The education panel made some important points; it was a great opportunity to get acquainted with Lance, Pat, Brian, Kaye, and Jenny. I wish the forum itself had made it more possible for Jenny (for instance) to describe her priorities and perspectives (glad she blogged them). Each of us had strong interests that merit a more thorough airing than could necessarily emerge in the Q-and-A format (Pat and I, perhaps Kaye as well, muscled our interests into air time, but it would have been great to hear more from Jenny and Brian). I don’t see blogged notes on the panel (no, Betsy posted some notes, thanks! Heath Row, whom I don’t know to speak to but whom I’d like to meet, posted something like a transcript of the first ten minutes or so, for heaven’s sake. That’s amazing. And now I found Tim Jarrett’s notes, too. And here’s Roland’s notes, that look like the most complete); it would have been helpful to see what came across to a blogger.
A couple of things didn’t get foreground attention this morning. One involves the access problem. People expressed righteous frustration over the distribution of online access, about the demographics of the weblog user community; another topic of interest involved the flexibility of electronic publishing (there’s no great imperative to constrain publications by length, for instance, in the way that print media require attention to the physical and commercial ramifications of a publication’s length.
We’re tackling elements of both these at the Disseminary. On one hand, we’re trying to generate educationally valuable material that can be freely shared, regardless of a user’s or an institution’s capacity to pay. That’s not the same as, maybe not as important as, the matter of gaining access to the Web; but it’s a part that’s within my capacity to effect a change. And having Web access in general is worth a lot less if there isn’t good stuff to do there.
Likewise, Disseminary publications aren’t constrained by the publishing parameters that keep some work out of print media, or remove it from print media after long, or make available in print but at so high a cost that very few people can have access to it. We’ll publish any worthy monograph of any length (from pamphlet/article to full-scale book) and distribute it to anyone in the world who’s interested, and will print copies through our print-on-demand publisher.
Posted by AKMA at October 4, 2003 01:29 PM | TrackBack