This notice was posted a bit earlier. Caught it on the reader from a post by Terry Wassall. Here is the text posted on the front page of eduspaces:

It was announced at the beginning of this year that TakingITGlobal would take over and continue to host the eduspaces.net community. Because of their location in Canada, some legal issues had to be sorted out first. This was why EduSpaces members had to explicitly state to have their account transferred to what would have been a new provider. Unfortunately, the legal issues didn’t end there, so, to avoid any more inconvenience for EduSpaces users, TakingITGlobal and the EduSpaces team have decided not to continue with the planned migration.What will this mean for you? Well, Eduspaces will remain EduSpaces, and your account will stay where it is for the foreseeable future. This means no migration nor termination of the service and you can continue to use and enjoy the service as you have always done. Misja will help look after the community.

We have learnt many valuable lessons during this process and would like to apologise for the way the transition period was handled.

The EduSpaces team – March 18th, 2008

And additional info here–

http://eduspaces.net/misja/weblog/298383.html

I am not sure what this means to me. In the ensuing turmoil (since the abrupt notification that eduspaces would be shut down on December 16), I have already moved myself to edublogs and have found here a wonderful community. I am now following some new folks and enjoying the reads.

I am now much more aware of ownership/licensing, export features, and student impacts than formerly. In other words, not so naive anymore. I know that the bottom line requires that all these “free” services must be paid for. I am more cautious about requiring my students to use services as part of the class without having a backup plan (at least in my own mind, as the instructor). Surely on-line networks only thrive when the members of the community invest time and effort into building content and commentary. If all that can disappear in a flash, it is hard to sustain a commitment.

I think about the most successful community I know and am part of: the forums as moodle.org. Frequently, posters comment on and marvel at the sense of community there. Will Richardson recently posted some excerpts from Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”. This particular bit caught my eye. Maybe it explains why I so strongly support open source projects, why I think academic social networks could be so valuable, why when I think about writing a text book, I imagine it as a wiki that students can engage with long after the class has ended.

now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution. Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and a longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love (142).

And, when love is betrayed, what then?

Clearly, any project with a networking component must carefully consider issues of sustainability, maintenance cost and effort, and graceful termination strategies. In this respect, a university has a strong advantage–in house support, resources, stability, and purpose.

A moment ago, a Q&A thread opened.

Hmm. Right now, I think I will stay with edublogs AND eduspaces, and just pipe in my feed. I dislike the idea of going through all this again! But I very much like the idea of spreading out and interacting with more communities.

Sounds like another research topic. How many different communities can you belong to and interact with profitably? How many ways will technology let you clone yourself? At what point does this just get ridiculous? : ) (I am laughing. I miss my smiley icons!)

Overall, the predominant feeling I get from the discussions is one of sorrow. Terry Wassall, Joan Vinall-Cox, and Mark Pearson expressed this very well. We are likely losing a community that we all enjoyed and participated in. That isn’t easy.  There is also possibly a feeling of betrayed trust (Graham Attwell), whether or not you may think that is justified.

I think some people are in a bad spot–students who are hosted on eduspaces and have not completed their terms, faculty members who might already be on holiday and “unwired”. Personally, having this happen during Christmas break was preferable. I have time to do something about it before the new term begins!

There are quite a few ideas floating about for moving the entire community, either to a new elgg installation or to another site

• http://www.mylearningspace.org
• http://classroom20.ning.com/
• http://www.ll4schools.co.uk
• http://www.college-cram.com/study/eduspace/
• http://ucpbl.aau.dk/
• Mark V. H. is considering the possibility of hosting the whole community, at least for a while.

This whole situation has been interesting. I was relatively unconcerned about moving *myself* (after all, there are many communities of instructional technology folks, and I will surely make new friends and get new inspiration at edublogs.org). I also had no real problems exporting my own text, although I was less happy about losing some valuable comments and messages. Those could not be exported; they could be saved in other ways.

I was most unhappy about losing my communities. I owned one and I was a member of one. The community I owned was used as a group blogging site by students in one of my senior level courses. We had a topic each week, and I blogged about it along with the students. My students had decided that they wanted the momentum of a group blog instead of several individual blogs. None of them had blogged before, so I think having a community provided some support that made them more comfortable with the whole idea! The community I was a member of had much information of a technical nature, and a great deal of the most valuable bits were in the comments! In fact, we often posted a question as the blog entry and received detailed answers as comments. We can’t export those comments.

But on the other hand, will I care about those comments in a year? When Moodle 1.9 has come, will comments on moodle 1.8 really be that important?? Maybe I should just be content with letting the river sweep me along? I already have close to a terrabyte of storage. And how many of those files do I really access on a regular basis? (Don’t ask; you know the answer). How many of my 2000 email messages should I be deleting as obsolete? (a bunch, a bunch).

So I am going to see how it all turns out. I enjoyed the time I spent on eduspaces; I think that experience changed me and how I look at virtual communities. Dave and Ben, I salute you!

 Hi All,

We would like to inform all users of EduSpaces that we will be shutting
down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism for you to export all your blog posts in
either an RSS format or HTML. To do this, go to your blog and select the
submenu option you require. For those of you with files, you might want to
download those as well.

Thank you to everyone who has supported EduSpaces over the last three
years.

Best regards,

The EduSpaces team

I was quite surprised of course, and began to watch the discussion develop. In the meantime, I considered my options. At my university, we have an instance of elgg. Mostly as an experiment for me and my students, but I have high hopes for its use as an academic community. I also run a couple of Word Press instances. But I decided that I would rather locate a host for my blog. My primary criteria was that it be part of an educational community supporting open source/access and contain some basic tools for spam filtering, media embedding, and access control. I chose edublogs as having the right philosophy, the right tools, and the right community.

The Eduspaces team did provide an export mechanism for personal blogs. The content could be exported in html or rss. (The export mechanism was not available for communities, unfortunately.)

After setting up my new account here, I looked into the import tools (in the admin view, look for “manage” and then “import”) . Edublogs supports import from a fair number of popular blogging applications (from Blogger to TextPattern). If your service is not listed (and, of course, ELGG was not) then the RSS import is probably your best bet. I uploaded the feed exported from eduspaces.

Problems with the conversion:

First, the categories were not cleanly imported. I had a large number of empty categories, so I simply deleted them all, created new ones, and re-assigned. Had I more posts, this would probably have been much more tedious!

The exported feed uses

<dc:subject><![CDATA[academic facebook]]></dc:subject>

Word Press uses

<category><![CDATA[academic facebook]]></category>

I would think that you could carefully insert the proper syntax into the file prior to upload and correct this issue.

Second, the author is listed as “James” for every single post! I found later that the eduspaces export does not seem to contain an author field, but Word Press uses

<dc:creator>James</dc:creator>

This seems to be a default value if the author field is not found. However, I could find no way to edit this field once my posts were imported. So James will be getting a lot of (dubious?) credit in my blog! Again, it seems reasonable to think that you could correct this prior to importing the text file.

Third, there were quite a few���� symbols scattered throughout my text. The last time I saw something like this, it had to do with UTF encoding. However, I really don’t know what causes these symbols. Some posts had more, some had less. Posts with a lot of code seemed to have the most. There were also some ]]> closing characters on each post. For most posts, I edited the symbols, but some I just left.

Fourth, I had to manually change the accessibility setting of posts. Most of my posts on eduspaces were accessible to logged in users only. When I imported my content, I had to set the commenting and post status where it differed from the default (default appears to be allow comments and pings, make public). While I know that there is a site wide admin setting you can use, individual articles can override. I was unsure how that affected my newly restored content, so as I was editing �symbols anyway, I checked the access settings.

All in all, it took me an hour or two to get set up. I enjoy all the tools that edublogs makes available. I will certainly miss the social networking aspects of eduspaces; there are some very exciting things happening with ELGG. I would not be attempting to manage a university ELGG site (however small!) had I not experienced it first hand as a member of Eduspaces.net. I appreciate very much the opportunity provided by the Elgg developers.

The good news is that I heard a rumor that edublogs will be venturing into community tools early next year! It could be very exciting!