As you might have picked up from the eduspaces frontpage, the eduspaces migration to TakingITGlobal has been discontinued. In the end there were too many (mainly legal) issues getting in the way of having the service continue smoothly and not getting in the way of users too much. All in all it has been a learning experience and to echo the message on the frontpage, a sincere apology to all users for the way the transition period was handled.
I'll be devoting some real time to getting eduspaces up-to-date again and will be acting as a 'community manager' a bit, so if you would like to discuss the service or have a really aching need for specific functionality, just drop a comment :)
Comments
Thank you very much! I am glad to see a resolution.
Thanks, that seems like an easier solution for us in the end. I hope you life gets a bit easier too ;-)
So who now owns it?
One seriosu problems is that people seem to not to be able to comment on my blog without creating an account (and couldn't do that either).
Is that possible?
If not I guess I will have to move after all.
Thanks again.
Good to see that it's not moving! And looking forward to seeing the site getting got up to date.
Thanks.
Hi Misja,
I have two questions:
(1) Will the discussion forum feature be reinstated? This was a great feature that enabled open discussion among members.
(2) Is there a way to set the font size for posting comments throughout Eduspaces? The font size in windows (like this) is very small and difficult to read on the screen. I realize you can click the "Edit AA" option while in a window. However, it would be more convenient if this feature could be set as a universal feature, perhaps in the "Accounting Settings" screen.
Thanks for the help.
Rick Lillie (CalState San Bernardino)
To all, it's good to hear supportive voices, thanks for your comments :) A few notes about what will be happening here. First of all the site will receive some updates which will hopefully resolve some niggling issues you might have been experiencing here and there. Second is the service itself: some of you have been asking about the forum, and closing it down was deliberate since we would like to bring the service back more to its origins with a strong focus on the individual space and the connections between its members. This also means a new emphasis on communities as an ad hoc way to organise around shared topics, interests, etc. (which includes the site itself too, of course).
As to other functionality, we'll be considering adding extra's with care, but don't hesitate to mention your favourites (I already noticed the presentation tool being asked about).
I have mixed feelings about the forums not being enabled again. We saw more action there over the last couple of months than I can ever remember before and, ironically, the sense of community (admittedly under duress) was greater than ever! But I do take your point about the the original focus on personal space and connections. And all that is now history and we need to move on.
I notice that (some) communities can still be viewed in forum layout. This might be a good compromise if the vanilla forums are not reinstated. We could start a feed back and issues community perhaps. However, I notice that if you click on a thread (post) title in forum view the links are broken. If you click on 'comments' however the post opens up ok. Pedagocial Impacts is an example.
Why does it appear that some communities can be viewd as forums and some can't?
Cheers
I am delighted that Curverider have managed to resolve whatever difficulties led them to proposing the service withdrawal in the first place and very happy that Eduspaces still exists for educators to discover and develop their use of social networking software to support teaching and learning. Some of those who have been introduced to the Elgg platform through Eduspaces (including me!) have gone on to implement projects, pilots and institutional implementations of Elgg, so having a network is an important conduit for the long-term development of Elgg within the education sector.
As many of you know, I'm currently working for children's charity Childnet International, producing advice and guidance for UK schools on using social networking services in education. As part of this project, I've been producing an evaluation tool for teachers – a checklist of issues they may want to consider when familiarising themselves with services. From the outset, Eduspaces was included in this along with Bebo, Eduspaces, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Ning, and YouTube. When the closure was announced, plans to include Eduspaces obviously came to a halt. However, now that the site is back I would be delighted to include the service, with permission of course from Curverider. I very much hope that you’ll let me know very soon if I can include the service or not in the work. Obviously I hope you’ll joining the other providers in recognising the value of this work to the schools and education community and agree to be a part of it!
Best wishes, Josie.
I agree with Terry that the forums were quite active; while I like the communities that can be created here, most that I've joined have been very quiet. I suspect in part that's due to people having the option to set up their own communities (a Good Feature), but the draw back of that is of course that a lot of communities end up being set up, which may overlap a lot with others, hence all have few members & few get to be particularly dynamic.
Perhaps the lesson to be learnt from the activity in the general forums is that a community that everyone is a member of would be a useful tool.
(There were a few things that were confusing such as the sinking, I never quite knew if I was sinking something for everyone, or just for me. [Is is language-ist to sink something in a language you can't read?])
Josie, your work sounds very interesting & I'm hoping to get to read it at some point!
Misja, one problem that I found with the individual communities is being able to find a community in the first place. While the system produces a list of communities, there's no structure to the listing (i.e., alphabetical, by category, etc.). A series of screen numbers appears at the bottom of the screen, but it is not practical to scroll through 100+ screens looking for something on a screen that lacks structure. You can search the list and produce a narrower list, but again the process is not very easy to work with.
While the individual communities are interesting, the general, open-discussion forums made it easier to meet people. Once I met people, THEN it was easier to create an individual community to which I could invite people that I had met.
Please bring back the open-discussion forums. They serve a very important purpose in a community such as Eduspaces.
Thanks Emma - it's with the web designer as I type so it'll be available very shortly.
I agree with Ricks vote for the forums. Although the focus of the discussion over the Christmas period was unfortunate, the actual content and quality of posts was excellent. I really felt like I got to know site members better. So either the forums or some similar function in a prominent site wide space would be great.
Hi Misja
While we are waiting for a more organised community or forum to discuss issues, wish lists and so on, I'll take up your offer in your original post to drop a comment here.
It is great to see the fantastic use that is being made of Eduspaces' multilanguage facility. However the old way of finding new communies and friends by scrolling through a few screens of 'view all posts' is less convenient now for the average language-challenged english person. Would it be possible to filter posts by language?
The filter for posts with comments only produces one screen full (10 posts?). Would it be possible for the back link (perhaps renamed 'previous') to produce more screens of posts with comments while the 'with comments' filter is on?
Any possibility of the user advisory group proposed by TIG being set up?
I hope you are having a break this Easter!
@terry - it is not possible to detect what language someone enters directly into the blog form so I am afraid you will need to filter past it yourself, or make the people you wish to follow a friend and then view "friends' blogs"
re: view posts with comments, this is a bug and will be fixed in due course. Thanks for pointing it out.
re: advisory group - to be honest that really would be overkill. There are only a handful of people who use the service so it makes no sense to create something as formal as an advisory group. It would be more effective to just create a community 'EduSpaces issues' or something like that, in which anyone can contribute thoughts, ideas and so on. Misja will then monitor that community and where appropriate, act accordingly.
Thanks Dave. It's probably right to draw a line under the advisory board idea in the new situtation. It did seem appropriate at the time though. In any case the constiturency of users here is so diverse now it would be hard to know how to represent it accurately.
You say only a handful of people use the service. It would be interesting to have some stats on active users. Stan gave some for (if I remember correctly) Myspace and Community @Brigton at the ElggJam last year and a figure of about 3% of total users springs to mind. I guess it depends on what you count as 'active' and what info the system generates to operationalise this.
This is for everybody watching this post, there now is a central community for all Eduspaces and education related topic. Every member has been added automatically so you should be able to jump in right away. Just to reassure everybody - there have been no side effects related to the migration, so all accounts have remained untouched. See you all at the Eduspaces Central community :)