Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Re: ISED-L ON BLOG AND RSS

Ah yes, I knew I forgot something...

Seventh. Context. There's been a fear expressed of having our comments taken
out of the larger context by having them ported to a blog site. I'm a little
confused by this. Is it assumed that those of us who are signed up here for
the "officially sanctioned" communiques each read every single post in every
single thread? I can tell you that I certainly don't do that. Does anyone
here have the time to do that? I'm a subject line skimmer. If the subject
line doesn't appear to interest me, I ignore the thread and move on. Does
this mean that I'm losing the larger context of what else the people I'm
currently discussing access to color printers with may be talking about? Of
course it does, but that's life. Everything's a little bit out of context,
and sometimes a subject creates its own brand new one.

Similarly, am I expected to read all the previous posts from people with
whom I'm now corresponding with, no matter what the subject, in order to be
able to put their issues with color printers into the proper context? I sure
hope that's not what's being implied.

Eighth. Privacy of email addresses. OK, this is the one thing I can see that
might actually be a big-ticket issue. If you've gone through great efforts
to protect your email address from spammers, and figured that if you only
used it within the confines of this group, you were safe; I can understand
you being a little upset about having it posted "out on the open in some
blog" where a bot can more easily get at it. But again, this was a side
effect, and probably one that wasn't even considered because the person who
set up the blog stuff in the first place probably hadn't even considered the
effect it would have on his own email address. There's no simple solution to
this one. One has to weigh the ability to be easily contacted (about your
properly attributed post) against the likelihood of increased spam. There's
no one-size-fits-all solution to this. Not any more than there is to the
question of how obvious your email address should be in the first place. I
specifically bought my own domain so that all my family members could be
name@gatling.us, and so that people who are looking for us could find us
more easily. On the other hand, I know of people who studiously avoid that
type of email address transparency.

I will say that on a recent online forum I was involved with, the fact that
the email addresses of the conversants (is that a real word?) were stripped
from the content, made it nigh impossible to respond privately. The only
option you had was to put your email address out there and beg them to
contact you. That was a real pain.
--
keg

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Keith E Gatling - Computer Instructor
Manlius Pebble Hill School
5300 Jamesville Rd
DeWitt, NY 13214
315.446.2452
http://www.gatling.us/keith

Some teachers teach subjects. Others teach people.
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[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.