Dependence on Web Apps
February 28, 2008 by Kate Olson
Just a thought inspired by @metaweb20 on twitter this morning - 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? 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! My teaching background/training was in teaching software like Microsoft Office, and as archaic as this may seem in the age of web apps, you just didn’t experience this sort of issue on the major scale as you do now.
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! I know this has been addressed by other bloggers and I look forward to doing more research on the topic later today.
Oh, and if my twitter account gets hijacked, I WILL be done with twitter! Based on some talk of cases of this happening to others recently, take tweets from your network with a grain of salt if inappropriate tweets start coming through - dm the person and let them know immediately!
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
I agree. I did a presentation last night and was so paranoid that I couldn’t get a connection or for some reason that the links wouldn’t work or the connection would be so slow that I would lose people. I printed out a hard copy in case none of it worked. Then I also had a powerpoint in case the wiki didn’t work. I tend to overdo when it comes to this but I like to be prepared…just in case.
Unfortunately you do need to have a back up plan when using these technologies. What happened with Twitter was incredibly unfortunate but they were onto it immediately - if you check the timeline of the twitters.
Definitely I had a major stress attack when I returned after 2 hours to see what had happened. And while people commented on twitter, unlike other people, I received no DMs. But I did gain new people choosing to follow my account - educators.
I feel comfortable with it all now knowing that all my online accounts aren’t in danger of being hacked.
I think this highlights a crucial need for schools and institutions to start offering locally-hosted instances of equivalent applications. In the case of blogs or wikis, with Wordpress and MediaWiki being open source software it is well within the capacity of school systems to start offering blog or wiki hosting services on servers run by the schools or districts.
Using externally hosted services is certainly easier from a support standpoint, but realistically the preservation of student data and privacy are fundamental mandates of the school system. When this information is jeopardised via outages or security breaches it presents a real threat to the responsibilities of the school.
So if instructors are starting to find new and innovative ways to engage their students, and they’re resulting in real learning benefits, it should provide a real motivator to senior advisory committees within the system to provide comparable systems.
Then people can be a bit more assured that the systems are being looked after properly and by people who share the same priorities.
[...] “Dependence on Web Apps” Reflection 2.0, February 28, 2008 [...]