kairos >> 7.1 >> News >>

Spring 2002|

 

Kairosnews: A News Site and Online Community for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy

Charles Lowe, Co-Editor Kairos News Section

Across America, long before the Internet, television, and even the telephone were common forms of communication, the general store served as a much needed focal point for individuals within communities to meet and share information. Often without the benefit of a local daily newspaper, friends and neighbors met not only to do their shopping, but to share the local gossip, discuss issues relevant to the community, and even catch up on the national and world news. In today's electronic frontier, a similar need exists, an Internet nexus for members of the teaching with technology community to share the news. While Kairos news editors have always worked to provide up to date information with feature sections such as "Conference.Central@Kairos," "Projects in Progress," "CFP's," and "Voices from the Field," a journal issue-by-issue publishing cycle of twice a year doesn't always get the news to the community as quickly as needed. Nor does Kairos provide an interactive space for our readers to discuss these features. But that has all changed. With this issue release, Kairos would like to announce Kairosnews, a daily news service for those interested in rhetoric, technology and pedagogy.

Like the general store analogy above, Kairosnews is different from the typical news sites, such as CNN or Wired, which use reporters to provide content for their audience. Instead, Kairosnews draws upon the open journalism model best exemplified by Slashdot, a web portal site for computer programmers and others in the IT field. In the Slashdot model, readers are more than just readers--they're all authors. No longer will you send your cfp notice or conference review off to Kairos news editors to be included in the journal two months or more down the road. Just go to Kairosnews and submit your piece to be posted. Within a day, Kairosnews editors will activate your submission, posting it to the main page. And in order for readers to discuss the submissions, each posted article also has an accompanying discussion board. Among others, site features will also include links on the main page to online journals, an online bibliography, a chat room and a live news headline feed from Wired magazine.

In addition to the article submissions discussion threads, Kairosnews also offers a separate "Forums" section, an alternative open conversational space to the listservs and MOO's already serving the community. Members can discuss discipline related issues in the "Teaching with Technology" forum, or go off topic with "Open Topics." The editors have also created "Kairos Talk" and "Kairosnews Talk" as places for discussing both the journal and daily news site. As the number of member dialogues grow, Kairosnews editors will take suggestions for opening specific topic categories. And we would also like to offer a limited number of forums for special interest groups/individuals within the profession who need a public web space to get community feedback. Finally, there are some private forums where Kairos staff will be working hard to maintain the Kairosnews site and provide you with upcoming Kairos issues.

Beyond the obvious benefits of stimulating increased community interaction, providing a web-based bulletin board service for community announcements, and offering an asynchronous web-based communication system alternative to listservs and MOO's, Kairosnews will provide another, much needed function. While I was writing this piece, I decided to review materials on open source journalism. So I struggled with my over-bloated Netscape Bookmarks file, tried to scan through almost 1700 TechRhet emails from the last 6 months, and dived into my many layered word processor file structure looking for my notes from various electronic sources. I realized then that collecting electronic communication about the field is quickly becoming unmanageable, as well as a significant time investment for each scholar/teacher. Suppose that we stop trying to collect all this information individually? That we pool our resources and worked together to manage this information flow? Imagine developing a community built, web-based collection point specifically for all things for teachers of technology. Such a place could act as a huge bookmark file for everyone, with information about upcoming conferences; calls for papers; job listings; brief, annotated links to essays and news reports on the web; short editorial postings to initiate conversation; listings of new online writing resources; observations/reviews of new technologies for the classroom; notices about newly released texts; etc.

Thus, through your contributions, Kairosnews can quickly become a large, easily searchable database, one in a central location with the tools to make information management easy. Researchers will not always have to wait until they are seated in front of their home or office computer workstations to access their bookmarks, emails and other documents. Instead, researchers can simply go to Kairosnews and browse day-to-day listings of submissions and discussion boards. "Articles," the label for all readers submissions, will also be browseable by individual topic categories--i.e. hypertext theory, courseware, literacy, ethics, MOO's, OWL's, intellectual property, cfp's, open source, gender, and tenure. So far, there are forty plus topics listed, and the news editorial staff will add more as submissions dictate need. For more precise research, readers can also keyword search the entire database of submissions, comment discussion board posts, forums content, and online bibliography entries. Assuming that the reader/author base could contribute an average of five posts a day, researchers would be able to access over 1800 submissions after the first year alone.

In order to expand this valuable academic resource, Kairosnews editors will contribute articles just like every other reader. But in our role as editors, we will work to facilitate the growth of this online community in a number of ways. Part of our job will be to provide content about site administration and policies. This will be posted within the FAQ section of the site. Once Kairosnews has had a chance to settle in and gain an established base of readers, we'll take input from members and work to provide additional features and content sections. And then there is our role as editors of article submissions. Unlike in the journal edition of Kairos, which is understandably a peer-reviewed publication, editors will often simply activate your submissions. Of course, we'll occasionally correct obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. We'll also filter out obvious spams. Finally, sometimes there will be more than one submission, each by a different author, on the same specific topic--for example, duplicate submissions of a cfp, or more than one annotation of a new article at The Chronicle of Higher Education. In that situation, we'll activate the first submitted, encouraging the other submitters to join in the conversation on the attached discussion forum. But, as editors, we won't be evaluating content. Just as with many other electronic communication mediums, each author will be responsible for the accuracy of their own submissions in this web portal community.

So prepare to fix your browser home page on the new Kairosnews. Visit Kairosnews and go ahead and register as a user. Check back frequently for the latest update. When you find a particular news worthy item or resource, don't hesitate to post a submission (consult "Article Submissions" in the FAQ section for more details on posting). And, as will always be the case, if you have any questions or problems, don't hesitate to email the Kairosnews editors.

We'll look forward to seeing you there!

Kairosnews is located on the web at http://kairosnews.org

For those interested in seeing other example web portals, below is a brief sampling:

Kairos 7.1
vol. 7 Iss. 1 Spring 2002