Last school year I experimented with Ning in various ways including using it to house a course I was teaching with three classes and recommending it as a way of extending the conversation for the schools service of a local attraction. Ning is a personalised, scalable, social networking site which you can configure for your own network and needs. In fact, it’s a bit like Elgg/Eduspaces where I housed my blog until recently except that Ning was just getting very useful for educators with many different ways of interacting and of storing digital artefacts. Ning had adopted the familiar business model of free and premium plans and has just announced that the free plans will be abolished. This has upset the education community in particular and there is a furious buzz in the educational world at the moment with people desperately looking for alternatives and worried about how easy it is going to be to transfer what they have already invested into Ning elsewhere.
The situation with Ning is one that is familiar across a great many of these Web 2.0 tools. Most of them are not created with educators in mind. Educators take to them and tweak them to fit but cannot be surprised when business considerations weigh more heavily than any obligation to the education community. I can imagine that it is difficult for Ning or any other Web 2.0 company to see the difference between free and extremely cheap. In the case of Ning we are talking about $10 a month currently though this will change after May 4th.
I was invited to complete a survey about the Ning product as a prelude to the re-organisation which is being rolled out on May 4th and wondered while I was filling it in if companies such as Ning understand how education works. The key point, not just with Ning, but with any Web 2.0 tool in education is that you have to convince teachers one at a time and you do this by offering a free version. Teachers already subsidise education enough without expecting them to pay just $10 here and $5 there. Each tool on its own could be cheap enough but if you want to use a palette then it could get very expensive. Of course a responsible institution will have a budget for these types of applications but care needs to be taken how this is run. A decree that in the school year beginning 2010/2011 there will be a college-wide adoption of Ning is unlikely to result in a great deal of buy-in and runs completely counter to the prosumer idea of decision-making at the individual level.
In my own case, the teaching Ning is a completed project and its only value for me now is the lesson material which I have housed there and which I wanted to recycle for the next school year. But as Ning had added functionality I was warming to it more and more as a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and recommending it to other teachers. The local attraction will no doubt be prepared to pay the low premium rates to maintain their Ning, if they don’t already do so anyway.
At the very least this is making educators stop and think about what they actually value about Ning and whether it can’t be found elsewhere. But it’s going to be a pain rescuing the material!