Stephen Downes

Blackboard - which has been getting some bad publicity lately (here and here) - has announced that it's shutting down the LearnCentral community. Steve Hargadon, a stalwart with the community, reports, "As you can imagine, this is a tough day for all of us who've been involved with LearnCentral.... As we all know, not every Web project succeeds, but you helped to explore the exciting combination of what we liked to call the "LC3:" a social network for educators, a personalized repository for collecting and sharing educational resources, and synchronous meeting capability." He says it was "the right decision" though I have to wonder. And what does Blackboard mean when it says "we will be focusing our community networking efforts on established and dedicated sites geared towards educators, such as wecollaborate.com, Classroom 2.0, EdWeb, etc."?