I’ve made some decisions these last few weeks with regard to where I’ll be making my contributions to open courseware, OERs, and my blog. I left blogger about a year ago and went to WordPress, but now have decided to move back to blogger. My WordPress site, called Collaborative Understandings, started to accumulate too many plugins which were required to have the website that I thought I wanted. It got to a point that my website started to bog down along with generating memory errors due to issues with my host provider, GoDaddy.com. I was really trying to establish one website where I could house all of my work and reflections and still be able to share and potentially collaborate with others. But it just became too much work.
So I’ve since made two changes in the way that I share and reflect on my teaching practice and research. First, I moved back to Blogger and will discontinue my Collaborative Understandings WordPress website at the end of this semester. Blogger has a simpler interface and I don’t have to worry about SEO or making sure that there is no conflict with the rich-text edit bar, etc. I can just post and be done with it. Second, since I find myself working more and more in a wiki – WordPress has an average wiki plugin but is limited in its functionality – I decided to continue building the Wikispaces site which I started several years ago (formerly called Collaborative Understandings, but now is called EduQuiki). Like Blogger, Wikispaces is extremely user-friendly and it just works. I don’t have to worry about my students complaining about losing information after having worked in the wiki for 30 minutes only to find out that the information didn’t save or that the information is not accessible. I’m done trying to configure stuff in order to get that “perfect” look, feel, and functionality. I want something that has already been tested and will get the job done. I don’t mean that WordPress won’t do it for you, but as I’m far from a technology guru, I’ve finally reached the decision that I need an easier work environment so that I can focus less on the technology and more on the message.
EduQuiki is the new website. It’s a wiki that anyone can join and will contain open courseware and open educational resources that stem from what I do every day. It’s an invitation into what and how I learn, and will forever be a work in progress. I look forward to becoming more productive and having to worry less about technology working, and will continue to share my thoughts, experiences, and artifacts so that others are either encouraged to do the same or so that perhaps others might find some use in reusing, remixing, redistributing, or recopying what I’ve shared for their own purposes (attribution is required). Goodbye Collaborative Understandings, hello EduQuiki!