Rising Out of Beta Mode!

Those proud and few readers who knew about MBE from its outset also know that you've been guinea pigs in an extremely small-scale experiment—one that I told few people about and pondered setting aside.

By now I've received sufficient positive feedback, while enjoying myself enough, that today I took the plunge of sending the email below to a few hundred people in my email address book. Thus this experiment moves to a more visible form with firmer ambitions to continue for a while.

The journal I studied in my first book—referenced here—loved to recycle a sentence similar to this: “we do not promise or threaten to go on forever, but will endeavor to continue for as long as it seems useful.” That seems like a good motto to recycle again today. Here's the announcement in case I want a URL for it later.

Dear friends and colleagues,

Last summer, during a media workshop I was required to attend, I had to choose between setting up a new Twitter account or a new WordPress blog. I chose the blog, then proceeded to tell almost no one about it because it truly was experimental in the strongest sense.

If I had a Facebook presence, many of you probably would have read some of my subsequent posts. I did share a few of them with a few of you, so perhaps some of them made it into Facebook’s notorious databank.

But I am not on Facebook-- and more pointedly I understand the time I spend on the blog to be in zero-sum conflict with time I might otherwise spend with Twitter and Facebook.

I freely admit that this makes my blog parasitic on my friends’ Facebook and Twitter accounts, at least if its success is premised on anything I write circulating very far. But I see no remedy for this situation. I do hope some of you might follow this blog and repost some of the work as it seems worthwhile to you. But I'm trying not to enter this promotional war of all against all directly.

In any case, I did want you to know (since I can’t do this via Facebook) that MBE, Mark’s Blogging Experiment, is a thing now—moving out of a more experimental mode—and invite you to take a look at it. Here is the front page

The Academe blog recently reposted three pieces I wrote about “assessment regimes” and the politics of academia. If you are thinking today about the teachers’ strikes in the US and UK, or about my school’s (perhaps yours too?) attacks on tenure, you might like to click on these posts. Here is the first one.

If you want to read more about this experiment, this is a good place to start.

I wish I could write personalized notes to each of you! Since I can’t, I will just send blanket good wishes and promise to reply personally if you respond. Also, once more I underline the word “experiment.” Although I’ve enjoyed working on this project, it may or may not not make sense to continue in the long run unless they picks up wider collective momentum than it has had so far in “beta mode.” I am interested in hearing your feedback about that ongoing question.

All best wishes,

Mark