Tim Carmody, posting on Kottke.org, about Dan Cohen's "Back to the Blog" post.
…blogging either needs its own mechanisms of ambient humanity — which it's had, in the form of links, trackbacks, conversations, even (gulp) comments, all of which replicated at least a fraction of the buzz that social media has — or it needs a kind of escape velocity to break that gravitational pull. Gravity or speed. Or a hybrid of both.
Source: Blogging, social media, and ambient humanity
We've seen another way. It's possible, and we know that because it worked for years, at internet scale. But the mechanisms of ambient humanity in the Big Silos won because most people really don't care about the infrastructure. People just want to feel connected to people, and there was less friction in the silos - at the cost of giving up and/or losing control.
There are absolutely parallels in edtech. Instructors and students largely interact with each other online via the institutional learning management system, rather than richer distributed venues designed for each individual context. Or, rather, some courses use those interesting non-sanctioned venues anyway, because they suit their needs, but without the blessing of the institution and at risk - both personal and institutional.
Student data (names, emails, ID numbers, grades, etc) needs to be tightly managed by the institution for very good reasons - we can't violate the privacy of our students, either through active leaks or from passive breaches due to data becoming siphoned off into other tools without our control. I get that we need to control the data. But we're also setting up a mirror of the social-media-to-corporate-silo model, which has been shown to be harmful in so many ways.
So. How to support the decentralized needs of an incredibly diverse and interesting ecosystem of communities, while protecting sensitive personal information, without stifling the interesting and creative activities that are possible when students and instructors have more control over their own environments?