Weekend Voices 2/16/08

Executive Producer/Host: Amy Browne

Contributing Producer: Jim Fisher

Segment 1:  An interview with Hillary Lister of Maine IndyMedia and the Native Forest Network (NFN), and Chris Smith, also of the NFN.  Hillary Lister outlines the web of connections she has found in her research into Plum Creek Corporations connections with other power players in business, politics and media, and asks the public’s assistance in providing additional information.  Chris Smith reponds to the information from the perspective of a Mainer who has been opposing Plum Creek’s planned massive development in the Maine Woods.  FMI: www.maineindymedia.org, hillary@maine.indymedia.org

Segment 2:   Second-hand smoking and smoking in cars.  Jim Fisher talks with Sally Christ, a tobacco educator in Eastern Maine.  FMI: Sally Christ (via Healthy Peninsula Office 3743257) www.tobaccofreemaine.org The Maine Tobacco HelpLine: 1-800-207-1230

Jim Fisher is the host of Common Health, a call in show that airs the 3rd Wednesday morning of each month at 10 o’clock.

Musical break featured Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman’s “Organized Crime” from their “If All the Land Would Rise” CD (2005).  FMI: www.riotfolk.org

Writers Forum 2/14/08

Hosts: Dr. Betty Duff and Joan Clemons

Topic: Love Song to Maine: Tradition, love poems, Maine poems, WERU

Guest: Pat Ranzoni (pranzoni@aol.com)

Mixed blood Yankee, Patricia Smith Ranzoni, was born in the Katahdin region to a Canadian-American woodcutter and farm girl from Orland and Castine, both descended from European settlers to Indian territory in what became Massachusetts then Maine, their roots mixing in relation with Native Americans and First Canadians. She grew up in Bucksport where she now writes from one of the subsistence farms of her youth.
Her unschooled documentary poems have been published across the country and abroad, and she is a frequent reader and reciter around Maine. In 2002 she became the first poet from the northern reach of the Appalachian Chain to be invited to read at the University of Ohio, Zanesville, Women of Appalachia Conference. Her work has been used in Colby College’s “Many Maines” course and by University of Maine  departments of history and English, and is being acquired by Fogler Library’s Special Collections and other archives of Maine history, class, and women’s studies.
Books: CLAIMING (1995), SETTLING (2000), ONLY HUMAN ~ Poems from the Atlantic Flyway (Sheltering Pines Press, 2005).

Questions this program may have answered for listeners:
What are some Maine traditions? How do Maine cultures connect with other cultures?
How are winters today like winters past for long-time natives keeping the old ways?

Notes from the Electronic Cottage 2/14/08

Producer/host: Jim Campbell

Here are addresses for sites mentioned in this week’s program that offer free college level course materials to anyone who would like to use them.

Open Courseware site at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://ocw.mit.edu).

Rice University’s Connexions courseware site (http://cnx.org).
University of California at Berkeley has put up videos of about 250 course segments and events on Google Video
(http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html) and now also on youTube as well http://www.youtube.com/user/ucberkeley).

Other universities have also established youTube channels. Search for channels (not videos) using the keyword “education.”
The Open University in Great Britain has an open learning site (http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php).

Open-of-Course (http://open-of-course.org/courses/). Courses contributed by anyone with some expertise, not necessarily college professors.

W3 Schools (http://www.w3schools.com/). The focus here is on courses relating to web development.