Well, there’s certainly been a varied response to the release of the magazine, Stephen seemed to think it was a good idea, and we got some nice responses to the our opening post, but at the same time there Judy O’Connell wasn’t happy at all as apparently it reflects ‘an energetic move to monetize blogging in education’ and Miguel Guhlin produced a completely over the top headline (pulled a ‘me’ ;) with Selling Out the Edublogs Community? which, to be honest, I’m not sure what to make of.
So, thinking specifically about Judy, I figured that we probably need to do a couple of things, in the first case clear up a number of misconceptions about the mag and it’s purpose, and in the second (and certainly the one I’m looking forward to more) lambast anyone who is going to criticize us for promoting Edublogs or, more pertinently, being a business.
So out with the boring stuff first. Besides the monetization bit, Judy certainly seems to imply that this is an Edublogs-only -club or that it exists, ahem, for ‘the overt promotion of bloggers who use the edublogs platform’, which is of course not true. While the magazine aims to inform, engage and generally make using edublogs better for the people who do use it, contribution is open to everyone. Wanna test that out, try submitting something or giving us a few weeks at least!
And more to the point, if we want to create a magazine that serves our users, why on earth shouldn’t we be able to do so?
Oh, because apparently:
rather than creating a magazine that engages us all in the global conversation. This is an obvious commercial move at the expense of egalitarianism in blogging
You what? Who exactly handed the responsibility to us to serve a global conversation? Oh, hang on, nobody. But guess what, that’s actually what we’re trying to do, within a few boundaries obvioulsy, but best we can.
And more to the point (slipping into interesting stuff here), what exactly is this notion of egalitarianism in blogging (I thought we’d gotten over that bit of nonsense), and… drumroll… what is wrong with this being a commercial move? In fact, what is wrong with Edublogs being a commercial operation (it is) at all?
Because here’s how the magazine is commercial. It will provide (hopefully) great news, information, ideas, resources and all that jazz for edubloggers the world over. Contributors will get a decent sized audience (we’re able to promote it to a lot of people, all the ‘egalitarianism’ in the world isn’t going to get you thousands of readers a day), links back to their sites and the chance to engage in a conversation they might have struggled to get into from a central place. Existing Edublogs users will hopefully enjoy it and as a result will enjoy using Edublog even more, and hopefully some people will see the site and think ‘hey, I should get myself an edublog’ or ‘let’s check out this Edublogs Campus thing’.
Which will, in turn hopefully help us to continue to grow and develop Edublogs as a whole. Because as I said, that’s what we want to do, both to provide a great tool for teachers and students (that’s ad free, unlike the platform Judy uses that plasters adsense all over the site, surreptitiously) and to put food on our tables.
I really want institutions to sign up for Edublogs Campus – besides being a bloody great platform (and incredibly affordable by regular hosted elearning tools standards) which I’m hoping is going to be able to evolve into an approach to online teaching and learning that revolutionizes our current tawdry practice-by-platform, it also (kinda) pays the bills.
And I’m dead keen that users sign up for free Edublogs, first up you’ll love the features (I promise, we’re way ahead of other blog providers in many ways) but also because we offer, and are going to extend, paid upgrades that will give you pretty much everything you could possibly want out of a blog… for a tiny fraction of the price you’d pay if you hosted it yourself… and also because that pays for the petrol to drive my kinds to school.
So what do our users get for this? Well, you could say brilliant, free, advertising free, supported, evolving online teaching and learning tools and community. Sheesh.
And if we didn’t commercialize this properly, as Stephen pointed out rather bloody well in regards to projects like elgg (and we all know what happened to eduspaces) and as Tom Hoffman noted at the time, services without supporting business models will not make it.
Really, what I’d like to see is the people who criticize us for commercialization or ‘selling out’ do three things:
1. Put yourself in our shoes, remember that this, along with Incsub, is my full time job, it’s what I do for a living and what tens of thousands of educators seem to find useful…. what would you do?
2. Next time you’re out grocery shopping, and you pop into your specialty store (organic, really nice fruit and veg, butchers etc.), make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to tell them what you think of them for making money out of you bu giving you what you want in exchange for $.
3. Get a grip fer heavens sake: “There is real danger it might be destroying the open collaborative environment of blogging around the world… please reconsider the marketing of this magazine…for the sake of our students. (Oh I know it won’t happen – not everyone puts the needs of our kids first!)” Leave the invective up to the pros ;)
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