In the last month or so, the Kairosnews team has seen a substantial increase in the number of members posting blogs to the site. Over the years, the Kairosnews staff members have done most of the blog posting themselves. However, Kairosnews was first established with the idea that it would become a Slashdot style site--our goal has always been to assist a large community of people writing about rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. We want to encourage all of our members to share their views. All teachers, academics, graduate students, and enthusiasts interested in these areas, feel welcome to share your thoughts, announcements, and links to useful resources around the web on Kairosnews. We value your participation. Please help us make Kairosnews an even more valuable resource for our field.
If you have any questions about how to participate, please contact us.
The Kairosnews Staff
By Comment, Post, or Email
I am thankful to Charlie for making this announcement. I can remember when I was first approached by James Inman to be part of the Kairosnews team, and then talking to Charlie about it for the first time. I had heard of "blogs" but didn't know much about them, and Charlie and Clancy were very gentle and encouraged me as I embarked on my quest to become part of the team. My active participation on Kairosnews has allowed me to meet a great many cool people who have helped me, again and again, when I needed it and when I least expected it!
My advice to "newbies" would be to see Kairosnews not so much as a "technological" tool than as a "social networking" tool. Knews is not about technology, but people interested in technology and eager to talk about it with other people (and thus view the issues that matter to them from different perspectives).
Ideally, we'd be getting anywhere from 10 to 50 comments on each post on this board. Making comments are what distinguishes a "passive" member of Kairosnews from an active one. They make the site more exciting and useful for everyone because we all profit from multiple perspectives and additional insight. Comments also encourage your colleagues to make more posts, since they have hard evidence that people are reading and thinking about their posts. I would encourage everyone to try making comments to posts. Don't be intimidated! No one is going to "flame" you or insult what you have to say. Let me also add that you don't have to make a very long comment for it to "count." A few sentences, or even a single question, are often enough to stimulate a rich, illuminating discussion.
Let's all work together to make Kairosnews even better than it is today. Let's get active. Let's get critical. Let's get kairotic.
Thanks to everyone,
Matt
Time
What time is required? How long are you part of the koironews team?
And how much time you spend on this kind of hobby?
Time
I've been part of the Kairosnews team for 3 years, 23 weeks. :-) I'd say I probably spend about 30 mins to an hour on Kairosnews a day, depending on how busy I am otherwise.
Participation doesn't need to take long. It could be as little or as much as you want. We're not sitting around with time clocks or anything like that.
kairosnews editors
As Matt has said, as Kairosnews editors, we visit the site daily (for instance, to monitor for spam postings) and generally do a good bit of posting. But everyone else that posts here does so at their convenience.