For those who may have my venture to analyise, below is my pitch”

Sean

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.

http://digitalplay.info/blog/

Team 8 Conclusion

On behalf of Ian, Sean, Ernie and myself (Jen), I would like to thank ETEC522 for excellent participation in this week’s presentation.  We hope you enjoyed the Moodle format for our discussions and activities and hope that you will also consider using the Moodle platform in your future teaching practices.

We have all learned something from the assigned activities and we definitely appreciated the insightful and reflective discussions towards collaborative technologies.  We are definitely sure that this will be a growing area of life long learning.

Please feel free to email or contact us if you have any questions or concerns about our presentation.  In addition, feel free to continue discussions in the Moddle forums, if you wish.

Enjoy the upcoming week as we are closer to the finish line.

Team 8

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

Hi everyone!

Welcome to this week’s presentation on Collaboration Technologies.

Our group has decided to try a different, perhaps more traditional, presentation style using the OSS learning management system called Moodle.  Many of you may be familiar with this platform or have had some working experience.  If not, that’s ok too!

Our website can be found at  ——————  (ETEC 522: Module 8 – Collaborative Technologies).  To begin, you will need to click on “create new account” and follow the prompts.  I have set the enrollment key as ETEC522.

We hope you enjoy our presentation and we look forward to your thoughts and ideas about Collaboration Technologies!

Your Module 8 Presentation Group,

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.