For those who may have my venture to analyise, below is my pitch”
Sean
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Sean’s Pitch
Author: seanmcminn
This was fun (sort of). I enjoyed the writing, mixing, and editing part; but once I started publishing, good old Windows Movie Maker kept hanging on me. I eventually figured it out. Unfortunately, it’s not as smooth as I orginally had planned. Comments most welcome!
Here’s my elevator pitch:
To go along with this week’s excellent presentation, and for ESL teachers, here’s a blog that I follow. The authors of the blog often discuss ways inwhich gaming can be used for English language teaching. There’s some great info here, I think.
Hi Everyone,
It looks like our pool of collaboration technology resources is starting to take form. Thanks!
What’s been interesting is watching how it has been taking form. Some of you are showing your MediaWiki experience, while others are learning on the go. Some of you are creating new pages for your reviews, while others are writing a review on the main page for collaborative technologies and linking directly to the tool’s web page. As a group we are creating something new (and hopefully useful) publicly. And as a group, I wonder, can we form a resource that is coherent , concise, and consistent both in content and format. Does this technology (and the time and energy that we have) allow for this? We’re about halfway through this module, and it’ll be interesting to see how this new resource will look like at the end.
Hey folks,
If you want to follow the changes everyone is making to the Collaboration Technologies Wiki entry you can subscribe to this RSS feed:
http://wiki.ubc.ca/index.php?title=Collaboration_technologies&action=feed&feed=rss
Ian, Sean, Ernie, & Jen
That’s not my title, but someone else has posted something about the company Techsmith, which I do like and use. How they evaluate the conpany may interest everyone … although, cubing it may be better.
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/the_hottest_ed_tech_company
I have been thinking of ways to use Jing for creating machinima — a creatve way to have students practise their language skills through storytelling. If you want to watch some good examples of machinima, go here.
Sean
PBworks, formally called PBwiki, is a collaboration service that has taken advantage of the growth in popularity of wikis. Their website claims: “PBworks is the world’s largest provider of hosted business and educational workspaces. We host over 800,000 workspaces, serve millions of users per month, and 96% of PBworks business users would recommend PBworks to a friend.”
Face 1 – Market Focus
I actually had a little difficulty with this. What is their market focus? Public schools, higher education, or corporate training needs? Their service seems blended. Although, their website does indicate that their major markets would be higher education and corporate consumers. PBworks has separate services, such as “Project Edition” and “Campus Edition”, which seems to support this multi-market ambition.
Face 2 – Types of Offering
PBworks is mainly a service providing a product and infrastructure for managing course and students content; although, wikis can be used for numerous other things, including asynchronous communication.
Face 3 – Who is the buyer?
I see two options here, being:
- “Learning bought for Learner” – perhaps, for example, it is mainly for higher education courses where the instructors wish to include wikis in the course; and
- “Learning Bought Centrally” – perhaps, for example, a university or schools district has adopted the idea of wikis and wishes to provide this type of learning environment for the entire institution.
This seems evident in the various packages that they provide.
Face 4 – Global Markets
PBworks is mainly focused on “Wired Anglophone Countries, although there is a small market in other areas.
Face 5 – Development of the market
PBwork saw a niche in the market. MediaWiki and Wikispaces would be the two other major competitors; however, PBworks, perhaps seeing the growth of wikis in education and corporate use, simplified the enduser’s experience with wikis. The international market freely imports content and infrastructure, although I’m not aware of many (if any) local companies that produce wiki packages.
Face 6 – Learning Technology Competing with Other Forms of Learning
PBworks would fit under the category: “Learning Technology Substitutes for Others Forms of Learning”. For one thing, their product and service may have to compete with the various LMSs, other Social Media platforms, such as NING, blogging platforms and other services, such as Google Docs. But that’s just “eLearning”. PBworks would have to compete with face-to-face appracs to collaborative approaches to learning.
Surfing around, I discovered this:
Technology Ventures
http://www.stanford.edu/group/techventures/index.htm
Which lead me to some samples resources, such as this:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/techventures/resources/TechVentures_Chap1_2e.pdf
and
http://www.stanford.edu/group/techventures/intro_textbook.htm
If you explore, you can find videos, pdfs, sand sample syllibi. This may be useful.
I may sound harsh here, but I’m going to start by saying no to investing in this one – for numerous reasons. (Comments most welcome if you disagree with what I say because I’m new to being an EVA.)
Burgess takes too long to get to the point in her pitch. The introduction is much, much too long. Actually, I’m curious: who is her audience? Would she not pitch this idea to people inside the university? If so, is it necessary to go into so much detail about RRU’s history? Please tell me if I’m wrong here. Regardless, I would spend a little less time talking about the historical significance of RRU … and the history of OCW, too.
Her words appear to have said a lot about RRU, but the rhetoric is empty. She said a lot about its history, its successful marketing team, its “innovative pedagogy”, and its “effective use of technologies”, but no concrete examples were given. Nor were there suggestions about how RRU’s OCW would be different from other universities. Yes, she showed that some research had been done with regards to how other universities adopted OCW, and she commented on common criticisms about this practice; however, there was very little (if anything) about how RRU would overcome the criticisms made about MIT and other universities. Instead she provides comments that are full of logical fallacies (sorry …), such as “The bottom line is it‘s the right thing to do”. Is it? I’m not convinced, yet. (Although, I do support the idea of OCW.)
Burgess does do well when mentioning how OCW would benefit the university. Yet there is little information about how this will be accomplished. Will they ensure high quality materials that are competitive against MIT’s OCW? Is that feasible? Will their methods for delivering content be innovative? How?
I also question whether her plan for how OCW would truly benefit students. She didn’t seem to give enough evidence for this. In fact, I got more of an impression that the OCW would be used more for marketing purposes, attracting more students, attracting more faculty.
And, which I’ll admit that I’m perhaps being too harsh here, I was not impressed by her delivery. For example, she relied too much on pathos (such as commenting on the university’s credibility) and ethos (such as visuals in the presentation like … the baby – why a baby?).
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Hi from Hong Kong
Hi Everyone. My name is Sean McMinn. This is my 7th MET course, and I’m pretty excited to be (virtually) here.
I teach English at a university here in Hong Kong, and I love it. The job is great, the people are nice, and life is simply interesting and always adventurous. So far, I’ve been enjoying the MET programme — which has helped me advance in my career over the past year or so. In particular, I’ve been able to embed podcasts (http://campusbeat.ust.hk) and wikis into courses successfully thanks to what I’ve learned though the programme.
I’m looking forward to ETEC522 because I lack entrepreneurial skills and would like to explore business opportunities … some day. More immediately, I would like to enhance my intrapreneurial (new word for me) skills. As I learn more through the MET programme I see opportunities for developing or enhancing technologies to be used at our university. To do this, though, I need to apply for funding. If I can improve on my “pitches” or selling, I would be happy.
I’m looking forward to working with everyone. (I can’t believe the summer break went by so fast!)