Web 2.0’s Fun Forward: “The Machine is Us!”

Ever try to explain the phrase Web 2.0 in a digital sound bite? This brilliantly fun little 4-minute video from professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University does the trick. This digital ditty is cultural anthropology at its finest; you can bet Marshall McCluhan would be duly impressed. It captures the power of Web 2.0 in a smart blip of techno-frenzied pace, … [Read more...]

Food For Thought: Media to Digest for Healthier Kids

March is National Nutrition Month, so Shaping Youth is adding to the ADA's Eat Right web resources with some fun and worthy positive picks in food media to share with your kids, boost their media literacy IQ, and counter-market the cartoon pitches for empty calorie crud. Here goes: I've always loved the SmartMouth interactive site for kids, but my new discovery is the U.K.'s … [Read more...]

Wrigley Field Now Sounds Like a Deodorant

There's "ad creep" in the outfield. Under Armour logos will now blare through the historic ivy-covered walls of venerable Wrigley Field. Hard to imagine the two doors in left and right field that were painstakingly painted green to blend with the ivy in 1937 will now have the big ol’ Under Armour sports apparel logo smack dab in the center as a shout-out to … [Read more...]

7 clues to a New Year’s riddle for the 7th year of 2000

This landed in my e-mail from some pals of mine, and it seems worthy to toss out there to get kids thinking along these lines and open up some dialogue. Yes, I’m being ambiguous on purpose so I won’t spoil the fun. To challenge yourself, write down your guess after reading each clue; then, after reading all the clues, see which (if any) of your guesses is … [Read more...]