Yahoo is sending out alerts on the transformation of Yahoo Groups into a list server. The spin is ridiculous. The changes “better align with user habits,” and “we are making adjustments to ultimately serve you better.” It’s as if users had been protesting against the existence of public groups and Web-hosted discussions and Yahoo were complying with the demand.
Yahoo, in case you haven’t been keeping track (I hadn’t), now belongs to Verizon. It makes economic decisions, and one was that running public Yahoo Groups was no longer worth the cost and effort. This is the result of changing user preferences, as well as stupid policy decisions over the years that drove people away. The attempts to correct those blunders may be part of the current problem.
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Helping a nation of homeschoolers: Digital preservation
We’ve abruptly become a nation of homeschoolers. People are figuring out how to do it with no preparation. They have to face a lot of issues, most of which I’m not helpful with. One of them is finding good material on the Internet. There’s no lack of well-written, informative pages; the hard part is sorting them out from all the garbage. Many of us can help in our fields of expertise by providing pointers to the best material.
On Twitter I saw a call for “expert sniffers,” people who can find the experts. We can do that where we’re specialists if not experts. We need to find articles that are good from an educational standpoint. Presenting all the knowledge isn’t enough; the hard part is presenting it in a way that learners can understand.
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