EduCities (亞卓市)

» see educities.edu.tw as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

亞卓市 opened on 5 January 2000, which makes it one of the few things buried here that was already running before I finished high school and was still running when I was past thirty. Fifteen years is an absurd lifespan for a government-funded web project. Most of them do not outlive the grant that paid for them.

The idea came out of the Learning Technology Lab at National Central University, where Chen De-Huai had been working on it since 1998, and it got its money from Taiwan's Ministry of Education under a teaching technology program. The metaphor was literal. It was a city, you were a citizen of it, there were public buildings of a sort, and there was an honorary mayor. The first was Lee Yuan-tseh, the Nobel chemist who was then president of Academia Sinica. His successor in the role was the vice president of the same institution.

The point of the city framing was to let a schoolchild hold a role that an adult would normally hold. A student could teach a class to other students inside it. That is a genuinely good idea and it is still not a common one, twenty-six years later.

It got big. By 2012 the register held 2.6 million citizens across more than 1,700 participating schools, with roughly 120,000 students and 3,000 teachers active in a given year over 3,800 classroom groups. The US Department of Education's 2010 National Education Technology Plan cited it by name as an example of a networked learning community.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who paid for it ~

The funding arrangement explains the lifespan. Ministry money started it, and from 2004 National Central University ran it jointly with HiNet, the internet arm of Chunghwa Telecom. A telco with a national subscriber base paired with a university that had a research reason to care is a far more durable owner than a grant cycle.

What it handed students, past the city itself, was free web space and a free photo album. In 2000 that was a real thing to be given by your school. By 2012 it was something a child could get from five companies without asking anyone.

~ closing day ~

The closure was announced on 26 December 2014 and the service stopped on 28 February 2015. Nobody was raided and nothing was sued. The reasons given were ordinary ones: the interface still looked like something built ten years earlier, and the community features that had once made 亞卓市 unusual were by then standard on every site a student already used.

Taiwanese adults in their thirties still turn up on forums asking whether their old 亞卓市 email account can be recovered. It cannot. Fifteen years of a country's schoolchildren had accounts in there, and for a lot of them the first web page they ever made sat on a municipal street that was never really a street.

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