Special Education Today Newsletter, 1(1)

The first issue of the venerable newsletter in its new form

Welcome, dear readers, to the first issue of the first year of the newsletter for Special Education Today. Yes, that is correct. We are starting over with volume 1, number 1.

As explained in the SpedTalk newsletters, there were potential problems with using the name "spedtalk." The main issue was that someone else trademarked that name a couple of years ago, and that trademark would make my use of it inappropriate—despite my history of having used the name beginning in the 1990s and having owned the domain name since the late '90s or early '00s.

Therefore, I am relaunching as Special Education Today. I've had this domain name since the early '00s, as well, and have a more recent record of having used it than with spedtalk. What is more, two colleagues and I published a physical newsletter under the name "Special Education Today" during the 1980s. Readers interested in the background can find it in the post, "SET & Spedtalk," mentioned in the current contents.

Subscribers

Special Education Today has essentially zero subscribers as of this writing. I am working on porting over the SpedTalk subscriptions to the new newsletter mailing list. Readers are welcome to subscribe directly using the "subscribe" button.

Current Contents

I spent a lot of cycles on administrative work this week, so the content is a bit thinner than I would like it to be. Still, readers can find articles about various topics in the magazine. Here they are in chronological order (FIFO):

• SET & spedtalk? What's up with that?

• Editorial: What news is news? Disabilities, special ed, and related terms appear often in the news. I ponder what counts as "news."

Earlier Contents

I've enquired of Substack about porting the content from SpedTalk into the posts for SET. If I can do so readily and preserve the old publication order, I hope to do so this coming week or next. Meanwhile, I do not plan to delete the old site (at least, not in the near future), so readers can still find the content there.

Technical Matters

At present, SET uses its Substack URL, http://specialeducationtoday.substack.com. I have initiated requests to make the domain name, http://specialeducationtoday.com or http://www.specialeducationtoday.com point to the site. This action (sorta-kinda) requires (a) changing records in the domain name server (DNS) system, an interenational Web of servers that translate names to Internet Protocol addresses (it takes a while for the changes to be adopted by all the servers in the huge number of DNS machines) and (b) Substack adding lines to its servers’ configuration so that those Substack servers know where to find the content associated with the domain name.

I hope that the name change will propogate through the DNS system in the next couple of days (i.e., by Wednesday, 23 June 2021) and that Substack’s changes will be complete in a like amount of time. But, you can subscribe and share the current info, resting assured that subscribed addresses will be notified regardless of the technical twists and turns.

Meanwhile, thanks for reading, please do join and share, and remember to teach your children well!