Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I don't know what it is about institutions that they don't want to keep anything online beyond its immediate use, but it's definitely a trend and a worrying one. Everything I ever did at Assiniboine was removed by the college, everything I did at the University of Alberta was again eventually wiped from existence, and if I hadn't preserved bits of these they'd be gone forever. NRC regularly 'prunes' its websites. Not just colleges and universities: the HotWired threads were removed from existence, and these are just some of the many boards and lists I used that have disappeared. Brian Lamb shows us the first UBC wiki that was yanked offline and left in the hallway as garbage. He adds, "George Siemens laments the loss of a wiki he published DIY, that the hosting university has unceremoniously deleted on him." And if people wonder why I don't want to contribute to some community or institutional or company service, that's why. None of the other issues matter. If I can't self-archive it, I'm not interested.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

Copyright 2024
Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 04:23 a.m.

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