Category: From the Editors

I have been having a fun time lately going back through the close to 900 posts that I have written on this blog since early 2004. It has been fascinating to remember what I was thinking, where I was on the right track, and where I was on the wrong one. As a personal reflective ePortfolio, it has been more useful, enjoyable, and fulfilling than I ever could have imagined when I started it.

But I am even more amazed at the number of people who have found it worth reading. We’re up to about 3,500 non-robot page views a day. That’s just mind-boggling. It makes a little more sense to me now that I have been joined by great authors who regularly post interesting content to the site. But I am still continually astonished and gratified by the number of people who seem interested in what I have to say and who are so kind to me when I meet them at conferences and other professional gatherings.

All of which brings me to an idea that I’ve been playing with lately. I’m thinking about putting together an eBook that is a retrospective of eight years of e-Literate content. I would create just a few categories, publish the posts for each category in chronological order, and add commentary (both for each post and for each chapter) about what I have learned and what I find interesting about it looking back. These would be my posts only, although if the experiment is successful I would consider working with my featured bloggers on a sequel (assuming they are willing).

I would like to charge for the book, partly because it would be nice to have a non-icky way to defray some of the costs of maintaining e-Literate—I’m up to $99/month in web hosting fees now—but mostly as a way of learning more about how people value the work we do here. I know roughly how many people are interested in the content when it is free, but how many think it is interesting (and hopefully useful) enough to pay for it?

So here are my questions to you:

• Without thinking too hard or paging back through the site archives, are there any e-Literate posts that are particularly memorable to you? If so, which ones are they and why did they stand out in your mind?
• If you would consider reading such a retrospective, what would you be looking to get out of it? Why would you find it interesting?
• Would you be willing to pay a few bucks for an annotated anthology of blog posts that are freely available online?
• Why, in general, do you read e-Literate? what do you get out of it?

Thanks in advance for any perspective you can give me.

I’m always interested in finding out which posts people find the most useful and surfacing those posts so that they are discoverable even after they scroll off the front page. There are indirect ways of doing that—seeing which posts are most viewed, have the most comments, are most tweeted, etc.—but those methods all have their limitations. So I’m adding a direct “rate up/rate down” feature for each post. Top-rated posts will appear in a list in the sidebar. It’s one click. Please do rate up the posts you like (and rate down the ones you don’t, I suppose).

I have been working on this one for a while. Michael Staton has become the senior statesman (relatively speaking) of the up-and-coming generation of ed tech entrepreneurs. When he’s not working on Inigral, he’s out trying to raise awareness and support for bringing more young innovators to the educational technology space. Michael has agreed to blog from time to time here at e-Literate.

A handful of you have let me know that you are getting 403 errors when you try to access e-Literate. There seem to be some residual caching issues from an anti-spam plugin that I deleted. I have cleared the cache on the server, and most folks have been reporting to me that when they clear their browser cache, the site loads just fine.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We will be taking e-Literate offline while we switch over to a new web host.

Back soon!

Looks like it’s going to be a few more days before we move to our new host, so I’m re-opening comments and will try to squeeze in a blog post or two over the weekend.