Managing at last to get something working. Have completed slide 1 from the planning documentation with the introduction instructions. Essentially a series of seven slides with a go to and stop action.
When we started our Edspaces blogs for the puposes of researching on line communities this semester I did not expect that we might witness the full lifecyle of a community, and be present at it’s ending. It came close to that last week.
The next stage of the community seems to be a need to clarify and re- define its aims and purpose, and to separate those out from the aims and purposes of the software developers. In this area it seems to me as a late comer to this maturing community, that this is a good thing as there are obviously conflicting needs here.
Although there seems from my reading to be a historical link between early adopters and poineers of elgg with the uk HE sector, this link is now secondary to the wordwide scope of the eduspaces community. This is reflected in the move of Eduspaces to another organisation with a global remit.
So what about me and my humble blog. Well its primarily a personal resource for reflective writing, but is also evidence for formal coursework submission. Moving to eduspaces from my blog in Blogger afforded me the chance to write and reflect taking in to context other writers on similar issues. I think this brings a richness to what I can say, and provides a fantanstic research resource. This is infinately preferable to blogging alone in the dark. So as a matter of preference for the duration of my studies and potentially beyond I would like to remain blogging in eduspaces. Yes I could still do this from an external blog, but it increased the sense of belonging to be all writing in the same room as it were.
However there is a but and a large one. The recent debacle regarding threatened closure, and the inadequate, tech support, communication from the developers, and backup facilities within the eduspaces elgg community, threaten my ability to rely on this platform for my studies. I could not concieve of the anxiety level had all my thesis work been conducted here at the time of the closure announcenmet for example. The community is now in transition and “issues” are not going to be resolved for some time.
This issue would not be solved by my university setting up an install of Elgg as the wider community would be lacking and there would be no gain for me personally.
I have found that Eudblogs offers far better support resources and backup facilities, which would make any further moves easy and painless to achieve.
Therefore my primay blog will have to be here in Edublogs until such time as Eduspaces comes out of transition and offers the same levels of security and reliability. This is a lose for me in the short term as I will have to post in two places. Automating a feed into eduspaces is not working currently. I want to continue to follow the debate in Edusapces and enter it where I have something to say as I did over the crisis week. I want to see the community survive intact, thrive and find its new direction without loosing many of the experienced voices from whom I have so much to learn.
and a bloging new year
Hi this is a test for feeding eduspaces from the digital lifeboat at edublogs!!!
No sign of this working at the moment but I guess things could be amiss at eduspaces end.
Cheers Happy Christmas everyone. Hope the storm ends soon!
I did not expect when I set this blog up as a test to see if it could be seen within the firewall at school that I might need it as a refuge after the closure of Eduspaces!
So having created two previous blogs now experimenting with word press in here. I am kind of nervous about committing much to another free site after we were left in the lurch. I think that I may well look to host my own but thought I might as well get familiar with wordpress seeing as I had this account in the wings.
One benfit of this event is that I have now managed to integrate the two blogs into one in here.
I have learned that one should never blog at a site with no easy import export systems. Thankfullly edublogs does have these facilities. So the first thing I will do now I have edited and re formatted where necessary is to download a backup of the whole thing.
