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Ideology in Textbooks

Emile Lester, University of Mary Washington

Last year, a commission of experts found new history textbooks approved by the Board of Education in Texas were pushing a specific ideology. One of the experts says parts of the textbooks weren’t just misleading; they were false.

10 mins

Interpreting the Magna Carta

Thomas McSweeney, College of William and Mary

Has the Magna Carta’s 800-year legacy been a snowball of misinterpretations? One scholar doesn’t think its authors intended it to be the foundational text for common law that it became.

8 mins

Secrecy in the Sunshine Era

Jason Ross Arnold, Virginia Commonwealth University

In the 1970s, a series of laws ushered in a new “sunshine era” of unprecedented government transparency. Secrecy in the Sunshine Era investigates how, despite these reforms, government officials developed new workarounds, including overclassification, concealment, shredding, and burning.

10 mins

Accessible Government

Waldo Jaquith

Jaquith is a pioneer in using the web to foster more open and accessible government. His projects include Ethics.gov for the White House, States Decoded, and a website that allows users to watch video of floor action in state capitols and even vote on what they’d like to see in a bill.

12 mins

Wikipedia in the Classroom

Kyle Nicholas, Old Dominion University

Wikipedia has been viewed with skepticism or worse in the academic community. But one professor has his students edit Wikipedia pages to develop their critical thinking skills and media literacy.

 

6 mins

 

Electronic health records can save billions of dollars and increase patient safety. But in the United States, they can also put individual privacy at risk, more so than in the European Union. Janine Hiller (Virginia Tech) spent a semester in Sweden studying Europe’s approach to balancing patient privacy and health rights.

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