The journals should consider for publication articles that have previously appeared on the Web, either on blogs or Web sites.

That would allow the journals to keep doing what they do well. It would bring worthwhile materials to a broader or at least different audience. It would encourage the authors to revise their posts towards a more permanent audience. It would require no additional volunteers.

Is this too simple and straightforward to pass muster?

For reasons that elude me, NCTM’s blogs haven’t found a great deal of traction.

Group blogs, as a rule, don’t work on today’s internet. The web we currently have, it seems to me, is designed for following people, not publications. Group twitter accounts have a rough time too.

As long as I’m here, let me chime in to say that I agree with Tracy: blog posts don’t usually easily travel to print. I’m not even sure how I’d feel about a blog-digest column in print. I think hyperlinks are an important part of reading the sort of blog-digests that we at GMD write. I have a hard time imagining a similar blog digest in print, though maybe that’s just saying something about my imagination.

To answer the bigger question — what do blogs provide that the NCTM journals don’t? — it’s easy to focus on the medium, rather than the content. But I think the main lessons from the world of blogs is about the type of reading and writing that teachers are (can be?) interested in. Here are some claims, for consideration and debate:

1. Personality matters. Part of the joy of following a blog is watching a single individual’s ideas and teaching change over time. We learn to develop a taste for certain writers, a distaste for others. That’s good. I think it would be a good thing to give individuals columns in the NCTM journals.

2. Curriculum-sharing matters. So many blog posts are little more than a narrative description of how a lesson went, along with links to the lesson resources. The NCTM journals are doing that, and should continue to do that.

3. There is an audience for a wide variety of writing about teaching math. A list of wildly popular blog posts would include commentary, classroom anecdotes, policy opinions, lesson ideas, classroom management moves, etc. I think the NCTM journals would be a more vibrant place if they published a wider variety of content.

4. When readers react in writing to people’s ideas it is a healthy sign for a community and engaging to read and write. For example: these comments! I would love to see NCTM journals publish pieces that are debatable, and then invite people to write and publish responses, either in paper or online.

In sum: teachers will read a wide variety of material from writers they have a relationship with, and that relationship can be entirely a reader/writer relationship.

As an aside, I would love if the submission process was more like pitching a piece to an editor. I’d love to get in touch with an editor, pitch an idea for a piece, offer a drafty sample, get feedback, and then resubmit the piece for editorial consideration. I shouldn’t have to write a full piece before getting in touch with editors about it, I feel.

A few years ago, after posting something on my blog, I was contacted by the editor of the Mathematics Teacher who asked me to expand it for publication as a SoundOff. It was not hard to do: I lengthened it and added figures, and it was published.

This year, I thought I would adapt something from my Web site for SoundOff. I expanded it a little, and submitted it. The response was that this was *exactly* the sort of thing they were looking for, in both form and content, but they could not use it, because it was too close to the original, which was freely available on the Web.

To me this says that in at least some cases, (the ones our Best of the Blogs editor would pick,) the transition is absolutely possible. In my first experience, the massaging was successful. In my second experience, the ONLY objection given was that most of it had appeared on the Web, which of course would not be an issue.

Wow! This is a treasure trove of information. I will certainly pass this along to the Editorial Panels as something to be considered.

I was wondering if a polished-up version might work? Given that people are already curating some of the best of the math blog world?

Remind me please, what is “GMD.”

Also, explain what you mean by the journals giving GMD a column.