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Re: [school-core] [Fwd: Re: Regular media contact]
Good points, William, and you do appear to be the resident journalist cum
publicist. Funny how much teachers and journalists have in common job-wise:
only a few make the "big bucks." Anyway, I'd like to say that I do not think
you need a mandate to speak as long as you are part of the conversation
working toward consensus and can accurately and honestly portray it -- with a
positive slant.
By the way, I disagree with the idea that the pr to date has been
unsuccessful.
First, remember that most countries in the world can't do _anything_ other
than cease to exist that will "make news." CNN ignores all but about 20 of its
supposed 220+ broadcastees, except when someone loudly accuses them of bias.
The BBC's no better. It's the nature of the "modern" news media-beast(s). They
can't be comprehensive because they're in the entertainment business as much
as that of "information dissemination." So, the fact that we haven't hit the
big news pages doesn't mean someone hasn't heard us yet. It just means we're
still on the cutting room floor.
Secondly, something went right. Little opensourceschools.org's version of the
latest pr has 3,800 visits -- that's people who took time to click on "read
more," not just those who saw the headline and intro. That's the biggest
response to any story by far. You may say that 3,800 is nothing, and you'd be
right in big media terms. But in grass-roots terms, it's progress and it seems
to have resulted from concerted, collaborative effort. So, the process worked
and a few more people joined the coalition.
I'm of the opinion that we are ourselves in the business of a more
organic-style of information dissemination. We may have to play at the
advertising game a bit to get _some_ of the average Jill and Joe's attention
span, but it's a process, not always as focused as we might wish, of gathering
and writing how-to's, presenting evidence that the tools and ideas work, and
spreading the word person-to-person. This is where I agree with William that
local efforts need support.
That said, I think we should do some or all of the following:
1)Seul and Open Source Schools and a few other orgs are not local, but central
by design -- meant to be clearing houses and gathering spots. I say we combine
them as schoolforge. I would like to continue as rabble rouser/editor of the
front page, and we've had this discussion before, but my thoughts keep coming
back to the duplicated effort. I would like to invite anyone who's doing what
opensourceschools.org is, free/opensource resources in ed journal/newszine to
subsume under a new "front page" for schoolforge. I have more thoughts on the
"how" of this if anyone's interested.
2)I think we should either start a new org a la a (very) cheap version of the
w3.org and ask the opensource ed foundation to ramp up to be the funding arm
of schoolforge, or create a new npo/ngo. This could be done in a way that
encourages the formation of local groups, perhaps as complements or sub-groups
of LUGS world-wide. If we go the LUG sub-group way (as a strategy), there
might be no need to form an official npo/ngo. That could wait until some
university or large foundation is convinced to fund a serious effort. It looks
like I'll be doing a doctorate Edtech at Nova-Southeastern (US/Florida),
mostly via the Web. Maybe they could be convinced to "look good" by supporting
an organization. Maybe MIT could (SEUL?)
3)Take William up on his offer but more as a writer and strategist than as a
spokesman, although he will inevitably be that, too. But his job, as he
himself, foresaw would more appropriately be to make each part of the
coalition shine. For one thing, I would like to see him as co-editor of the
new Schoolforge frontpage/journal/newszine. Anything too serious without a
salary would obviously be unreasonable for William, so we have to make good
use of his time. If we ever _did_ get financial support, maybe we would be
able to pay him.
4)Redouble efforts to reach an international audience and get someone to help
Felipe organize a translator's group.
5)Plan one or more (international again) free/opensource in ed workshop(s)
conferences. Again, balance local and international: we could probably
centrally develop the workshops that could be locally delivered for free or
for profit, as suits the needs/desires of the ones actually getting people to
listen and learn.
6)Continue the current efforts to develop a cd or two with good stuff on it.
These could be touted at the workshops/conferences.
All in all, we have to stand for something, together.
David
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> From: William Abernathy <william@inch.com>
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