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

PS — Got you in my RSS reader now.

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

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

I completely agree. Unfortunately as your post today highlighted (”Dependence on Web Apps“)

“…as more and more of the popular web tool sites are experiencing downtime and outages or loss of data (examples: twitter, voicethread, edublogs, wikispaces)…….how much should we rely on these services for the bulk of our work?”

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.