Sunday, April 05, 2009

I want to retire; here's an offer for you

I'd like to retire from working on this blog and on its associated Educators' Resources website, http://ibritt.com/resources. Having left teaching over a year ago, I find that my focus has shifted away from the world of online education, so it's time.

I don't want to "sell" this site. It's been a non-profit, non-advertising site since day one. I've kept it up just as a service to my global colleagues in education.

Yet, if I just leave it sit here, it's going to get "stale" fairly soon.

I could take the whole site down and delete this blog, but I'd hate for my loyal readers (about 9,000 unique visitors each month!) to lose all this resource material.

So here's what I propose:

- If you're an online educator who doesn't yet have a blog, perhaps you'd like to take this one over? It's at blogger.com, so I could just give you the login and the transition would be simple.

- If you do already have a blog or resource site of education links, perhaps you'd be interested in having a copy of the pages in my site (ibritt.com/resources). You could then add my pages to your site, or just mine the pages for links to add to your own pages. Each of these would be easier if you had my files. That Resources site is a bit old-fashioned looking, having been designed when I first learned HTML 10 years ago. However, since then I've applied CSS to format it, so it would be fairly simple to restyle the pages for your own website if you're using CSS.

- If you don't have a website yet and would like to take over the pages in order to start one, we can talk about ways you could do that using my existing site pages.

- I could do a combination of the above -- give the blog to one person and the pages to another.

I don't want payment. I just want these resources to live on after I remove them from my personal ibritt.com website.

I won't give my materials to just anybody. To qualify:
- You must be involved in the field of online education.
- You must enjoy reading and collecting good information for other online educators.
- You must not use my materials for profit or in conjunction with advertising or marketing of any kind. I stand by my sole reason for creating these sites: being helpful to fellow educators. (So all you software and system marketers, don't even bother writing to me.)

To discuss further:
Write to me using the "comment" form at the end of this blog post. Comments are set to be moderated, meaning I'll get your comment in my email rather than it being posted online. Tell me about yourself and your involvement in online education. If you have an existing blog and/or website, include the link to it. I'll take some time to review everything I receive, and then I'll get back to each of you.


**NOTE TO MY READERS: After somebody takes over the pages from my site, I'll post a referral URL for a few months so that people can find where the resources have gone.

1 comment:

Sylvia Currie said...

Hi Kate,
What an interesting idea to have your blog up for grabs! I've been thinking that this would be a great resource and activity for the BC Educational Technology Users Group. We could have designated blog editors and have volunteers cycle through that role. Our editors would be featured in the community, monthly newsletter. The blog would also be an excellent contribution to the Learn Together Collaboratory, a new site to support excellence in teaching in BC and beyond. http://www.ltcollaboratory.org/

Right now there are 1,100 ETUG members from BC post secondary, k-12, and some international.

I imagine you've received many, many comments so far! I'll be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to read about your decision!

Sylvia

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