An animated portrait of my 2013 on Twitter

obsolete and dead online spaces

If you've played in online spaces for any length of time, much of your content has probably been lost to the vagaries of dead, decommissioned, and obsolete spaces. Be it online course content, or one of the many "free" services that have been shut down over the years, you've probably lost at least a portion of your "artifacts" over the years.

This may, or may not, have prompted you to self-host your content in the hopes of have more control over the fate of your content, but even this approach is not a 100% guarantee of the persistence of your online "stuff."

Then again, you may have bet on the right horse (Blogger for example) and still have access to the stuff you posted a decade, or more, ago.

You can mediate the risk, and help to ensure persistence, by cross-posting your content across multiple spaces; however, if it's truly imperative that your loot persist--you'll want to have local (i.e., offline) and hard-copy versions of that which can not be lost.

Learning Diary Redux

This is a post from an #android tablet, and a "free" wifi connection. It also represents a resurrection of sorts of this space along the lines of its original purpose:a diary of my learning. My Learning Diary began some 12 years ago (almost to the day) as a repository for learning artifacts associated with my online M.Ed. studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT).

At lot of things have changed in online spaces in the interim, and a great many are still the same. One development I'm particularly interested in, are the advances in, and evolution of, self-organized social systems and how they've become part of the vernacular in the form of MOOCs and the like.

I've signed up for a course being run by Dave Cormier based on this model (that he and colleagues developed, notwithstanding what USA schools/corporations would have you believe).

What's the same now as it was then, are the human and social characteristics learners bring to any space, be it online or off, and intend to use this space to make (what I hope aren't TOO sporadic) entries related to my learning and observations of the process, and my reactions to the experience.