Tuesday, February 19, 2008

ILTA newsletter experiment

ILTA are currently reviewing how best to distribute a regular newsletter to members. Any suggestions can be sent to me at brian.mulligan@gmail.com - In the meantime, I am experimenting with using this blog for that purpose - if you have any snippets of interest to the membership (particularly about your own organisation) please email it to me. In addition, please feel free to comment on postings on the blog. (Select Comment below)

7 comments:

Michael Hanley said...

Hi Brian,
Re: distributing information - seeing as the info will already be available here, how about e-mailing a weekly digest of headlines and links to ILTA members? Of course, once you've got your blog's RSS feed up and running, subscribers will get automatic updates after every new post that you publish. Anyway, I've added your URL to my own blog, the E-learning Curve. Best of luck!

ContraryMan said...

Michael,

thanks for the comments. I'm new to blogs (publishing - I've been subscribing for quite a while). I feel that the weakness is the ability to "push" out a digest once a month, especially to get to those who do not get around to subscribing. I'll manually create the digest for the moment. What is the link to your e-learning curve blog?

Michael Hanley said...

In response to your question, you'll find my blog at http://elearningcurve.blogspot.com/

--
I agree with your sentiments re: distributing a newsletter to your user base; I guess your advantage is that you've a ready-made audience of interested parties via the ILTA subscriber list (which is where I found out about your blog). I think a good model to emulate in respect of a news digest would be the Silicon Republic news alert e-mail.

However, the advantages(and the real joy) of posting to a blog are the on-demand access to your content that the format affords, as well as the ability to engage in a dialogue with your readers. As such, the requirement to manually create a list of links etc. is pretty much an automated process thanks to Really Simple Syndication. I know some bloggers (such as Deirdre at the Active Learning Carnival blog) prefer to create a monthly, themed, list of links (the eponymous "carnival") rather than submit daily/weekly posts, but most people tend to post "as and when."

I've been a regular internet blogger for about three months now (I've submitted content to my organisation's internal blogs and wikis for well over a year). During that time, I've really learned how to use the functionality provided by the Blogger platform. It's modular layout really lends itself to creating an online space where you can share a range of resources, links, knowledge, podcasts, downloads, and information beyond what you include in your posts.

Anonymous said...

Great idea Brian. I Look forward to seeing how it evolves eh.. wait a minute that would be sooo web 1.0
I am involved already!

Hope to sporadically blog a bit myself this year relearn.ie.

Anonymous said...

Hi Brian,
It will be interesting if blogbulletins are the way to go. I have already got some of my student work out of Bb and into blogs as it is easier and it works. I will be showing them this in the context of business applications of blogs. Bloggs don't have the private password barrier which is great. Good Luck.Denis in Dublin

Anonymous said...

At this stage ILTA probably needed a blog, is it an inevitability? maybe! ... the other advantage of having a blog presence is the ability to share ideas amongst the larger learning/technology networks already online.

AND the other major bonus is being able to link to member's websites, for example Mr. Hanley's learning curve :)

Michael Hanley said...

Thanks very much Heather - I'm all embarrassed now!
I'm pleased you like my blog - hopefully it provides some food for thought.
Anyway, I hope you don't think it presumptuous, but I've gone ahead and created a blog domain called http://irishlearntech.blogspot.com/ if anyone's interested submitting content to it. Sadly, ILTA.blogspot.com was taken by the Indonesian Lawn Tennis Association :-(.
The neat thing about Blogger is that it allows 'team members' - just let me know if you're interested and I'll add you to the list; it looks like with Brian here on e-learning Ireland and Eamon Costello over at rElearn, that there's a but of momentum building in this domain at the moment.
As you'll see, the blog is currently in "plain vanilla" configuration - I think it would be fantastic for the ILTA if we took the time to give the association an online "look and feel." Any ideas anyone?