On Sunday (16th December) users of EduSpaces, the social website for the education community, received an email announcing that it was closing down on January 10th. This came as quite a surprise to the community of users and a lot of discussion followed, speculating on the reasons for the closure and wondering about alternative platforms for their content.
Yesterday evening an explanation was posted. In a nutshell:
When we launched the site three years ago, we were embraced by some members of the community and have enjoyed positive support and coverage overall. Contrary to popular opinion, we have never been affiliated with an institution or other backer; we personally funded it because we believed in it. We still believe in the underlying ideals we started with. However, we need to pay our bills, and it has become clear that the educational community is not the best way for us to do that; correspondingly, that is no longer our core focus. Running a community takes a lot of time and hard work, which we have no longer been able to give EduSpaces, and in that light, it seems both unfair and unwise to keep the site going.
Ben and Dave take care to highlight the distinction between EduSpaces and Elgg, which is still (according to them) going strong.
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