After a late night when the gods of mobile devices were clearly very unhappy with me, I forced myself to get up extra early to attend a SVC Wireless Networking Lunch.  I attended one of their networking dinners a few weeks ago.  This was my fist lunch.  The reason that I was extra early was not that I was really hungry but was because the last minute lunch was put together to give some Chinese entrepreneurs a chance to talk about their new Education 2.0 venture in China before they left for the airport this afternoon.  

The main speakers were Mr. Jason Ren and Dr. James Ong.  Their next tech venture is to create a type of eLearning Web 2.0 company and web site named Great Weave.  I could not find the web site.  Maybe there is no English language site yet.  Their company is going to help China to find a more cost-effective way to educate their college students.  In China, there are huge hurtles to overcome to provide a college education for everyone who qualifies.  According to Ren and Ong, only 20% of the people who want to attend college can.  The biggest problem is that there are many students and few universities and teachers.  I also learned that college in China used to be free back before 1997.  I was told today by one of the lunch attendees who went to college in China that now it cost around $60K for a college education in China.  Compared to US college costs, that is low.  But in China where a good job might pay $1k month, that’s a bunch of money.  

Great Weave is to mix the virtual world of multiplayer games like World of Warcraft with eLearning with college faculty and with social network sites like MySpace.  They are planning to create different virtual campuses for each member university and have the students create educational content.  I am guessing that the classes can be started at any time and that the advance students will help teach the novice students under the watchful eye of a professor.  The only part that I found distasteful was that this virtual university site is supposed to also include shopping.  The speakers showed a mock-up of a virtual university including a virtual dorm room.  I suddenly flashed to the SIMs world.  I saw students buying virtual furniture that was way cooler than the virtual furniture that came standard in all of the freshman dorms.  I imagine that it will not take much to get to a huge virtual bar tab for a virtual fraternity party that leaves a huge virtual hangover.

Technorati tags: Great Weave, SVC Wireless, eLearning, Education 2.0, China, mobile learning