Live elearning

As part of my new year quest to keep my inbox under control, I have decided that if I have my morning tea in my office, I may as well read and filter through the many email or rss subscriptions I have. Many older updates have been deleted, and I’m now working through some more recent email newsletters.

One article which caught my eye was Hey Dude – where’s my (community) Data? from Graham Atwell (via Stephen Downes). It discusses the issues around keeping ‘Stuff’ online, and the various conditions under which many online services are provided free of charge, prompted by the decision of the developers of Elgg to stop providing the hosted service at Eduspaces. It raises issues about access to your own data, finding new solutions where it has been integral to the delivery of a course (old-fangled language I know), and also how data may be extricated and used elsewhere.

Last week in setting up this blog I thought about using Blogger or Edublogs to host it. Partly this thought arose from the notion that I should be modelling practices that our staff can take on board. Instead I loaded up a new version of WordPress onto the server and domain our household maintains, and was up and running quickly. It gives me the freedom to tweak and mod to my heart’s desire (or not, as the case may be. WordPress is rather brilliant straight out of the box). After this morning’s read, it also confirms a sense of control over the information I choose to put there.

And I will still keep using services like Flickr, because there are some beautiful advantages in an altruistic way. The more I load up there, the more in the creative commons pool for people like our staff to use in the their work. In this case, using a hosted service makes sense to me.

What implications does this have for our staff and students and their employers?

I don’t think it means we should only use those services provided in house – that would not meet the diverse needs of our groups at present.

I think it means we should ensure we know under what sort of conditions web-based services are provided and also, most importantly, ensure that we can fairly easily back up or extract our data if it no longer meets our needs, or ceases to exist. There are too many advantages of being part of larger, wider groups and accessing wonderful, new and emerging services to close the gates.

I think it means we should also actively support those services provided free of cost through feeding back to the user communities and such like.

I also think it means when a service is fantastic, and we can host it for ourselves without losing anything, and potentially gaining others (eg username/ password integration with other systems), we should actively pursue that with our tech support areas. Off to email them about the wiki they were testing last year. Apparently it was going into production/ live at the end of November. I think a month’s grace is reasonable…

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