Please Note: This post relates to an Edublogs outage that took place in 2008, not the one from December 2009.
The last 24 hours have not been kind to Edublogs.org. James Farmer has indicated that over a period of 4 to 6 hours “a bug between the new forums features and caching caused quite a few blogs to time-out.” This prevented some users from viewing their blogs.
[NB: My initial introduction indicated the outage lasted 24 hours. Farmer has since clarified this is not the case. Apologies for the misprint.]
This is a huge hit for edubloggers and some really bad press for the technology in general. While there are many really keen and switched-on educators in the blogosphere currently, many in the wider academic community have only just begun to wade into the realm.
Unexpected lengthy outages like this only serve to prolong the adoption time by painting blogs – and indeed online technology in general – as something that hasn’t matured yet and is not yet ready for widespread useage.
As someone who helps support services and applications (both large and small) at the uni level, I understand that outages like this are an unfortunate reality; but the blogging evangelist side of me cringes at the impact this may have across the sector.
Kate Olson echoed these sentiments on Reflection 2.0 (“Dependence on Web Apps” 28 February 2008):
“I believe wholeheartedly in opensource, freeware, and all the good stuff that can be done, but sometimes these glitches in otherwise great products can seriously hurt our professional image – for example: trying to do an entire workshop on how to use edublogs or wikispaces and the service is down!
…I’m in no way advocating NOT using web apps (I’m so deeply involved with them right now I couldn’t work without them!), but dealing with these issues needs to be taken into account. This is especially true when working with students who will NOT be accepting of the fact that all of their work has been lost or teaching educators new to technology about these tools – we need to be able to instill SOME confidence!”
Update: An announcement in the edublogs dashboard area just indicated:
“Apologies! – We’d like to apologise for the downtime today, a bug between the new forums features and caching caused quite a few blogs to time-out but we’ve fixed that now.”
Update: As seen in the comment area of this post, James Farm has reiterated his regrets for the problem and has provided the following correction on what I had initially reported:
“Hi Mike,
Completely agree, it was a pretty poor show by us and we’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again – it’s a typical painful side-effect of new features (like the forums) meeting old features (like the cache) for the first time in a high load environment
Just to clarify a few things though the site wasn’t down (people could still log in and do stuff) but some users couldn’t see their blogs… I know this is as good as a ‘might as well be down’ though so no excuses.
The problems lasted between 4-6 hours.
Cheers, James”
References:
- “Dependence on Web Apps” Reflection 2.0, February 28, 2008
As an avid edublogs user and advocate, I have to say that today’s outage did bother me quite a bit. The inconvenience of being unable to access my blog was one issue, but the larger one is my credibility in advocating blogging in education and edublogs specifically. I have put a lot of time into training colleagues and others on edublogs and outages such as this just reinforce the idea that technology can often be more trouble than help. I’m not about to stop using edublogs, but I’m worried that incidents like today’s will just frustrate many educators new to blogging.
Hi Kate,
I completely agree. Unfortunately as your post today highlighted (“Dependence on Web Apps“)
In my neck of the woods – on-campus providers of eLearning services and support – this conversation is absolutely in the front of our minds right now.
The rise of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) has afforded a tremendous amount of flexibility and opportunity for staff and students to carve out their own learning systems online using a wide range of applications. This effectively opens to door to access to far more options than an institution or school could ever hope to run and support on their own.
However as the edublogs outage today illustrates, there are serious implications to be considered in doing this.
When staff begin to use externally hosted services they are taking student data and placing it in the hands of people who don’t work for the institution. While these providers don’t want outages anymore than we do, their motivations and priorities are inherently different than those of academia.
The situation as I see it is schools and universities must start to be demand driven rather than supply focussed. It is the responsibility of the institution to ensure student data and privacy are protected in all activities – online and offline – and this will mean starting to offer locally hosted instances of popular external applications.
In the case of blogs, WordPress is opensource and freely available. It is also the pseudo-industry standard blogging platform. Therefore institutions should be looking to install locally hosted instances on institution-run systems. Not only will this insure the data is protected via back-ups and well within the control of the institution, it will also enable policy makers to guarantee the intellectual property rights remain in the hands of the schools.
End-User Licensing agreements aren’t something everyone reads carefully, and it’s an unfortunate possibility that in hosting school/uni data off campus instructors would open the door to use of the content in ways that wasn’t originally intended by instructors and students.
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Hi Mike,
Completely agree, it was a pretty poor show by us and we’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again – it’s a typical painful side-effect of new features (like the forums) meeting old features (like the cache) for the first time in a high load environment
Just to clarify a few things though the site wasn’t down (people could still log in and do stuff) but some users couldn’t see their blogs… I know this is as good as a ‘might as well be down’ though so no excuses.
The problems lasted between 4-6 hours.
Cheers, James
Hi James,
Thanks for the clarification. I’ll post a correction with your comments. Glad to see you guys are back up and running too.
Please don’t take my comments as criticism either. As I said, I help support applications, so I know the occassional hiccup is unavoidable.
Furthermore Edublogs is a fantastic thing for educators and has created an invaluable network through which collaboration and discussion can take place.
Best of luck to you!
Cheers,
Mike
Mike
I suppose there is the reality that things are gonna happen but it sure does suck when those things happen when you are least expecting it. (I luckily had some backup plans at a wiki site for lessons with my students yesterday).
Still, I love Edublogs and still think James Farmer and his assorted helpers (they move like elves in the wires, I am convinced) is one of the best things for teachers moving into blogging.
But I can imagine the frustration of a teacher just trying out new tech and being hit by the down signal from Edublogs.
Oh well.
Take care
Kevin
PS — Got you in my RSS reader now.
Hi Kevin,
I quite agree. Especially for people new to technology, there is the expectation that applications will always work and will never fail. Even after working in the industry for a number of years now I’m still caught off guard and seriously annoyed when one of my favourite app’s goes belly up. Just take Twitter for example.
I must say though that the fact James went out to several blogs (including mine) to actually address and respond to the complaints being leveled against the app was a seriously classy touch.
Some might call that damage control; I call it fantastic customer service.
Cheers,
Mike
I tried to log into edublogs or even just look at my blog, and it was a no go. “Cannot modify header” error kept coming up. My biggest annoyance with edublogs.org is that there is no way to contact a real person for help unless you are logged in. Well, idiots, I can’t log in when your stupid site is broken.