WikiEducator

WikiEducator and the Commonwealth of Learning

We're turning the digital divide into digital dividends using free content and open networks. We hope you can help us.

About

WikiEducator is a community project working collaboratively with the Free Culture Movement] towards a free version of the education curriculum by 2015. Driven by the learning for development agenda we focus on:

• building capacity in the use of Mediawiki and related free software technologies for mass-collaboration in the authoring of free content;
• developing free content for use in schools, polytechnics, universities, vocational education institutions and informal education settings;
• facilitating the establishment of community networks and collaboration with existing free content initiatives in education;
• fostering new technologies that will widen access, improve quality and reduce the cost associated with providing education, primarily through the use of free content.

Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth of Learning is the patron of WikiEducator.

Organizational affiliation

WikiEducator is a free community resource supported by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) for the development of free educational content.

COL is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.

Team Members

• Wayne Mackintosh

Location

Commonwealth of Learning (COL)
1055 West Hastings Street, Suite 1200
Vancouver, BC V6E 2E9
Canada

Tel: +1.604.775.8200 Fax: +1.604.775.8210

Languages

English

Interests and Expertise

• Open and distance learning
• Learning design for asynchronous learning
• Building capacity for free content development

Current Projects

List of projects related to OLPC, eg:

Educational Activities

Designing activities and lesson plans for use with XO.

Past Projects

List of completed OLPC-related projects.

Potential Projects

Project ideas, projects under discussion

• Wiki Collaboration - OLPC section on the wikieducator wiki; vice versa. Shared template/tutorial and style guide development (Wikieducator has excellent templates and images for use in mediawiki). Discussion of how our communities can work together -- shared plotting. Also,

• interwiki links.
• translation network connections.

• Content jams

• Handouts for the classroom. work on problem collections or books. getting communities (small ones!) together to collab on this, work with a shared db and submit their work, also get inspiration / content from the same central community
• University projects to run mini content jams - David Wiley
• NGO projects to run larger or synchronized content jams
• local communities to run evening / afternoon jams

• Free textbook projects -- work with India, Arab Free Text project, Polish Free Textbook project, XXI texts project [actually put them on-wiki], Freeculture efforts (high school & beyond)
• Content release cycles. multimedia and multiformat

• libraries and collections to be used by software
• media and materials useful to the software; where to find more
• lesson ideas and workshop brainstorming around an activity
• whitepapers that cover the focus of the release
• connections and supporting groups
• Publish shared cycles for releasing snapshots of books, wikipedia collections, news updates about the state of the world (similar to

what icommons do), &c.

Resources

• Wikieducator Content