*Note: I'm not currently accepting freelance gigs--building Purpose Portfolio has me pretty much at capacity :) Thanks for your interest, and feel free to drop me a line if I can help find the right designer for your project. `sj
As the responses have continued to trickle in, the magnitute of what these sneaky buggers tapped in to has begun to crystalize. Granted, as far as I know, no actual money was exchanged in this fiasco, but they effectively "sold" their product using my reputation.
At some point in the past 4 days, Kate suggested pedicures. I didn't remember the date or time. Nor did I remember responding. I checked my inboxes: gmail, facebook and text messages...nope. I checked my RSS feed-reader, chat archives, skype log, twitter updates...nope. I searched my facebook wall, my blog dashboards, my inbox [again.] Nothing. Then I started to feel a little crazy. Were we actually speaking face to face? I would have sworn I'd seen it written. What color was it? What typeface? Have I started "typing" verbal conversations in my head?
I never did find it. Ended up, after a disproportionately long mental debate about what medium to use, sending her an email...and really wondering about the quantity/quality balance of my own "connectedness."
"So, SaraJoy, you've just completed your first major edit to a Wikipedia article. How do you feel?"
At some point, I am forced to admit that some really smart people believed this stuff; and that these ideas contributed to critical advances in the field; and that someday in the not-too-distant future, students will read about my theories and wonder how any sentient being could have convinced themselves the world worked that way.
We feel vulnerable exposing the deeper reasons for our opinions/desires/edicts, but choosing to do so anyway creates space, loosens things up, allows creativity to wiggle into the loopholes and create compromise and even mutual benefit in situations that otherwise might end up in "impasse."
The pies de resistance of collaborative authorship in the online world today is, of course, Wikipedia. And navigating the process of contribution is a truly elegant learning envronment
Not only are your traditional, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal "articles" surprisingly difficult to track down online, they tend to be significantly longer, denser, boring-er, and [forgive me] uglier than the myriad alternatives egalitarian electronic self-publishing has wrought.
The following are a few examples [untainted by any sort of experience with the subject matter, and irrespective of what is currently regarded as possible] of metrics I would find useful for gauging and improving the effectiveness of an instructional website:
This blog had its 1000th visit today. [no, my clicks don't count, though I haven't figured out how to subtract my mother's :)] Fun stuff. Just felt like celebrating a little--especially since the next order of magnitude milestone is likely to be a while coming.
In the end, it turns out that McKensie and almost exactly split the difference between the next best case for each of us. Perfect solution, right? Best of both worlds for both of us, right? So, why am I still trying to convince myself?
