean island to escape, among other things, Facebook.) A 2009 study by online marketing firm Razorfish revealed that most people friend (now, Like) a brand because they’re a current customer or because they are looking for coupons. They follow brands on Twitter for much the same reason.

And in a blog post from last October, Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru cited data revealing that fewer than 10% of retailers view the network as an effective way of finding new customers. It seems reasonable to wonder whether those numbers might dip even further if they looked at magazine subscribers, especially those of the New Yorker.

Artists, though, seem to be in a mood to experiment with Like walls. Musicians including Lil’ Wayne and Jennifer Lopez have given away tracks to Likers recently, leveraging what’s become an important part of a smart big-time artist’s marketing strategy.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008. His unfinished novel, "The Pale King," will be
published next month.

Strange bedfellows

Cassanos has not (yet) answered a question I asked her about Franzen’s part in all this, but I bet I know the answer: the writer is totally on board. He and the subject (one of them) of his article, the late David Foster Wallace, would probably get a kick out of the idea of using Facebook to “deepen” anyone’s engagement with anything — much less with the kind of difficult, time-devouring, reader-confounding fiction they both practice(d) and which Franzen, in a blurb on the back of Wallace’s 1996 opus, Infinite Jest, said “can still run rings around the competing media.”

More Than Your Local Paper:
Exploding the Bounds of Learning with Global Journalism Online

Educators are inundated with buzzwords like 21st century skills and global education, but how do we bring them into the classroom effectively today? The Student News Action Network, an online high school journalism collaboration, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, is building a network of kids around the world writing research-based journalism about topic-driven issues ranging from the March earthquake in Japan to the global water crisis to women’s rights in the Arab world. We will present a practical, scalable model for meaningful international student collaboration that teachers can use in the classroom immediately.

• Entry points that work for middle schoolers up to graduating seniors
• How journalism can be a powerful tool for learning across disciplines
• Modernize and internationalize your journalism program — painlessly!
• Cultivate a positive digital footprint that students can show off to colleges and businesses