📑 A Provocation for the Open Pedagogy Community
All my former university hosted sites are gone. We built up a WPMU instance at Keene in 2010, and the lack of broad adoption meant when I left in 2013 we shut it down. I ran some wiki on university servers here and at Keene, and those are gone too.
All my self-hosted sites are corrupted from hacks or transfer errors in imports. Go back into this blog and you’ll find sparse posting schedule for some years between 2010 and 2012 and it’s because those posts got nuked in a 2012 hack. I had to go out to the Wayback Machine and reconstruct the important ones by hand.
Responding to Dave Winer’s news that Harvard are closing down blogs.harvard.edu, the first academic blog hosting space, Mike Caulfield wonders about the temporal nature of institutional and self hosting. He discusses the multitude of sites that have now disappeared as they were either closed or corrupted. This is something he has discussed before. It makes me wonder whether things are any different now? It also makes me wonder about the Domain of One’s Own project and the IndieWeb, what happens when we move out of our homes? What does it mean to have a canonical link or keep a digital commonplace book?
Lindsay McKenzie discusses Harvard’s recent announcement that Harvard is closing down blogs.harvard.edu. This piece collects together a number of perspectives from academics. Mike Caulfield wonders about the temporal nature of institutional and self hosting. He discusses the multitude of sites that have now disappeared as they were either closed or corrupted. This is something he has discussed before. Tim Owens and Jim Groom use this as an opportunity to take a wider look at blogging and archiving.