My Turn

Well, nothing like a little kerfuffle over education politics to stir up the crowd, huh?

In all seriousness though, this is an "open-source" website, meaning that: if you register and play by the rules, you get to participate, share ideas and debate. There is no pre-conceived notion of what is "in" or "right", only the exacting science of "crowd sourcing." If you are not familiar with that term, you need to be, and I refer you to the FAQs above.

And, in that regard, my only concern so far is that people are not "voting" or rating the blogs when they read them. This is crucial. You see, the idea is that only the crowd has the ability to sand off rough edges and see the possibility in ideas, in a story, in a person's inchoate attempts to find the truth. When you "rate" a diary, you are giving it a weight that moves it up or down on the scale of must-see content. I am working with my tech guy to make sure that this kind of ranking leads to identifying what the crowd finds most valuable, and leaves behind that which the crowd decides is just not worth it.

As this community gets good at identifying the diamonds over the dross, the "highest rated" blog posts become something special, something to shoot for, and it attracts better ideas and more considered writing. So far, I've been really happy about the growth of the site in terms of visits and participants. If we continue to grow as fast as we have these first three months... well, who knows where we will end up.

But, this is your site. It reflects, at least in part, what you believe, think and value around being a teacher. In order to consistently make that true, you need to take responsibility to rate the blog posts, and even, once we are outfitted, rate the comments. That way, an ethic, a vision, a sensibility will evolve about what matters in terms of teaching and teachers.