Ventures in Learning Technology

Here I will reflect and capture my portfolio of comments and key learnings from this course. I will provide links to the posts that provide evidence of my thinking and reflect on what they mean for my educational practice.

My first reflection, titled “View of the Horizon” analyzed the Horizon report while weaved analogy into my response. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec522may12/2012/05/16/view-of-the-horizon/

The second task took my investigations into the venture marketplace to analyze business venture pitches. My response to the venture pitch from Dybusters and Mindtraction provided feedback on the elements within their venture pitch.  It was important to remember the key elements when deconstructing a venture pitch – content and message. Content includes: pain point, solution, differentiation, marketing, championship, competition, the ask and the return. Elements within the message includes: CEO and management team, venture concept, marketability and venture plan.

Then came the task to investigate deeply into a venture within the educational marketplace. I began with the ISTE conference vendors listing, as suggested on the course site. Through this early scan, I decided to spend time looking deeply at John Baker and the Desire 2 Learn (D2L) company located in Waterloo, Ontario. By the time I had completed my investigation, another course member had posted an incredibly detailed summary about the company, CEO and market offering. I turned to another company that was of interest to me, and completed a reflection on VocaLinks, Inc.

Our next weeks were spent working on small group presentations relating to ventures and markets relating to education. These include: Blogs, Learning with Games, Learning in the Cloud, Personalized/Adaptive Learning, Visual-Intensive Learning, BYOD, Self-Guided Learning and Masters of Educational Technology