evo2011mlit
It's been over a year since Ning went over to its plan to change the Ning business model from a community driven free service to a money-driven paid one. Pearson tried to help by sponsoring educational Nings such as this one that wanted to continue as communities, but the stipulation was that it was at the lowest level, restricted to 150 members only.
This Ning has that many members and could easily have twice as many. Last year we went through the process of going through membership and trying to identify spammers and lurkers and were forced to cull some potential contributors to make room for newcomers to the community as we ran the latest versions of our multiliteracies courses at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com.
This proved to be unweildy, too much trouble, and required constant maintenance and awkward decision making. As much as I appreciate Ning's obvious affordances for paid customers, and Pearson's attempt to assuage the situation for educators, it is simply unworkable.
Now we are entering the season where our courses will run again and this requires a decision on where our communities can best sustain themselves. It is clear to me that Ning under its present management is not a suitable environment for expanding, altruistic, and unfunded endeavors such as ours.
I don't believe in tearing down what has been built and developed online so on my part I plan to do little further with this Ning. I do NOT plan to remove it. There is a nice archive here. If you are still a member you can continue to post here. If membership shrinks we can add new members (but I'm not going to remove anyone else who at any time acted on an impulse to be here). We are still subsidized for the foreseeable future, that grant just ticks over automatically. But the 150 member cap means that a community can neither grow nor thrive here, and I plan to devote my energies elsewhere, in places which will scale out to allow for organic community development.
I will continue to get notices of activity here and will respond to messages and clear out spam in case that happens. However I will not link here from my future Multiliteracies courses (though the links will remain in the archived versions).
Thanks for your understanding and for sharing in this community during its heyday.
Views: 75
Tags: evomlit, multiliteracies, ning
Comment by Vanessa Vaile on July 14, 2011 at 6:55am 
Comment by Vance Stevens on July 14, 2011 at 8:45am Hi Vanessa, thanks for your ongoing participation. And when I say ongoing, I mean in spaces such as the EduMOOC event going on now and for the next few weeks https://sites.google.com/site/edumooc/.
We'll be forever at http://goodbyegutenberg.com, and the sidebar there will point you to our current spaces. We like to experiment with such spaces.
Multiliteracies (evomlit) is always exploring, and thanks for the feedback :-)
Comment by Vanessa Vaile on July 14, 2011 at 7:50pm Comment by Vance Stevens on July 15, 2011 at 8:43am Thanks for letting me know about the Wiggio password request. Does it want your Wiggio password or one specific to this group? I'll look into it (when I get time, need a break myself ;-)
And thanks for your offer to be a greeter. We have had one in previous sessions. You're hired!
Comment by Vanessa Vaile on July 15, 2011 at 2:41pm Comment by Vance Stevens on February 1, 2012 at 1:12am Latest from the fat cats at Ning: https://twitter.com/#!/VanceS/status/164531257340997632
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