These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.
OK, I tried to kick the Feedburner habit once before and I fell back into it for no good reason. This time I mean it. I have killed my Feedburner subscription because (a) it keeps breaking and (b) I don’t really care about the statistics it gives me anyway. The RSS feed for e-Literate is now located at https://eliterate.us/feed/. Please resubscribe to this URL. The old feed URL will stop working in two weeks.
Sorry for the inconvenience. I promise you, this will not happen again.
I have gotten some good feedback and done some thinking regarding how to improve my interviews. I’m a bit torn, though. People seem to want shorter interviews, but I really like the long form. I hear lots of five- and ten-minute interviews, and I rarely get much of value out of them. At the same time, I appreciate that people don’t always have time to listen to an hour-long interview in one shot.
So here’s what I’m thinking about doing:
How does that sound?
In all the years that I’ve been blogging, I can count the number of non-spam comments that I’ve deleted on one hand. In all cases they have been egregious trolls, and in all cases they have been by a person or persons who have used fake names and email addresses. Not all anonymous posting is motivated out of spite, of course. Whistle blowing is on the other end of this spectrum. Most often, at least in the context of this blog, the motivations of anonymous posters fall in the gray area in between those two ends of the spectrum. It’s usually somebody who wants to make a critical comment but fears some sort of negative response. I can appreciate that concern. Sometimes its legitimate. Sometimes it’s just cowardly. And sometimes it’s a bit of both.
This puts me in a bit of a dilemma. I want to encourage people to make honest, useful comments without fear. On the other hand, I also want to encourage—in fact, I want to insist—that people take responsibility for the statements that they make here on my blog.
So I’ve come up with a new policy. From now on, ((I won’t apply this policy retroactively to comments that have been posted before now.)) if I see a comment that I suspect is being made under a pseudonym, and it is not immediately obvious to me why the commenter has a legitimate and compelling reason to remain anonymous, then I will send an email to the address provided by that person requesting an explanation. If the person responds with even a halfway reasonable explanation, then I’ll let the comment stand. But if I don’t get a response, or if I discover that I’ve been given a fake email address, I will delete the comment immediately, regardless of the merits of the content. To reiterate: If you want to comment on e-Literate and you choose to conceal your identity from e-Literate readers, you must (a) make your identity known to me by giving me a real email address and (b) be prepared to convince me that you have a compelling reason to remain anonymous. The burden is on the anonymous (or, more accurately, the pseudonymous) commenters to convince me that I should let them wear masks when they are in my house and talking to my guests.
This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I can come up with.
e-Literate had an outage of several days due to…irreconcilable differences with my now former web host. I have moved to Fused Network. Even in these early days, the difference in quality of service is night and day. I think I’m going to be happy here.
You may have noticed that the site looks different. Again. I have had a hard time finding a theme that I’m happy with. My criteria aren’t actually that complicated:
I’m happy to say that the new default WordPress theme finally meets all of those characteristics, so that’s what I’m using and intend to keep using for the foreseeable future. I may change the banner at the top of the page, but that’s about it.
I’m going to be posting a video interview of Desire2Learn CEO John Baker, probably in the next 24 hours. It seems likely that I’ll be doing more interviews in the future. I’m discovering that I have a particular philosophy about how to do the interviews, which is in line with my attitudes toward guest posts and technology demo posts. I’m very lucky to have e-Literate as a platform to get information out to a pretty large audience. There are lots of people out there who are very smart and have very interesting things to say that deserve to be heard. So part of what I try to do here is to help them reach a broader audience.
Here’s how I approach that goal:
(more…)Between an action-packed Sakai conference and a growing backlog of other post material, I have a lot to write about. Unfortunately, I also have a lot of work to catch up on after two weeks away from my desk. I am nevertheless going to do my best to get out a number of posts over the next week before some of the ideas fade from my head.
You have been warned.
