Web Watch

In the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina were family memories in photographs and letters. Those were lost forever.

You can preserve your family’s story on Proust.com.

The website allows you share and preserve your memories through a series of questions.
You can set the privacy level from anybody to only family and friends.

There are questions like: “Talk about a memory that makes you smile when you think of it.”

If you don’t like it, skip it and try another. You can add photos and video. Invite your family. Unwrap your family history and leave some memories for your little ones.

While there, you can rummage around the memories of others who have not set their levels to private.

Web Bits

What's Black and White and Re-Tweeted All Over? Teaching News Literacy in a Digital Age, by Renée Loth

It was Week Six in the news-literacy course at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island, and the students were in near-revolt.

Their homework had been to watch three YouTube videos from the Iraq war and identify in which "news neighborhood" each resides: raw data, straight news, opinion, propaganda, or entertainment. One of the videos showed U.S. and Iraqi soldiers firing on insurgents from inside a building in Baghdad. Another was a CBS News clip from a reporter traveling with the troops in Fallujah. A third was a sort of home movie created by an American soldier in Iraq. Read more ...

At MSNBC, a Professor as TV Host, by Brian Stelter

Week seven of Melissa Harris-Perry’s introductory course in African-American studies at Tulane University includes a lecture about “the hollow prize” — a theory that African-Americans tend to be elected as mayor only after a city has tipped into economic decline.

One day last summer, when Ms. Harris-Perry was filling in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, she recast the class lecture as a television segment, invoking Detroit; her adopted home, New Orleans; President Obama; and tax policy. Read more ...