This week Cara and I have been adding the last tweaks and fixes to the website before the peer reviewing starts this coming week. This has mostly consisted of re formatting things, reviewing and editing what has already been written, as well as writing a couple last pages, including the Lisa Baldwin interview  page, as she finally got back with us this week. On page in particular that I was putting off to the last minute was the “Why does this happen?” page. I save this page to last because I hoped to have the best possible picture of what happened before I started conjecturing and describing why I thought people challenged books in general and why this book was challenged.

I am very proud of our website. Given the fact that we only started learning how to use this program at the beginning of the semester, I am impressed with how the website looks and flows and am excited to see how we can improve it in the coming weeks.

The only thing I wish we had more of on our website is primary documentation and fact. Though we were able to interview a fair amount of people, we were not able to obtain the formal complaint or the final MTAC decision, nor were we able to talk to the teacher or the complaining parent. This means that all of the content on our website comes from an outside source, such as the news articles, or from someone we interviewed. While these sources are very helpful in understanding the challenge from different perspectives, I would have been much happier if we could have provided primary documents on our website and also shown the interpretations different people had. Because of the nature of a website, I think it is better to present the facts and the documents available in an organized manner so that people can find in and use it as a resource to form their own opinions on the topic. Though this can still be done on a website that provides more description of possible scenarios and interpretation of events, I would much rather also provide the primary documents in as value free of a way as possible. I’m not opposed to giving my opinion, I just wish we could have also given a more detailed factual account. Though truly value neutral educations is impossible (as we have learned in this class), I wish we could have given a more well rounded account of what happened, so that our site was more neutral and fact based.

However, at this point, all we can do is make our readers aware of this fact. Because we were unable to provide some of these documents and an exact account of what happened, all we can do is provide a description of what we think happened and make sure the those who visit our site know that much of what is on our site is interpretive.