I’m currently writing this (at 21:00 on Thursday night) in OneNote, not in WordPress and, as I write, I’m panicking. I’m panicking because this has happened… I can’t access my blog; I can’t access the course pages, I can’t even access the Edinburgh University webpage.
I guess the servers have gone down and all will, eventually, be well. However, what’s of interest to me is just how disabling this is: I’ve lost all that I need to participate in the course: I can’t access the discussions; I can’t access the links to the useful tools I need to make my adapted version of the dialogue from Phaedrus.
And there’s the rub with online education. When the online disappears, so does the resource, the community, the notes, the links and the content. My class, my exercise book and my teacher have all disappeared. In a week where we’re contemplating and playing with a text which examines the negatives of an over-reliance on the written, my reliance on the multimedia hypertexts that comprise IDEL is exposed.
I’ll just keep shouting for help…