One of Seth Godin’s recent blog posts (The Reality of Digital Content – lose the cookie, lose the fortune) has been reverberating in my mind over the past week.
What happens when the people with great ideas start organizing for themselves, start leading online tribes, start creating micro products and seminars and interactions that people are actually willing to pay for? …
I have the challenge of working on the Editorial Panel for an academic journal — while I enjoy the reading and editing of articles and the community of professionals that surround the journal, I’ve found the process of acceptance, publication, distribution and commentary to be out of date. My greatest fear is that, as Godin mentions, the journal will be rendered irrelevant in an environment of PLNs (through blogs, twitter, nings, webinars, etc) developed spontaneously by teachers who see a need, share ideas and engage in deep discussion of pedagogy, content and technology. But, in order to remain tight control over their content, they are reluctant to open their journal fully to the web and the chance to allow their readership to contribute without the organization’s filter. Hopefully time and new members of the Editorial Panel arriving in June will help to encourage them to take a great leap forward.
