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ITForum: Alternatives to the Walled Garden listserv?

By Jennifer Maddrell - Posted on 09 February 2008

George Siemens facilitated a nice review of his paper - Teaching and Learning in Knowledge Networks - in the ITForum this week. The "conversation" was good and nicely moderated. Unfortunately, I can't link to any of the conversations as they are held on an e-mail listserv and the conversation history can't be viewed by those not going through the (free) registration process on the listserv. Also, it is quite a pain to follow a forked e-mail discussion (various replies to replies). As a newbie to the ITForum, I suppose I shouldn't criticize as I start, but it sure seems the days of using a listserv to facilitate global discussions are past. The ITForum listserv has over 2,200 subscribers and there were some great thoughts and links that I would love to collect and share here, but it isn't possible to "link" to an e-mail. Further, the discussion policies state that:
"All discussion statements are considered the property of the member and may not be posted on the web elsewhere without their permission."

Here are a few links I pulled out, but they are so removed from the context of the discussion ... (sigh)

Social Network Theory - http://www.istheory.yorku.ca/socialnetworktheory.htm
Federated Social Networks (FSN) - http://www.mediamatic.net/set-26902-en.html
Social Graph: Concepts and Issues - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_graph_concepts_and_issues.php

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Comments

Tue, 03/25/2008 - 7:11am — nickie (not verified)

Comments ....

Here is the full policy of ITFORUM

This is ITFORUM's policy, written by the list moderator for the past couple of years Bev Ferrell ("Phoenixziaco"): Quote from September 7, 2007 post: 1. No content from ITForum may be Rssd or posted elsewhere unless the content permission is obtained from the original poster on ITForum. 2. NO EMAIL addresses of ITForum members are included in the posting. 3. Copies of content that is posted elsewhere must have the permission from the original poster emailed/ccd to the moderator of ITForum before posting the content. 4. ITForum may be mentioned by name, but no email addresses or ITForum URLs are to be included to avoid spam robots. --- This policy is not even legal. Multiple people objected, and her only revisions were to make the policy even more strict. I recommend K-12 educators use H-EDTECH instead of ITFORUM. Completely open archives have been here for over 15 years with no problems: http://www.h-net.org/~edweb/http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.edtech/topics?hl=en&lnk=sg There's also a teaching and learn online (talo) group here: http://groups.google.com/group/teachAndLearnOnline/topics?hl=en
Sat, 02/09/2008 - 11:47am — George Siemens (not verified)

Openness...

Hi Jennifer - I agree with you - information/discussions of this nature benefit from being open. It's valuable (in extending the conversation) to allow direct linking to the forum or individual posts. For what it's worth, if you would like to comment/critique any of my submissions to the forum, feel free to post them at length in your blog or other correspondence. Take care George
Sat, 02/09/2008 - 5:38pm — Jennifer Maddrell

Thanks, George!

Great topic this week ... even if 99.99% of the universe won't see it :)

Jennifer Maddrell

The current ITForums policy
Submitted by Stephen Downes (not verified) on Fri, 04/11/2008 - 2:24pm.
The current ITForums policy came into place roughly 3 years ago when I started syndicating the list of posts as an RSS feed. Bev Ferrell instituted the policy without consulting members, and as mentioned, made it even stricter, blocking unregistered access to the forums.

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