The sorry eduspaces saga rolls on
Friday, February 8th, 2008The eduspaces closure (or not) saga rolls on. To bring new readers up to speed, just before Christmas Curverider, the comany behind the popular elgg open source software, announced the closure of eduspaces, which describes itself as the “the world’s largest social networking site dedicated to education and educational technology.”
After several days rather fraught debate in the edublogosphere, Curverider rescinded the closure notice, saying that TakingITGlobal, a Canadian not for profit trust, would take over the service. Sighs of relief all round, albeit with some concerns over the lack of transparency regarding the transfer. And for a time all looked good with TakingITGlobal indicating their desire to establish an advisory board to help them run eduspaces. But, come January, things went quiet again. Then this week a new announcement appeared on the front page of the eduspaces site.
“As announced earlier TakingIT Global will continue hosting the eduspaces.net community. Please login to get redirected to a page where you can indicate if you would like to have your eduspaces.net account transferred to a new home on educatorcentral.org. This option will remain available until February 27th 2008.”
This has raised new doubts. As Josie Fraser says on the site forum:
“…it’s currently not possible to be logged on to the site and not select an option before carrying out any other activity – including referring back to this post to ask for further information. I’ve asked to be migrated across but I would have liked to be able to have given informed consent and understood what this means a little better. The transfer notice refers to another URL – does this mean that all existing links on site will be broken (again)? What happens to links between friends on this site who don’t opt in to joining the, in effect, new community? Was it not possible to come to an arrangement regarding the Eduspaces URL?”
Besides the issue of the domain name change, there now is some doubt over the future platform. Most of us had assumed the eduspaces would continue to be hosted on the elgg Open Source platform. But TakingITGlobal has previously used a proprietary platform for its networking activities. The lack of any communication must lead to speculation that they will in fact not use elgg but will transfer accounts to their own platform. And the educatorcentral domain name referred to in the transfer notice is not yet active. In effect edusapces is being shut down with TakingITGlobal offering a new service for those who previously were part of eduspaces.
So the sorry saga rolls on. As Terry says: “the community is the people, not the technology”. But it seems increasingly clear that eduspaces will no longer be a key part of that community.
