I like to see that Nate has done somehting with the idea of collecting threads, but I have one question about his solution – how is it more accessible to the non-bloggers? Those of us who subscribe by RSS can get updates and even make changes to the wiki but what about others who are still more comfortable with subscribing to an email list? Nate is probably right that the overhead would be a major burden to – and yes, it might possibly even kill – my journal idea, but just because we have an option does not mean that we have addressed all the concerns. That is what needs to happen at some point if we are to find the right balance in this type of communication between groups within our group (AECT). I found another idea over at Weblogg-Ed that looks promising. There is a link there to a conversation tracker at blogpulse by Inteliseek. Unfortunately I have not been able to get it to work. I am thinking that they only track a subset of blogs, but if the tool could be used for AECT related blogs or Education related blogs it would be a very interesting start. On another note, I am starting to wonder if I should take a sabbatical (as a student) to work on this stuff for a while without having to worry about classes. Any ideas? 🙂

I know Nate is serious about Getting off the porch and so am I. I said before that we are not getting our message out to the right audience just because it is on the web and thus universally available. I started talking about presenting at AECT in Orlando only to learn that Nate was ahead of me there with the Overlay and the Strategic Task Force. Since then I have realized that between now and October is at least one lifetime in the blogosphere if not two. I think that finding some way to keep these good conversations visible in some ongoing way would be useful but I continue to contend that we also need to send the invitations into the established venues of communication. A presentation in October is too long to wait. We should still do that, but before then we should publish something. Here’s a radical idea – why don’t we actually advertise? Get an ad in TechTrends or ETR&D listing the topics of some good academic conversations that we have had in our stadium and invite people to visit us. This would be print, so the conversations would have a different type of life, but the ad could point people to a website which teaches how to join the blogosphere as a reader, provides links to the conversations in the ad along with all the blogs that have participated in any of those conversations and teaches them how to begin writing a blog when they are ready to contribute in that manner. Perhaps it should provide a link to the aect-members list of blogs so they can get a dynamic list of bloggers to look at. The point is that we have to advertise our party in a way that will get to people, but […]