(2018-08-10) Caulfield A Provocation For The Open Pedagogy Community

Mike Caulfield: A Provocation for the Open Pedagogy Community. Dave Winer has a great post today on the closing of blogs.harvard.edu. These are sites run by Berkman, some dating back to 2003, which are being shut down.

My galaxy brain goes towards the idea of federation. (federated wiki)

we need a web that makes as many copies of things as the print world did

All my former university hosted sites are gone.

All my self-hosted sites are corrupted from hacks or transfer errors in imports.

The entire Blue Hampshire community I co-founded, over 15,000 posts and 100,000 comments, originally self-hosted on SoapBlox and then WordPress? Gone.

but here’s the thing: My Blogger sites from 2005 forward? They’re up and they are pristine.... Same holds — as I’ve mentioned before — for projects students put up on Google Sites.

A big reason I moved to self-hosted and institutional solutions was this idea that commercially hosted stuff was too fickle. In 2006, it seemed that every week a new site shut down. For better or worse (mostly worse) monopoly consolidation has changed that dynamic a bit. There are other good reasons for self-hosting or doing institutional hosting, but durability is more downside than upside of these options, and we might want to let our students know that if they want something to stay up, self-hosting may not be the best choice.