EduBlog Digest

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Okay, I’ve been thinking more about this than I should have (it woke me up at 4:00 in the morning) and I have a great idea for how to keep good blog dialogs visible – we should publish a journal of blogversations which are academic in nature. I’m not sure how to get this all down in writing, but I’ll try to summarize my thinking here and see what we come up with together.

“Articles” would consist of all the blog posts, comments and trackbacks of an idea that grew into a conversation. Each piece of the conversation would be attributed to the author of that piece and at the bottom of the conversation would be a list of contributing authors – everyone with a trackack into the conversation – with links to their blog pages. All content would be licensed under an appropriate CC license. The editors might have to seek permission sometimes from some potential contributors if they have too restrictive of licenses on their sites. Off the top of my head I can think of two such conversations from Nate, this one and quantum cognition. Obviously there are plenty of others out there, but those were just the first two examples that came to mind right now.

The structure of the journal would be to have an editorial board who would help to monitor and gather conversations as they emerge. We would need to have standards about what constituted a conversation (ex. at least two posts each from at least two authors) and then add those conversations to the journal that met the criteria as well as updating conversations in the journal that have grown since they were included. Besides the articles we might include an editorial piece that is just for the journal not more than once a month that talks about trends that the editors are seing in educational blogging.

The journal needs to be syndicated in blog friendly format (RSS) and non-blogger friendly format (email distribution when new articles or editorials come out) so that non-bloggers can be exposed to the rich conversation in a format they are comfortable with. When new articles are mailed out we can send links to those articles that have been updated since the previous mailing.

I have more ideas about the structure of the database that would support the journal but I’m not sure I have the know how to make the software to power the journal (we might be able to modify WP or something). Beyond that we would need hosting and a domain (EBD.org?) before we could really get under way. Maybe we should write a grant to fund the endeavor. By now my post has become confusingly complex so let me know what you think about the idea and how you would be willing to participate.

This is the type of site that we could advertise .