Well...another one bites the dust...

Wikispaces this past week notified users of their Free wikis that the platform is going away this summer (apparently private label wiki admins got this notification earlier). It seems that one by one pioneers of the Web 2.0/social media revolution are closing their doors and moving on. I remember the excitement that was afoot when we could create our own wikis without needing to setup our own server to run mediawiki.  Wikispaces was a pretty awesome space. Yes, wikis by their nature are not as pretty to look at as compared to something that you lay out in InDesign or something similar, but it does get the work done.   Back in the day, when I was a student in the Instructional Design MEd program there was some turmoil in the department; lots of turnover for program directors, so no steady leadership, and lots of brain drain. Because I was an employee of the institution classmates kept asking me program specific questions that they thought I knew.  Getting tired of answering the same questions (and also looking for an opportunity to get my own questions answered), I created a wiki on wikispaces called PocketID (Pocket Instructional Design), which included faculty bios (which I tried to crowdsource from faculty themselves as well as students), syllabi, course material breakdown (sort of like a crowdsourced OpenCcourseWare), a history of the department, and so on. A few years later, once things settled in the department I didn't maintain PocketID with much regularity, but the department decided to adopt the majority of it (and fork it).  Good times wikispaces, sorry to see you go.