Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities

[Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>]

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:13:37 EDT, Clifford Collins said:
> IT's response was that some thought, planning and a server were necessary
> to do it right and therefore more time would be needed to provide a
> supportable solution. Now the faculty member is saying she will just use
> one of the many "free" ones on the Internet.
>
> I'm interested in people's view of any risks or other down-sides to such
> an approach. Pointers to papers, analysis and whatnot would be appreciated
> as well. Your thoughts?

Others have mentioned the issues of data exposure - I'll raise a much simpler
one.  If she uses the free one, and there's an outage, what does she do?

Remember there's a lot of failure modes - kamikazi squirrels taking out the
power feed to the free provider (yes, it does happen), backhoes cutting your
campus off from the Internet, and a whole raft of other failure modes that
nobody will be in a big hurry to fix, simply because she's not a paying
customer.

The *nicest* thing about using a locally-supported one is that there is
(presumably) a support structure that *will* at least answer the phone and
*try* to fix the problem if it breaks.  That's worth a lot more than people
realize.

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