Edtech expert Andy Carvin hosts PBS’s new blog for K-12 educators, learning.now. Carvin’s first column, posted today, challenges school districts to develop more reasonable approaches to filtering Internet content.

The Berkman Center and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society have published an online legal guide to podcasting. Writes Lawrence Lessig in the foreword: “Something fantastic has changed: technology now invites the widest range of citizens to become speakers and creators. It is time that the law remove the unnecessary burdens that it imposes on this creativity.”

Kilgore College in Texas decided to sell its public radio station to a religious broadcaster in part because its audience growth had stagnated and few of its members lived near the college. “What obligation does the board have to expend college funds to bring a service well beyond its service area or tax district?” asks Kilgore College President Bill Holda in the Longview News-Journal.

The Washington Post‘s Rob Pegoraro reviews HD Radio: “Seeing this technology inch its way into the market is getting to be as frustrating as trying to find some originality on your FM dial.” Mark Ramsey links to Pegoraro’s article and comments: “For the life of me, I don’t understand why we’re planting receivers with print guys.”

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports on the return of public radio’s American Routes to a damaged city and a new home there. “The question we’re all facing with the culture so disrupted is how we’ll make a living — not just financially, but how will we live here and feel whole?” says host Nick Spitzer.

“This thing called public radio is a club, and they’re not trying to let everybody in,” says Tavis Smiley in a Washington Post profile that touches on his disagreements with NPR and with WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., which airs his show at 2 a.m. (Related coverage in Current from 2003.)

Consultant Robert Paterson shares some thoughts about public radio’s New Realities forum, which takes place Monday and Tuesday in Washington, D.C. “For many who will attend, the issue is much more than the survival and health of public radio but the survival of the last large media space in America that can be trusted,” he writes.

Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media said yesterday it’s creating a new Center for Innovation in Journalism, which will further develop its Public Insight Journalism system. APM’s national programs are now starting to use PIJ after three years’ development at MPR. In a Nieman Foundation report (PDF) last year, Michael Skoler, the MPR news exec who will direct the new center, described the system that uses Internet and database technologies to gather a large pool of volunteer news sources. MPR raised $2.25 million for the project in its capital campaign and topped the new wing of its St. Paul headquarters with a meeting room designed for in-person gatherings of PIJ sources.

Mara Liasson, filling in this week as NPR’s Mixed Signals blogger, says she was “jolted” by a MasterCard ad — uh, underwriting credit — packaged with the web-only All Songs Considered.

WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill, N.C., is aiming to expand its presence in nearby Greensboro, a move which could increase competition with WFDD-FM in Winston-Salem, reports the Triad Business Journal. Jay Banks, WFDD’s g.m., calls the prospect “frightening.”

Joel Achenbach, a sometime science writer for the Washington Post and National Geographic, is spring cleaning his old files. He ponders a file about Carl Sagan, the late astronomer and PBS star, plunders some good quotes and (this is not a surprise ending) decides to keep Sagan around.

Earlier this month, PBS apparently strapped webcams onto several cows and launched MooTube, a bovine blog and video site promoting WNET’s Texas Ranch House, set to debut May 1. “Ladies and gentleman, it is now official . . . the Internet is a wasteland,” wrote TV blogger Richard Keller. “And, you can thank the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) for making it so.” Less cynical reactions at Broadcasting & Cable and the Washington Times, among other outlets.

PBS has tapped SES AMERICOM to provide the satellite network for the PBS Next Generation Interconnection System, the network announced Monday. The current public TV interconnection system uses SES AMERICOM satellites as well. The NGIS, which will move the system from traditional program stream broadcasting to digital, non-real-time program file delivery, is scheduled to go into service later this year.

CPB has issued a Request for Proposals for a study that will analyze coverage and interference issues related to HD Radio. “CPB is concerned with the disenfranchisement of listeners due to the loss of services public radio currently provides to them and the underperformance or lack of HD service (i.e., technical availability) when the conversion of public radio stations to HD is complete,” the RFP says.

National pubcasting orgs launched a website earlier this month designed to generate grassroots support as the system tries to stave off proposed federal funding cuts, reports the New York Times. In its first week, the website, www.tellthempublicmatters.org, generated “a couple thousand” e-mail messages to Congress from 39 states, said Mike Riksen, NPR’s v.p. for government relations.