Agree that anything you do should have an easy opt in opt out option Don't forget RSS either - most blogs generate RSS (a list of recent submissions) anyway and this can form the basis of a newsletter too. Google homepage, many email readers today all support RSS subscription.
The real difference between the blog and newsletter in terms of content is that usually a blog is collaborative, self building, and up to date whereas a Newsletter is usually composed by somebody and thus requires greater effort (someone collates all the info and sends it out) and has some time lag . However, Newsletter's can be targeted better, as marketing tool and direct to people but that in-its-self is a double edge sword, as you have to maintain your audience. I suspect for the first couple of communications you want a targeted newsletter. As you catch up with the information you want to deliver then moving to a more automated communication, RSS and possibly email subscription would be the way. I would say go straight to the blog and automated option. For offline people, this changes. The advantage of an up to the minute automated information service such a blog will never be met. For these people an offline version of a newsletter is required. However, even an offline newsletter can be generated from online content though some automated process - the creation of the content may not be the issue - but how they receive it could (which impacts frequency). As well as traditional post, you can also deliver a newsletter as an Acrobat file which can be downloaded and printed (in 100000's if neeed) in the destination country, they could even do this from a web page. So the web can still be used to facilitate offline users. Ray -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Foerster Sent: 07 November 2009 15:45 To: WikiEducator Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: WE blog or newsletter? Wayne wrote: << Agree we need to be very careful with mass-email which can arguably and justifiably be labelled as WE spam. I would suggest implementing an option for new users to subscribe to a news / letter magazine. We can consider a once off notification to WE account holders regarding the option to subscribe to the news letter once this option has been implemented for new account holders. However -- this would need to be an affirmative action to subscribe rather than a default that everyone gets the newsletter unless they opt out. >> Good, that's a reasonable approach. << Personally, I'd like to see both -- they serve different audiences and I don't see one replacing and / or duplicating the other. WikiEducator has extensive reach in the developing world -- places where connectivity is difficult, unreliable and expensive. The newsletter / WE magazine is an innovative way to "connect" the "disconnected" and keep those who want to stay abreast of what is happening online. Notifying teachers around the world of exemplary resources that may be of use. Profiling and sharing experiences of the efforts in setting up national OER collaborations (eg Uganda, Bangladesh, India etc.) --- These experiences are invaluable for other countries trying to bootstrap OER. We could have a low- resolution version to simplify local reproduction and keep costs to a minimum. Certainly, within the formal education sector -- there are still large numbers of educators who do not surf the blog sphere --- lets cast a wide net for open education :-) >> Very well, but there's no reason that a blog and a dead-trees newsletter couldn't have the same content. We could have the official news blog, and when there have been enough posts to fill however many pages we want the newsletter to be, we release the same content as PDF, RTF, ODT, etc. (Our actually printing and posting it sounds expensive, I assume that's not the intent here?) One potential issue with treeware is that some countries use Letter size and some use A4. (My wife's doing an LLB through a school in the UK from here in the U.S. where A4 is annoyingly hard to find, so we've been hit in the head by this one.) << Hopefully there will be more people than Wayne, Jim posting -- we should also include posts from Council members, workgroup leaders, featured teachers etc. This model would need some sort of editorial team to oversee alignment with community values etc. >> Valerie edited the workgroup charter to have us continue to oversee whatever blogs come out of this process. That's okay with me, at least as a starting point. << We definitely need an outlet that isn't edited --- we just need a clear communication / disclaimer that the posts are the opinions of the individuals writing them. >> Very good, so then it seems our workgroup should refine the approach of having three blogs: 1. Terra Incognita if possible, or if not then a sort of "Nova Terra Incognita". 2. An official newsletter blog, the contents of which are also periodically released in paper format. 3. An open blog where WikiEducators can easily add posts and there's light-handed moderation. -=Steve=- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
