Paneling a la Virginia Heffernan

I always enjoy Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times Magazine. (If you're a wordie, check out her piece on OED.com, the Internet-based, subscription-based Oxford English Dictionary.) But it was her blog post about the tribulations of moderating a recent panel about women in film that made me smile this weekend. "It was fun, but I don’t really understand panels," she wrote, "and I really shouldn’t do them because I’m a loser moderator." Here, here, sister. I moderated a panel about literacy and technology earlier this month at The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and although my charge was to "start a conversation," I was a little preoccupied with just trying to make sure that the speakers stuck to their allotted five minutes. To get a real conversation going, you need to ban Powerpoint. But in today's visual culture, that ain't so easy.

Still, there were certainly some provocative ideas to tease out -- so I'll be writing more about the Cooney panel soon.