Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Math Blogger Initiation: May I help you?

Sam Shah is providing an amazing community service. He's offered to help new bloggers get started with a 4-week-long initiation: each week the new blogger gets a prompt to write about, and gets featured on the blog of a more established blogger. I have the honor of being one of the volunteer "established bloggers".

Sam expected maybe 20 or 30 participants. He got almost 200. There are about ten volunteers, so we'll each get almost 20 new bloggers to feature.

I wanted to offer something else. I know I needed lots of hand-holding when I was starting up my blog. I'm not sure I could have done it without Kate's help. Sam will be away this week, so I'm adding my own layer here. If you're one of the group of 200, and have questions, comment on this post. I'll take on the first 5 people with questions. You can email me at mathanthologyeditor on gmail after being one of the first 5 to comment here.

To all of you, have fun!

4 comments:

  1. Hi - I have been reading your blog for awhile but not commenting. My goal is to start commenting a lot more, in addition to my new blog. My biggest current question, especially after today, is how do you know what to post/not post, taking into account confidentiality and privacy concerns?

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  2. Hi MPA. You can email me if you want to discuss the stuff that possibly should be kept private.

    I asked the boy I tutor whether I could post about him, and changed his name. I would always use pseudonyms for minors, and probably even for adult students.

    I would probably never tell bad stuff about colleagues.

    If students have told you about difficult things in their lives, that probably doesn't belong on a blog, but I'm not sure. It sure does help take the weight off to have others to discuss stuff like that with, though - email might make sense for that sort of thing.

    I don't know if what I'm throwing out is at all useful... I hope it is.

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  3. Yes, that is helpful - thanks for sharing your perspectives. So far I am going with "anonymous" on my blog but I am not sure if that will change going forward. I do have a public presence online in a different "blogosphere" and I am not sure if I want to risk linking them.

    So for now I am trying to be very conscious of that when posting... this is the hard part!

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  4. I'd assume that you won't be able to maintain anonymity. That will make it easier to make decisions that can't harm anyone when your situation changes.

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