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

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.

Originally, known as PBWiki, PBWorks is an online collaborative environment that allows users to create wikis fairly easily. It operates on the “freemium” model (free low level features plus a fee for higher levels that offer more features) and uses its own proprietary software which seems to evolve and improve year by year. When it was first released, it was markedly simpler to use than other wiki programs and has added more functionality such as more stringent security measures and audit logs which holds appeal for commercial applications. I have some experience with the company/product through doing a wiki for a History 12 class. A great product/service that I feel educators should explore given the time. So…

Face 1: Market Focus-(K-12, higher education, commercial)

PBWorks has and is being used by all three of the above categories. Save lower level grades (which might not be able to use computers until a certain age), this product has huge appeal for middle school and high school, universities/colleges, and businesses as well. According to their website, commercial ventures are their main focus with the claim to fame that they have users in half of the Fortune 500 list.

 Face 2: Types of Offerings-services rendered/product description

Obviously, the company offers workspaces for individuals, companies, cohorts etc to collaborate on various projects or personal quests. Simply, a wiki is a set of interlinked web pages that allows the user(s) to edit and share information in particular field or application. These wikis allow for different levels of access and editing/deletion abilities so as to preserve the integrity of the work being done. One is able to navigate fairly easily through a number of pages in specific folders and users can leave comments and insert both links to other pages/sites and actual multimedia files.

 Face 3: Who is the Buyer?

The buyer fits into seven different categories including:

 Master Pricing Guide

 The basic/free level appeals to individuals and those needing only basic services. The “Public” level is aimed at libraries/institutions while the differences between the Classroom and Campus editions is the number of users and number of workspaces. Standard, Legal and Project editions all allow for unlimited storage measured in Gigabytes. The differences between all seven categories is fairly substantial. For more go to:

http://pbworks.com/content/pricing-overview

 Face 4 – Global Markets

According to PBWorks, the only language that it is offered in is English (main business language) “PBworks itself (tools, help, support) is not available in languages other than English.” However, it utilizes Unicode meaning that any language that you can type in from your computer will be displayed in the workspace pages. So, you can use other languages but if you need help it is going to be in English. Customers include companies from Australia, the US, the UK, South Korea, Canada and China. A company like Bracewell and Giuliani has ten offices around the world and 450 attorneys. Basically, the nature of the product/service makes it very attractive for anyone with Internet access that wants a collaborative experience.

 Face 5 – Development of the Market

Arguably, PBWorks is the giant in the wiki business. Over 50 000 businesses subscribe, they host over 900 000 workspaces and millions of users utilize it each day. According to various sources, the company does spend time/money developing new features that reflect what their customers are telling them or are based on observed trends.

 Face 6 – Integrating the product in the education system

The product itself is relatively easy to use and includes very substantial and well developed webinars and technical support – that is a strength of the company. Hardware needed to run this is minimal and speed of the internet connection is not absolutely crucial. The playing of multimedia might be an issue. Getting students to use this would not be hard as it imitates blogging in some ways; however, some might feel self conscious posting comments/ideas using their own names. Cost is quite low and can be free unless many features are needed. Evaluating user contributions can be eased by paying more for a higher level edition.

Wow. We’re moving forward fast so far here in 522! There have been many links, & post and it has been almost a race to follow. I do feel like I jumped into “bootcamp”.I’ll add to the wealth of info. This is a wiki that has helped me with putting some concepts into perspective. This is site dedicated to global business it was created by an MBA student who has collected notes, observations, and ideas about venture capitals.

GloboTrends wiki for Global Business