User:SteveFoerster

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Steve Foerster
About Steve	Main User Page  |  My Doctoral Study Blog  |  My Site
My WikiEducator Projects	XXI Texts  |  User Page Expo
Community Participation	Most Recent Contributions  |  WikiAmbassador Record  |  Interim Advisory Board
Community Council 2008	Campaign Page  |  Vision for WikiEducator  |  Community Council Biography  |

Steve Foerster
Blog:	http://hiresteve.com/blog
Employer:	Myself
Occupation:	eLearning Consultant
Nationality:	US by chance, Dominica by choice
	email
This user was certified a WikiBuddy by Pschlicht .
Content contributed by this user is released into the public domain. This person supports Caribbean cooperation. This user is a researcher of wikis and/or open educational resources. This user comes from, lives in, or just plain loves Dominica. This user is a CIDER Research Fellow or Graduate Student Fellow. This user is an elected member of the WikiEducator Community Council. This user is a WikiAmbassador for WikiEducator. This user contributes using Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

Steve's recent blog entries
Ethiopia Gets It Wrong, Oh So Wrong Can Universities Buy Prestige? Dropout Factories: Whose Fault? How Does Your Community College Compare? Taxes, Houses, the U.S., and Us

Public Domain Dedication

All contributions by this user hereby released into the public domain I, Steve Foerster, waive all claim of copyright (economic and moral) for all content contributed by me to WikiEducator and immediately place any and all contributions by me to WikiEducator into the public domain. I grant anyone the right to use my work for any purpose, without any conditions, to be changed or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without any attribution or notice to me.

Hi, I'm Steve Foerster. From 2003 until 2007 I was Director of Instructional Technology for the Free Curricula Center, which had the goal of developing textbooks and Moodle courses as open educational resources. In late 2006 I attended the fourth Pan-Commonwealth Forum in Jamaica, and learned about WikiEducator. I became involved with WE at that time and when my colleagues at the Free Curricula Center learned that our efforts were largely duplicative, we chose to fold our materials into WE. As Wayne Mackintosh says, together we can do so much more.

I see the open education movement as a subset of the free culture movement. As such I have been fairly active with iCommons, the most publicly inclusive of the Creative Commons affiliated organizations. I attended the iCommons Summit in Croatia in 2007, and had the opportunity to talk about WikiEducator and meet with many like-minded people. I believe that we who do OERs should find as many opportunities as possible to cooperate with other branches of the free culture movement, especially the Open Access/Access to Knowledge movement, with which we have academia in common.

I was part of WikiEducator's interim International Advisory Board, and in 2008 was elected to the first Community Council, so if you have any comments or suggestions about us, please let me know by email. In addition, when I can, I promote WikiEducator through our Ambassadors program. Here's my personal record.

As a just-for-fun WikiEducator activity, in July 2008 Minhaaj ur Rehman and I started the User Page Expo, where once per month we bestow the coveted Featured User Page award on someone who has done something interesting with their user page. We've since handed it off to others, but as ever, nominations are always welcome!

Personal and Professional Notes

On a personal note, I'm married to Adella Toulon, and have four wonderful children, Duncan, Fiona, Graham, and Noah, who (as of April 2010) range in age from five to thirteen.

While I'd love to spend all my time with my family or researching, developing, and promoting OERs, alas, there are bills to pay. To accomplish this, my day job has most recently been as Director of E-Learning at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., but I resigned from that in June 2009 to do writing and consulting, and right now work primarily for eLearners.com and GradSchools.com. I also occasionally develop and teach a few online IT courses for Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College, located in the beautiful north woods of the U.S. state of Wisconsin, an institution that uses Moodle as their learning management system.

As if that's not enough, I'm also returning to being a student, having enrolled in the PhD in Economics programme through Swiss Management Center. My research interests relate to the relationship between distance learning/higher education and the economic development of low and middle income countries, and open educational resources seems like potentially an important part of that. For those who might want to see how I'm doing with this, I'm blogging about my doctoral experience here.