Sunday, December 16, 2007
Eduspaces to shut down
In an unexpected announcement this morning at 9 am CST, it was learned that Eduspaces will close on January 10. No reason was given, and apparently elgg is not affected. Watch www.eduspaces.net for any forthcoming explanation. This is very short notice, and not well-timed for educators who have resources on Eduspaces.
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I've just picked up this note about eduspaces shutting down from January 10th. So, according to some figures I have seen, there are now some 17,000 elgg aware educational users looking for a new home.
The Learning Landscape for Schools, http://www.ll4schools.co.uk, is a recently launched elgg installation for schools. Some security measures have been added to the normal installation in order to provide a safe, social networking environment for both staff and students. At LL4S we feel that there is immense teaching and learning potential in social networking and the use of the web2.0 tools built into elgg but that the popular sites (MySpace, Bebo, etc.) do not provide a suitable level of e-safety to be used in the classroom. Also many Local Authorities block these sites which is another disadvantage!
We are supported by E2BN (http://www.e2bn.org) - one of the RBCs responsible for supplying internet services to schools and Local Authorites in the East of England - who obviously take e-safety issues very seriously. LL4S want to provide a safe place for the educational potential of Web2.0 to be explored by staff and students alike. There is much more information on the site about how LL4S works and how to register a school and get accounts.
As the demise of eduspaces has happened so fast LL4S is not really in a position to offer space to all the current account holders - many will probably fall outside the remit of our site. However, if there are now homeless blogging teachers out there that are keen to use elgg with their students we would happy to accept any existing data they have so they can continue their own blogs and bring a safe, global social network into their classroom.
LL4S is not a free service as costs must be recuperated, expansion planned for and subscriptions are our only source of income. But I think we are great value!
So, take a look at the site, read about how we work and how to register. My blog is here (http://www.ll4schools.co.uk/blog/). Please get in touch if you want more information about signing up.
John Hackett
john.hackett@ll4schools.co.uk
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