WikiEducator:Blog/Guidelines

Overview
The objective of this WikiEducator Blogging Guidelines is to outline the approach that WikiEducator will take in establishing or sponsoring a set of blogs that help it to promote open educational resources and report on its activities.

The intended audience will vary by blog. For some, the audience may be the general public. For others, the audience may be all educators, for others, the audience may be those who do academic research related to OERs.

Possible topics include WikiEducator community news, OER news, how-tos, relevant copyright issues, and related topics such as online teaching and learning. Three blogs are being initially proposed, as outlined below.

Editors and contributors will be on a volunteer basis, as selected by the WikiEducator Blog Workgroup.

Disagreements can be appealed to the WikiEducator Community Council for resolution.

Terra Incognita
Ken Udas has graciously agreed to allow WikiEducator to be the new home for his blog Terra Incognita, which he published while the head of Penn State World Campus. Founded in 2006, the goal of Terra Incognita is "Exploring new ground in online education". It does this through a format in which each month brings a different guest blogger to post on some topical aspect of online education. From this, readers make comments that either add additional points or ask questions.

Ken has indicated that he is interested in continuing to be editor of this series, but that assistance from additional editors would be helpful. Steve Foerster has volunteered.

WE Newsletter
WikiEducator is a large and diverse group of educators, who often participate in projects and hold events that would be of interest to all were they only better promoted. In addition, the overall WE project often has technical and administrative announcements that would be of general interest. To that end, a newsletter blog will be created where a small set of WE's leaders will be able to post, e.g., Wayne, Jim, etc.

Open WE
This group blog will be open to all who want to become contributors. A few people will set up as editors, to prevent any abuse, but the goal will be access as open as possible. This blog may take the form of one hosted on WE, or it may come from an RSS feed from material tagged with "OpenWE" on Delicious.com or some similar means. Editors (3-4) - editor 1, editor 2, editor 3, ... Contributors - Valerie Taylor, contributor 2, contributor 3, ...

Planning

 * thoughts about how WE will be presented to blog readers, direction for contributors and editors
 * some ideas for how the contribution / publication process will work

Technical
There are a number of technical issues that need to be approached, such as


 * Reader comments - allow, monitor, control display
 * Spam deterrents

Ideally a blogging software package like WordPress can be used to handle these sorts of demands.

Themes, issues and trends

 * open, education, teaching, learning
 * create, collaborate
 * adopt, adapt, use, reuse, remix, redistribute
 * pedagogy
 * copyright, intellectual property
 * tips and techniques - wiki, media, technology
 * showcase users, OERs, adopt, remix
 * research, news
 * community of practice

Contributions and editing

 * all contributions will be considered ? preference given to WikiEducator users
 * submissions - formal submission for consideration form, RSS, social bookmark tags
 * review - criteria
 * editing - suggestions for author

What about...
 * promotional content for services, products - as editorial, advertising ?
 * good ideas but writing not to standard - editing, collaboration - who, how?

Review and publication process

 * submission - ?? explicit, auto gather via RSS or tags
 * intake - submissions acknowledged and logged, reviewer(s) notified
 * review - criteria
 * edit - author to make changes?
 * approve - ?? review/edit ok
 * publish - ?? automated aggregation / blog with multiple contributors, editors / editors add posts from original sources

What about...
 * frequency, quality, quantity of posts ?
 * editorial voice ?

Resources

 * Wordpress.org