Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Looking for New Contributors
While the archives go back to January 2005, the Rural Education special interest group of the American Educational Research Association began using this blog site as it's homepage on April 7, 2005. So, we are going on about eighteen months and during those eighteen months there have been exactly three hundred and one entries posted (including this one). And after eighteen months and over three hundred entries, my own timeline and duties for my dissertation and completion of my Ph.D. mean that I will require some help to keep this going. In addition, I am half way through my second term as the Graduate Student Representative and I have had little time to do anything on this front because of the time I have spent on maintaining this blog site.
However, one of the nice things about Blogger, and one of the reasons that we selected it in the first place, is that you can have multiple people that have access to post to the same blog site. Right now we are looking for those multiple people.
Right now I am making a general call to our membership for new contributors.
What can you contribute? Anything that may be of interest to people in the Rural Education SIG. You all get messages in your own inboxes that may be of interest to our membership. You all come across articles in non-rural education journals or non-rural education conferences that may be germaine to our group. And you all have issues and topics that you have opinions on that others may be interested in discussing.
This last item is an interesting concept, as the blog does allow for people to post comments which would be used to actually discuss issues - if we had people willing to write two or three paragraphs to get a discussion going.
I will stay on as the webmaster for the SIG, as I want to be able to devote some time to actually building some of the static website resources that we have discussed building in the past (e.g., the index of past conference presentations and of our dissertation award winners). I would also like to start to create a more formal discussion series on the blog.
I will also continue to post the weekly "Rural Education in the News feature and move the "Education Reviews Publishes..." and "Blogging about Rural Education" to bi-weekly entries. I will also continue to post announcements that come out from AERA or messages across our listserve so that they reach a broader audience.
What would you be responsible for as a contributor? Depending on how many people volunteer I would say that you would be responsible for posting one entry every two weeks and to date stamp your entries so that there is no more than one entry per day. Other than that, I can't see any other responsibility that would be required.
The move from an individual carrying the load to a team carrying the load is critical now that we have built up this resource and have an active readership. Regardless if it is me or any other individual who came after me, if it is only one person posting all of the material to the blog site and suddenly they stop - the blog simply dies. However, if we have a team of people and any one simply stops, there are others to continue.
Anyway, if you would like to be a contributor, e-mail me at mkb-at-uga.edu and I will send you the necessary information to get you set up.
Tags: AERA, small schools, rural, education, blog, blogging, blogs
However, one of the nice things about Blogger, and one of the reasons that we selected it in the first place, is that you can have multiple people that have access to post to the same blog site. Right now we are looking for those multiple people.
Right now I am making a general call to our membership for new contributors.
What can you contribute? Anything that may be of interest to people in the Rural Education SIG. You all get messages in your own inboxes that may be of interest to our membership. You all come across articles in non-rural education journals or non-rural education conferences that may be germaine to our group. And you all have issues and topics that you have opinions on that others may be interested in discussing.
This last item is an interesting concept, as the blog does allow for people to post comments which would be used to actually discuss issues - if we had people willing to write two or three paragraphs to get a discussion going.
I will stay on as the webmaster for the SIG, as I want to be able to devote some time to actually building some of the static website resources that we have discussed building in the past (e.g., the index of past conference presentations and of our dissertation award winners). I would also like to start to create a more formal discussion series on the blog.
I will also continue to post the weekly "Rural Education in the News feature and move the "Education Reviews Publishes..." and "Blogging about Rural Education" to bi-weekly entries. I will also continue to post announcements that come out from AERA or messages across our listserve so that they reach a broader audience.
What would you be responsible for as a contributor? Depending on how many people volunteer I would say that you would be responsible for posting one entry every two weeks and to date stamp your entries so that there is no more than one entry per day. Other than that, I can't see any other responsibility that would be required.
The move from an individual carrying the load to a team carrying the load is critical now that we have built up this resource and have an active readership. Regardless if it is me or any other individual who came after me, if it is only one person posting all of the material to the blog site and suddenly they stop - the blog simply dies. However, if we have a team of people and any one simply stops, there are others to continue.
Anyway, if you would like to be a contributor, e-mail me at mkb-at-uga.edu and I will send you the necessary information to get you set up.
Tags: AERA, small schools, rural, education, blog, blogging, blogs
