XplanaZine

(Editor’s Note — We normally run our He Said She Said feature on Tuesdays and Thursdays but, due to logistical issues, those posts will be delayed until the end of this week. Sorry for any inconvenience.)

My wife has a few fond memories, at least, of growing up in Lawton, Oklahoma. Many of those memories are of a beautiful park where she played nd swam as a girl, a place called Doe Doe Park.

To hear her tell it, Doe Doe was about as perfect and Disney touts itself as being. There was a pool, an incredible skating rink, a bath house and fairy-land picnic grounds (you can check out some of pictures here). According to retired postmaster Kinley McClure, “When Doe Doe Park opened in August 1945, the cool, clear waters in its huge pool seemed like an oasis to war-weary Lawtonians. The ‘wonderful water’ in the pool ‘was always clean. It was bubbling up all the time, fresh water coming up underground.’

But Doe Doe park eventually went the way of the Do Do bird. The park closed for good in the 90’s and has since been covered by trailer houses and other assorted urban waste. Most agree that the cause of the park’s demise was its inability to evolve and change. It opened as a “whites-only” establishment and held firm to that moral (or immoral) stance until the day it closed. Not even the civil rights demonstrations of the 60’s and ongoing protests of the 70’s could sway the owners to make the park membership inclusive. In the end, an evolving society won out and the park was forced to close its doors for good.

At least one of the morals of this story is about change and evolution. You have to know when it’s time to get along and leave old notions behind. We’ve been thinking along those lines at XplanaZine and realize that a couple of our features are outdated and need change.

When we established the zine a couple of years ago, it seemed like a good idea to start a “FutureMeter” that would predict certain trends in education and then track developments against those solutions. We’ve done that for a couple of years and our predictions have pretty much held true. Online learning is hear to stay, digital content is making a strong move against traditional textbooks, and open source LMS platforms are taking a bite our of commercial LMS profits. But the problems with predictions is that they don’t always capture the most important news. While we looked at some of those trends, the Web 2.0 and all of its ancillary content production tools came riding over the horizon. And, we’ve found that people have really responded to our monthly link archives but don’t pay any attention to the other stuff anyway.

So, beginning in September, the FutureMeter will go the way of Doe Doe Park and in its place we’ll feature a page called, simply, Monthly Research . We’ll change out the categories a bit to reflect the real issues, but we’ll remain committed to providing a current and historical archive of the educational technology news and research that shapes our work.

We’ve also received a bit of feedback on our Daily Tribute piece we run each weekday, and in which we list blog posts that we find important. Readers suggested a different title and a softening of the word “significant” when describing the posts. As one blogger pointed out, we only know for sure that the posts are significant after the fact, after they have generated a long tail of discussion. So we’ve changed that feature as well. The Daily Tribute will now be called XplanaZine Favorites and we will refer to the posts listed as our favorites.

In many ways, these changes are not that significant. But I like to think they show a sensitivity to the community they are intended to serve. XplanaZine and all of its features, including Lone Star Learning, are designed to contribute something positive. In order to keep doing that, we have to evolve along with our society.

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