{"id":2481,"date":"2009-09-23T22:02:20","date_gmt":"2009-09-24T06:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/?p=2481"},"modified":"2009-09-23T22:02:20","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T06:02:20","slug":"pbworks-cubed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/2009\/09\/23\/pbworks-cubed\/","title":{"rendered":"PBworks cubed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/pbworks.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">PBworks<\/a>, formally called PBwiki, is a collaboration service that has taken advantage of the growth in popularity of wikis. Their website claims: \u201cPBworks is the world&#8217;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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Face 1 \u2013 Market Focus<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>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 \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/pbworks.com\/minisites\/cpc\/ms-cpc.php\" target=\"_blank\">Project Edition<\/a>\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/pbworks.com\/academic.wiki\">Campus Edition<\/a>\u201d, which seems to support this multi-market ambition.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Face 2 \u2013 Types of Offering<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Face 3 \u2013 Who is the buyer? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I see two options here, being:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cLearning      bought for Learner\u201d \u2013 perhaps, for example, it is mainly for higher      education courses where the instructors wish to include wikis in the      course; and<\/li>\n<li>\u201cLearning      Bought Centrally\u201d \u2013 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This seems evident in the various packages that they <a href=\"http:\/\/pbworks.com\/content\/pricing-overview\">provide<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Face 4 \u2013 Global Markets<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>PBworks is mainly focused on \u201cWired Anglophone Countries, although there is a small market in other areas.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Face 5 \u2013 Development of the market<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s experience with wikis. The international market freely imports content and infrastructure, although I\u2019m not aware of many (if any) local companies that produce wiki packages.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Face 6 \u2013 Learning Technology Competing with Other Forms of Learning<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>PBworks would fit under the category: \u201cLearning Technology Substitutes for Others Forms of Learning\u201d. 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\u2019s just \u201ceLearning\u201d. PBworks would have to compete with face-to-face appracs to collaborative approaches to learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PBworks, formally called PBwiki, is a collaboration service that has taken advantage of the growth in popularity of wikis. Their website claims: \u201cPBworks is the world&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[548,751,563,5161,632,92],"class_list":["post-2481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mod03the-global-learning-technologies-marketplace","tag-cube","tag-cube-analysis","tag-m3","tag-mcminn","tag-pbwiki","tag-wiki"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2482,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions\/2482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}