Thoughts from a journal editor

As editor of Education and Culture, the journal of the Dewey Society, I write a brief note with each issue, usually offering a few ideas of my own while briefly discussing the articles. I went back recently and reread the notes from the first two issues I edited, 20(2) and 21(1), from about 3 years ago.

In the first I discuss what I see as my hopes for a journal sponsored by the John Dewey Society:

When I wrote the JDS board about taking over the journal, I gave a rationale that read, in part, that [My] interests are broadly Deweyan. Though I have read and studied Dewey’s work, I see the journal as more Deweyan in spirit, rather than just in letter. I would be interested in seeking out scholars who are examining not only Dewey himself, but his influence upon his contemporaries, and his enduring legacy. I would like to invite contributions on current work on Dewey’s influence. I am also keenly interested in exploring how the new technologies may be used in the journal. I would insist on electronic submission and reviewing procedures to expedite the process of production. I would also like to explore online components of the journal . . . I hope we are on the right path to realizing some of these characteristics, and I welcome any comments from readers on the journal’s direction and how this new editorial team may best serve the Society.

In the second note, I continue this discussion of what this journal is and might be. The impetus for this reflection was an email exchange with a former editor of Educational Theory:

Last year, I engaged in a series of spirited emails with Ralph Page about my new position as editor. Ralph recently retired after many years from the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana/ Champaign, and edited Educational Theory, one of the best-known journals in the areas of social foundations of education and educational policy, from 1983–1991. I had heard about Ralph from many people, especially my former colleague Christine Shea, before I had the pleasure to meet him, and came to realize the effect he has had upon not only the fields of what we at Purdue call “cultural foundations,” but more especially, through his work with countless authors and reviewers, a continuing narrative about what it means to be a journal editor. Ralph enjoined me to think of a journal as more than a place where the “best” articles get published, and the field, in my case, Dewey studies, is defined. Ralph thinks a journal can be, as he so generously put it, “a site of interchange among actual authors and actual audiences.” I thought about that and agreed that many people may not think of journals as sites for exploration, for the education of the authors, but more simply as gate keeping devices for the disciplines involved, and as finished products of scholarship. Ralph reminded me of the primacy of keeping the audience in mind when considering how to put together an issue. He told me that he asked himself the question: Will this audience be better off if they have a chance to read this article? That intrigued me, and I thought along with Ralph about what “better off” means in this context. We decided that “better off” may mean that an article raises neglected topics or a marginalized point of view, and thus enlarges the field of discourse. Or, more directly and personally, the audience may be better off by hearing a crucial statement by an up and coming junior scholar on the cusp of tenure. “Better off” for Ralph did not mean merely some notion of “excellence” or “cutting edge,” determined by a supposedly unbiased and distinguished review panel. These issues are not excluded, but a host of other issues, some idiosyncratic to the editor, his or her board, the journal at that particular time, may be considered.

I try to keep these thoughts in mind as we move forward with the journal and continue to think about its place in the lives of scholars and practitioners. We are moving forward with a special issue commemorating the150th anniversary of the birth of John Dewey in 2009, and looking at where Dewey studies, as well as practice, may take us today.

Open Access Scholarship

This post on open-access philosophy is, I think, worth reading in the context of our stated goals of communicating beyond our small group of colleagues whose libraries have subscriptions to expensive journals:
http://tomkow.typepad.com/tomkowcom/2008/06/open-resource-p.html

One of the important points made by the author and his commenters is that it takes the cooperation of the senior scholars in a discipline to change (and not drastically) the criteria for evaluating the work of younger scholars for hiring and tenure to make this work.

So, senior scholars: what are you going to do about this?

(Bonus question: why is the electronic edition of the collected works of Dewey so expensive, rather than available on a publicly accessible web page? Would Dewey approve?)

Blogging Tips

The Commission on Social Issues and our blog, Social Issues, aim to help scholars and progressive educators contribute to the discussion and resolution of social, cultural and educational issues.

Blogging is an important channel of communication about these issues. The public, engaged scholar-intellectual of today can get ideas circulating by joining the blogosphere.

Social Issues will frequently share ideas about blogging, and encourages its readers to blog, both here at SI and on their own.

We have already mentioned Chris Garrett as a source of great ideas on blogging.

Another source is Lorelle VanFossen, who blogs at Lorelle on Wordpress. Although much of the content is about the wordpress blogging platform, Lorelle is full of great ideas about blogging and writing in general.

In her post today Lorelle writes about the popular author Peter McWilliams and his motivational books Life 101 and Do It, demonstrating how McWilliam's style and approach to his topics offer great lessons for bloggers.

She says:

Blogging is about confidence, confidence in your subject matter and self-confidence that keeps you returning to your blog, persistently publishing . . . Blogging is about overcoming your fears. It’s about making mistakes and learning to live with it. It’s about the courage to say what needs to be said, no matter what anyone else says or thinks.

Life 101 and Do It! address the issues of what gets in our way and stops us from moving forward, especially when the path is a creative one that requires courage and faith in our abilities. It’s so easy to turn back when someone says something nasty . . . or insults your expertise

All of us hoping to advance progressive ideas in our conservative and frequently corrupt society have something to learn about the courage to move forward.

Citizen Journalism

The website Helium is partnering with various public interest groups to sponsor awards for citizen journalism on a number of topics of interest to members of JDS.

As it is the prime mission of the Commission on Social Issues to encourage citizen journalism among JDS members, this project should have special interest.You may remember Dewey's abortive collaboration with Franklin Ford, his complaint that the mainstream media were mostly scandal sheets failing to get behind lurid stories to the social processes responsible for them, and his complementary desire to bring more of the newspaper business into philosophy. So here is one already organized outlet.

Here is the lead from Helium:

Are you a real citizen journalist?
Helium's Citizen Journalism Awards cover a broad spectrum of issues: technology against world poverty, presidential candidates' health records, protecting animals by eating stem-cell-grown meat and the conflicts along Columbia's borders.

Show us your skills and get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers.

Here is more:

The time has come to rethink what it means to be a journalist. If you have what it takes to research topics and issues, lend an objective voice and write compelling articles, then you are a citizen journalist. Helium is bringing together the worlds of traditional news reporting and community-based journalism to create a site that citizen journalists call home.

Are you ready to report and write? Helium encourages you to report everything from local issues happening in your town to pressing global and environmental issues. As a citizen journalist writing at Helium, you’ll get recognized by publishers, news outlets, journalism institutions and peers. Here’s where to build a diverse portfolio of top-quality articles to help jump-start your career.

ONCE AGAIN AT HULL-HOUSE~Educating Women

Now located on the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and under the direction of Lisa Yun Lee, the original, now historic site of Jane Addams’s Hull-House remains a lively center of activity around social issues, as you will see if you check out the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. On May 22-23, 2008 the old Hull-House dining room and renovated conference facility were filled to capacity with about eighty participants in the inaugural gathering of a new international, intergenerational community of learning and inquiry on women, gender, and education—of which, without doubt, Jane Addams herself would have approved heartily. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the International Society of Educational Biography, the Blackwell History of Education Museum at Northern Illinois University, the University of Oklahoma, and Fairfield University hosted the event and provided scholarship aid for some participants. The brainchild of Lucy Townsend (2008 conference chair), Susan Douglas Franzosa (2009 conference chair), and myself, this new community goes by the name Educating Women. That name’s double entendre refers deliberately to women as both subjects and objects of educating.

True to that name, this inaugural conference brought together professors, students, teachers, activists, researchers, and concerned citizens from North America, Africa, Asia, and Europe around the theme, Educating Women: The Status of Research on the Education of Girls and Women. Consonant with that theme, those in attendance both surveyed and proposed such research, demonstrating the myriad rich possibilities of the scholarship in educational women’s and gender studies that has emerged only within the past two or three decades. Addressing education in infancy and throughout the human lifespan in highly various educational institutions both rural and urban, presenters’ topics included coeducation, single-sex schooling, teacher education, and women’s studies, as well as women’s instructive folklore, women’s educative social movements and friendships. Participants presented studies of girls’ and women’s education in Pakistan, Botswana, Kenya, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the American South. They discussed research on Mexican-American, African-American, Chinese-American, and Italian-American girls’ and women’s education; on education in visual arts, music, athletics, sexuality, gardening, sustainable agriculture, home economics, and the legal profession; on education about pain, for peace and other sorts of activism, and for living wisely and well; on women’s anger and artistry in teaching; on the teaching, learning, and curricular resources of mothers; on the particular educational challenges of pregnant teens and of both women with disabilities and mothers of children with disabilities. Some sessions argued for the value of studying women’s literary representations of teaching and learning; many others argued for the value of recovering knowledge about the past work or thought of significant educating women—such as Frances Wright, Elizabeth Sherwood, Betty Kirby, Flora White, Sarah Raymond, Ellen Swallow Richards, Catharine Macaulay, Christine de Pizan, Emma Goldman, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Roberta Abney, and founders of women’s studies programs—not to mention the sessions on Jane Addams. Selected papers presented at Hull-House will appear in forthcoming special issues of Educational Studies and Vitae Scholasticae. Meanwhile the community is preparing also to publish its own refereed journal, Educating Women, online, with password-protected spaces for discussing its articles.

Four keynote speakers called attention to issues of recurring concern throughout the conference. Ruth Sweetser, president of the American Association of University Women, opened the Hull-House conference with a lecture concerning the history of that organization’s research on girls’ and women’s education—including its most recent report, Where the Girls Are, which debunks the myth of a “boys’ crisis” in U.S. education and concludes that understanding race/ethnicity and family income levels are critical to understanding girls’ and boys’ achievement. Kolawole Babatunde, representing Nigeria ActionAid International, opened the first afternoon’s session with a lecture on “Major Factors Affecting Girls’ Education in Northern Nigeria: A Grassroots-Based Approach,” which illuminated strong points of resonance with issues affecting North American girls’ education, including critical concern about a narrow focus only on academic learning and achievement, and thus signaled possible directions for future collaboration in behalf of Nigerian girls’ education. The first day closed with a lecture by Lisa Yun Lee and a film, on Hull-House itself, along with a tour of the museum. Jane Roland Martin, whose John Dewey Lecture became one of her many books, Cultural Miseducation, opened the second day with a lecture, “Making Research on Women Count,” critiquing the “hidden” curriculum of misogyny witnessed during the recent U.S. Presidential primary campaign season as a signal of much educational work yet to be done and drawing imaginative inspiration from the concept of the land grant university to envision new approaches that Educating Women might take in the twenty-first century. Gaby Weiner, now of Edinburgh University, Stirling University, and Manchester University in the U.K., formerly of the University of Umeå in Sweden, opened the final afternoon’s sessions with a lecture, “Too Much Talk and Too Little Action: Trends in Research on Gender and Education in Europe and the Anglophone World,” comparing so-called “second wave” and “third wave” feminisms there with a content analysis of journals that suggested important possible future directions for Educating Women.

This conference and the publications following from it do not tell the whole story about the community of learning and inquiry that Educating Women aims to become. A project initially conceived in informal conversation over dinner in Charlottesville, VA during the American Educational Studies Association conference in 2005, and developed by its three founders at subsequent conferences and through carefully planned meetings and retreats in 2006 and 2007, Educating Women responds to a perceived generation gap in scholarship on women and education and also to a situation felt to be presently so limiting as to be stifling the field’s growth. In general, the educational women’s and gender studies field’s senior scholars seem to lack opportunities for collaborative work, while interested junior scholars often lack access to mentors and to sufficiently diversified, advanced studies to feel confident pursuing research on women, gender, and education. Moreover teachers, parents, and community educators often have no access to the research that is published in academic venues, even when it might be useful to them. Besides organizing conferences and publishing an online journal, therefore, this project will—as funds raised permit—utilize distance-education technologies, organize special interest groups within other existing organizations, construct an online archive of the field’s development, connect people with mentors, facilitate mutual communications and collaborations among scholars and teachers, and provide online a researchers' and teachers’/parents’ resource center that may work something like a virtual extension service. This trans-institutional, trans-associational project’s aim is to make unprecedented opportunities for novice, mid-career, and senior scholars to undertake advanced learning and inquiry in this new field and, also, just as importantly, to make their work available to a global audience of educators who can and will inform and inspire the work of scholars, use it, and improve upon it to make a difference in the learning and living of women, girls, and all other gender-troubled people. The founders are currently organizing Educating Women’s Board of Advisers, and welcome new participants in this culturally diverse community who care about girls’ and women’s education and about gender and sexuality education, who are also eager to learn and to teach. Contact: societyforeducatingwomen@gmail.com.

Teach your children well?

The Ghost of Charleston: Mississippi School Holds First Interracial Prom

Can schools change communities? Is it their responsibility to do so?

One High School in Charleston, Mississippi may have begun to change the community by agreeing to hold their first ever interracial prom on school grounds as NPR reported on Thursday.

As it turned out, it was not due to the activism of the school's administrators that this historic event was able to take place. Rather, it took a Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman and actor Morgan Freeman to initiate the process.

Charleston High School was able to turn a blind eye to the issue of segregated proms by letting parents take over the organization of separate proms and hold them off school grounds. Many parents believed it was in line with "tradition" to have segregated proms.

So the tradition lived on until this year when filmmaker Saltzman heard about the issue. He found out that Morgan Freeman had offered to pay for an integrated prom at Charleston High School back in 1997 and that this offer was refused. Saltzman contacted Morgan Freeman this year and they both went to the school board and the senior class with an offer to pay for the event and capture it on film in a documentary Prom Night in Mississippi.

Salzman explains that some white parents could not get past history and did not allow their children to attend the integrated prom.

But the school has agreed to fund the integrated prom for next year so that it was the students that prevailed and made the integrated prom the new school "tradition". As student Chasidy Buckley proclaimed in a sound bite about the successful event:
"We proved ourselves wrong, we proved the community wrong because they didn't think this was going to happen."

In the end, it was the students, the school and the community working together that made this change possible. But could the school have played a larger role in being a catalyst for change? Is it not their responsibility as an institution to open the doors for change and leave the ghosts of the past behind?

Original article, Photos and Audio interviews

Community as Intellectual Space: Aesthetics as Resistance

The 4th Annual Community as Intellectual Space symposium is being held this week at Paseo Boricua in Chicago, June 13-15. Events will start at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC), 2739/41 W. Division (near corner of Division and California).

This year, the focus is on Aesthetics as Resistance: The Act of Community Building. There will be artist-led tours of the beautiful murals found throughout the neighborhood, the annual People's Parade, a delicious Puerto Rican dinner, workshops on community-education activities as diverse as urban agriculture and computer programming for children using Squeak, meetings with local Humboldt Park/Paseo Boricua community and government leaders, including Rep. Luis Gutierrez and Rep. Cynthia Soto, and panels on liberatory education. [Click to enlarge the poster or follow the link above for more details.]

Aesthetics as Resistance promises an active dialogue on art, identity, and cross-cultural community building with community leaders, artists, educators, librarians, activists, students, and residents. It expresses the PRCC's vision to build community grounded in cultural practice, including murals, poetry, music, and the People’s Parade. These practices are both creative and political acts to develop community out of local funds of knowledge.

Paseo Boricua has a motto: 'Live and help others to live.' It is known for its multigenerational and holistic community activism around human rights and social change. Education is structured around the belief that ‘the community is the curriculum,’ reflecting the ideas of Paulo Freire and providing a contemporary version of Hull House.

With its many academic partnerships, Paseo Boricua also provides an outstanding example of university-community collaboration in research, teaching and public engagement. For example, last year the community hosted a tour and visit for the John Dewey Society. This furthered dialogue around how the community answers Dewey's call for critical, socially-engaged citizens, for an active public, and for education as lived experience.

[Note: I also posted this on my own blog.]

Scholar-Teacher Dialogues On Social Issues: Some Thoughts from Harriet Cuffaro

Harriet Cuffaro writes:

The absence of teachers' voice is long standing in academic discussions and research projects. There's been improvement with the literature on narrative, teacher talk, etc. In part, how problems, questions, dilemmas are lived, faced daily in the classroom, is quite different from an "outsider's" more distant view or discussion.

Both in curriculum and Foundation courses I taught at Bank Street, we talked about Dewey, Progressive Education, democracy. At some point I would ask, "How would you live democracy in a classroom of three-year-olds?" "Five-year-olds?" "Nine-year-olds?" and on. Such questioning is not different from Dewey's definition of democracy or his statement about "democracy as a way of life." My aim was to move from words to action . . . to translating ideas into daily classroom life, mindful of age, culture, and children's experiences

She adds that as many potential authors of Social Issues have access to classroom life and work with teachers, they might invite a teacher to join in a post, making it into a scholar-teacher conversation. For example if an author's topic is technology how are his/her ideas lived as seen from a teacher's perspective, how do they translate, what insights may surface, etc.

Harriet invites further conversation about this idea.

Guidance for Writers from J.K. Rowling

Caroline Miller at Positive Psychology Digest provides an inspiring post on the Harvard commencement address of J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.

In addition to a link to a video of the address itself, a video which will certainly be endlessly viewed in the coming months, Miller provides a very useful summary.

Briefly, Rowling hit on the following themes:

1. Don’t be afraid of failure. Rowling described herself as an utter and complete failure as she set out to write the only thing she’d ever wanted to do – tell an engaging story about a young boy named Harry Potter. At that point, she was extremely poor, a single mother, and a disappointment to herself and her parents, who had not wanted her to experience the same poverty they’d experienced, as well. With nothing left but her authentic heart’s desire of writing, Rowling said that she went after her dreams with gusto because she’d already lost everything external, and there was nothing left to lose anymore.

2. Treasure your friends. Rowling implored the audience to tend to the friendships they’d made at school because she noted that these relationships were what sustained her.

3. Use your imagination to have empathy for others. This part of Rowling’s speech was the most powerful and memorable by far. In moving terms, she described her job at Amnesty International when she was in her twenties, and how she’d seen courage and compassion exhibited by the Amnesty International workers on numerous occasions. She asked everyone in attendance to use their intellectual talents to do more than accumulate money or possessions, and to instead imagine the pain and plight of those less fortunate to be generous with their time and energy.

Many academic authors long to have a wider audience for their thoughts, and an opportunity to make a real difference in life. We need to turn our souls from the very real but limited allure of academic recognition and start learning how to write for those wider audiences.

Making SOCIAL ISSUES a Useful Blog

Chris Garrett, a trustworthy source of blogging advice, offers very helpful tips about how to make a blog useful .

He notes that some readers will be regulars, while others will have come to the site through a link while searching for:

1. Specific information
2. A solution to a problem
3. News and commentary about current events
4. Ideas, concepts, tips, education
5. Further details of the information they have found
6. General information on the subject area

Keeping this in mind supplies us with a checklist of six types of useful posts.

Chris adds that to make the visitor happy, a blog post should:

1. Promise benefits in your titles and headlines and actually deliver on it.
2. Make your navigation suit the missions your readers are on.
3. On your homepage provide links for first time visitors who want to explore and long time visitors who read via the web and not RSS.
4. Individual articles should provide the content they promise, then provide links to more on the same subject.
5. Add clear signposts to all your best or most publication-defining "flagship" posts, while keeping your visitor on the scent of their hunt with series, related articles and category links.

The Delights and Dangers of Cookbook Education

I found a nice simple discussion of cook book teaching today at the Positive Psychogy News Daily blog.

Sherri Fisher writes:

I don’t know about you, but I get bored making, serving and eating the same old-same old. . . .I’d be the first to agree that cookbooks perform a vital function. Especially in an age when it is unlikely that children and grandchildren are in the kitchen soaking up the traditional family recipes, cookbooks allow people the ability to perform in a kitchen with a reasonable amount of self-confidence.

In education there are a number of cookbooks. They may be called “curriculum frameworks” or something similarly sturdy and substantial sounding. Some have actually been around for years despite being touted as the outcomes of education reform. They serve the same purpose as kitchen cookbooks (attempting to guarantee a consistent outcome) and as such are bound by the same limitations. However, in an education system which is under fire from many quarters, cookbook education can sometimes rightly be seen by administrators in charge of “making the numbers” as the most easily defensible program a system can take. A school of educational thought, based on educational theory, develops a highly structured program that is as close to”fool”proof as it can be made. The program is presented to teachers, who are then expected to present it to students. Voilà, education happens. That is supposedly the delight of cookbook education.

Rote cook booking is essential for the novice. One who cooks every day, though, gains the kind of confidence to deviate from the cookbook, to improve the recipe, to adapt the recipe to individual circumstances and ingredients. Ideally, this happens to teachers, too. In fact, the better a teacher is, the more likely it is that the recipe will be improved for the students in her or his classroom, naturally shaping it to the strengths of students by using a teacher’s own strengths.

Good teachers are often acutely aware of the drawbacks and limitations of the educational recipes they are given. When educational systems insist on cookbook education, they may alienate their most creative teachers, their most experienced teachers, their most effective teachers.

One area of promise from positive psychology research in the field of education that addresses this is collective efficacy, the belief of a faculty that as a group they can execute the positive courses of action required to successfully educate students (Goddard, et al., 2004).

Collective efficacy represents a level of confidence in the ability of a group to reach a shared goal. It influences common expectations for action, supports creative problem-solving, and results in resilient goal attainment by influencing the effort and persistence necessary for academic achievement. No cookbook needed!! Perceived collective efficacy facilitates collaboration and the willingness to accept challenges to teaching in the face of difficulty (Goddard, et al., 2004).

Goddard, R.D., LoGerfo, L. & Hoy, W.K. (2004). High school accountability: The role of perceived collective efficacy. Educational Policy, 18(3) 403-425.

Robert F. Kennedy, 1925-1968

I'm sure that many of us, especially in the United States, are today thinking of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated forty years ago.

I am a bit too young to have lived through the very-public event of his death, as well as that of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of John F. Kennedy. However, growing up in a moderately-progressive Democratic Catholic family, the Kennedys in particular were a prominent part of my childhood political mythology.

I'd like to pose a couple of specific questions, and especially invite those who did experience this period, to share their wisdom.

1) While I grew up in the first post-Vietnam generation, these deaths and that war were still very present and raw in the minds of my mom, of my teachers, and most of the adults around me when I was a kid. Now that the second post-Vietnam generation is in college--what is the experience of teaching these events to them like? Is it just old, dusty history? Interesting in an old, antiquarian way like the death of Lincoln would be? Though this particular topic hasn't come up in the social foundations class for which I served as a TA, I feel that the civil rights struggles of the 60's had that same antiquarian feel for my students.

2) There are still many people who are not convinced by the official stories of the three shootings. Plenty of others are happy to call that group "conspiracy theorists," and group them together with alien abductees. Historians-as-public-intellectuals have a role in communicating to the public their best understanding of what-happened. Philosophers-as-public-intellectuals perhaps have a role in helping individuals recognize and respond to doubts they have in the face of official explanations of public events, and fashion an appropriate path of inquiry to respond to those doubts. I would submit that the philosopher has that responsibility to the doubter, whatever their own stance regarding the event in question.

3) The most troubling question concerns the present. There's a small, but not insignificant, fear that the hope and charisma of a contemporary young progressive Democrat will end with the same fate. Will teaching the events of the 60s lead to greater fear, and to a cynicism that "all the good ones get shot," so it's not worth trying to change the system?

Blogging in a Silo

Susan Gunelius asks this key question: are yoiu blogging in a silo? She writes:

There is a term used in business and marketing called the “silo effect” which refers to a lack of communication or coordination between business units and/or marketing efforts. Instead of working together, each team focuses solely on their own goals with little regard to everyone else’s efforts. It occured to me this week that bloggers should ask themselves whether or not they’re guilty of the silo effect on their blogs.

There are many blogs expressing progressive viewpoints on social and cultural issues. Many individual academics and scholarly socieites have blogs or newsletters. The question is: how effectively are they cooperating to get their ideas in circulation beyond the academy -- or in some cases, beyond their authors' field of vision?

Most scholarly socieities do not have an "engaged scholar" mission written into their mission statements. The Dewey society does. For this reason it can be a useful partner for engaged scholars and engaged members of scholarly societies.

After reflecting on the report about the March workshop at AERA Barbara Stengel writes:

I'm wondering about generating/investigating a network of "Deweyan" blogs, i.e. blogs that already exist out there that would "sign on" to the set of principles or whatever gets developed. Then put the JDS logo on the blog and put the links to other Deweyan blogs there as well. This might help folks find similar sorts of analyses of other issues and create a sense of community in the bargain. (If we looked for blogs with a Deweyan tone, we might even be able to recruit new members who didnt' know about the society . . . So add this to the list of possibilities.

So the task is for SI to stop blogging in a silo.

Please comment on any individual or organizational blogs or newletters with which we can partner in this way.