[Editors] Ed Tech Times online newsletter launched

[Jean Foster]

Hello Editors,

Over the past few months I've written to this list and attended an 
Editors meeting to discuss the ramifications of moving our paper 
newsletter, the Insider,  to an online only format, and I thought you 
might be interested in seeing what we have produced.   The Ed Tech 
Times  is an online, interactive newsletter focusing on educational 
technology news.

See it at:  http://edtech.mit.edu/times/

We plan on publishing one major article per month along with pertinent 
announcements of talks or service offerings whenever they come up.  We 
are also offering a regular bimonthly email summary of articles posted 
over that timeframe to those who wish to subscribe to an e-mail list.

We've used the free Movable Type blog software as a framework for the 
newsletter although we are not using this as a blog nor advertising it 
as such.   Blog writing tends to be very informal and  with a "stream 
of consciousness" style and I'm not ready for that!) The software just 
makes it easy to post new articles without actually having to do web 
page editing and also has some handy built-in features such as allowing 
readers to comment to each article in a bulletin board-like format, the 
ability subscribe to get automatic summary updates via email whenever a 
new article is posted, and an automatic archiving scheme. I consider 
the "Comments" feature an experiment. We can only wait to see how it 
works out;  whether or not people will use it enough to make it 
worthwhile or if SPAM and unwelcome postings will become enough of a 
problem to outweigh the benefits.

We will also be using the RSS technology that Robyn talked about at a 
recent meeting to have the Teaching with Technology web site "News and 
Announcements" section (http://web.mit.edu/teachtech/) automatically 
updated whenever a new article is posted.  (This isn't quite in place 
yet, but we're close!  We're hoping this will be working by next week 
.)

Please check it out and let us know what you think (preferably by 
commenting to the article "About the Ed Tech Times"!)

thanks,
-jean-