Derek Chirnside
I'm a dabbler and a newbie here in WikiEducator land.
However, I am committed to the vision of OER. My personal story includes great disatisfaction with many educational resources I had. Especially text books. I wrote lots and lots of worksheets, many of which I made available free. (I called them CooL Worksheets - Co-operative Learning)
I did put them on the market at some stage (never sold any). :-) People just copied them and used them anyway. For several years I made books every year of stuff for all my classes. If I die, you can still use this to get to the end of the course or more to the point: we can have a great time here, and if we have more fun and don't cover the topic - you have the stuff anyway. (Catered for my teaching style, loosely categorised as 'chaotic')
Fast forward to 2000. I became an educational designer. I found out I had been doing a form of educational design for 25 years.
Pragmatically, I think teachers need to share.
I enjoy teaching (and I need to find some for 2009, since with the merger [and the chaos, politics and money involved] at the University here I no longer teach either of the four courses I have been involved with in the past. I co-developed two of these courses and developed one).
I'm in the middle of a Moodle trial.
Now I see sharing, open resources and collaboration, networking, community as critical aspects to education and the way ahead. I see free range education as being vital.
I've rambled enough.
Looking forward to seeing you all in Dunedin.
