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Jody Baty

2 years ago

in On Competition on eduFire
“The purpose of competition is not to beat someone down, but to bring out the best in every player.” Walter Wheeler

I was recently at a tradeshow where my main competitor was located two booths down from me. For the first day or so, we just kind of gave each other silly looks and it was awkward. Then we started to talk and went for lunch together. Several things became apparent:

- the e-learning market is enormous and there's plenty of room for multiple vendors.
- the key is to 'niche thyself', as Guy Kawasaki recommends. Make your product different enough from each other to target different segments.
- You can learn about yourself from how your competition perceives you.
- And, who knows, maybe someday these will be the guys interested in buying your business or vice-versa

2 years ago

in Turning Teachers Into Rockstars on eduFire
Turning teachers into celebrities, such as the food industry has done for the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, is a pretty cool idea. In some ways we’ve already seen this. Who can forget sitting through Carl Sagan’s ‘Billons and billions’ lectures in high school? Or even the Mr. Rogers’ series for early childhood education.

It’s more difficult to name recent ‘Edu-stars’, however. Teaching and learning has changed significantly, even since Carl Sagan’s heyday in the mid-1980s. The idea of the ‘sage on the stage’ has fallen out of favour. There is a realization that real learning is a constructed process that it involves more than just one person (the teacher).1 The Rock Star model is part of the old paradigm of education where you have an instructor at the front of the room ‘talk at’ people until they understand.2 In the new world of distributed, collaborative education, it’s going to become more and more difficult to create Rock Star educators. This is not to say that there won’t be great teachers any more. But rather the great teachers are going to be those who are willing to step out of the way once in a while and let the students become the stars.

1. Kearsley, G. (1994, 1999). Explorations in learning & instruction: The theory into practice database. Washington, DC: George Washington University. Retrieved May 1999, from http://www.gwu.edu/~tip/

2. Bligh, D. A. (n.d.). What’s the use of lectures? Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.
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