Why pay for Ning??

This week the social network, Ning, announced that it's service are to no longer be free for any users, including for educational purposes. This brief headline came up on a news pages I was browsing and it caught my eye. It's clear after reading the article that Ning, because it is a business is changing its ways to charge for their services t all users. However, there is much opposition to this new change from the educational users of the Ning sites.

Since Ning has been created educators all over the world have used this social network to create various Ning sites which has led to countless ning sites dedicated to different specialities such as Web 2.0 tools or pertaining to different disciplines. Also, many teachers have used Ning with their classes. By making their own ning site only the teacher and their students are the users and creates a safe place in the Internet world for educational purposes.

Now with Ning throwing a cost attached to it many of these educators are wanting to pull out from this network, but are scared of which other network to turn to. With Ning, everything was a safe environmentof free sharing of ideas and educators were finally able to connect with many people in their disciplines to gain ideas for the their class instead the only other teacher in the building. Its scary for many users that have a lot of information uploaded on Ning to choose a new entwork and move aveyrthing over to the new site. Ning also present users with an easy and hassle-free layout, so even teachers that were not technically inclined could use Ning to learn new technology skills and new ideas for their class. These are all fears of users when they are contemplating the switch to a new network. Also, Ning was able to simulate mini professional conferences that before teachers were only able to attend once a year, and now with Ning educators could gain a plethora of new information by only sitting at their computer at anytime. If many key users that consturcted these sites left Ning, many resources could be lost.

I think it is sad that Ning has decided to make educators pay. Everyday teachers are striving to give back to their students and learn the new best practices to staty fresh, on a shoestring school budget. Thus, now having to pay for the services, no matter how small the amount makes Ning almost tainted to many. Currently, with almost every school cutting back it is highly likely that mroe money be given to pay for teachers to enroll in networks online. Therefore, hopefully something will change and possibly Ning will call back this idea of making educators pay. The article I read can be found at this here.