CrowdVoice, one of several initiatives from the digital archivists at Mideast Youth, is one of the best sites currently available for keeping track of recent developments in human rights movements around the world. Its organization has several advantages over traditional news sites:

• Content is organized by topic, and visitors can choose one topic at a time. Topics include the ongoing protests in various countries, but also protests around a single issue, such as gay rights in Uganda or the abuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan.

  

• Each topic includes video, photographs, and links. Visitors can view them all together, or filter them out by format. Each page also has a Twitter feed that aggregates hashtag searches related to the issue. Visitors can re-tweet and share to Facebook directly from the page.
• Topics can be found either by a list view or through an interactive map.
• Visitors can add their own URLs to any topic, and vote content up or down. Thus the content that you see at the top of any given page is the content that has been rated highest by other users. But you can also filter by date, to get the most recent news.
• Content can come from any source: blogs, newspapers in the U.S. or abroad, press releases from human rights groups, video of speakers at university lectures… whatever users link to or create. Teachers might worry that the material hasn’t been vetted, but this is part of media literacy: learning to evaluate truth claims, regardless of source. The posts toward the top will have been voted up by other users, which means they’re likely part of the discourse somewhere, if not in the U.S., never mind the student’s hometown. Understanding these global perspectives is going to be a key skill for today’s high schoolers.
• Events in the Middle East are obviously central to the site, but it also includes movements in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and even Wisconsin and Oakland, California. The United States government is neither singled out for criticism, nor exempted from it.
• Although there are multiple and overlapping features on the site, it is not so over-designed that it becomes non-functional.

The best thing about this site is that it allows teachers and students alike to get up-to-date, fast, on a single issue. During the Egyptian revolution, Al-Jazeera was one of the best English-language sources for news because it covered the protests almost continuously. It hasn’t been doing that for Libya, Syria, and other countries. And compared to CrowdVoice, Google is just inefficient.