User:SteveFoerster

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Steve Foerster
About Steve	Main User Page  |  My Site and Current Blog  |  My Blog from 2008 to 2010
My WikiEducator Projects	XXI Texts  |  Great Books XXI  |  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
Employer:	MicroStrategy
Occupation:	Education Specialist
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
Using Wikipedia Articles To Make OER Textbooks Political Persecution Of Indian Filmmaker Kamal Haasan Questions About Copyright Happy National Spaghetti Day! The NRA’s Response To Newtown Misses The Mark On Being Anti-Science Steve’s Pressure Cooked Vegan Stew Relax, Redux Relax, Higher Education Won’t Be Killed By MOOCs Don’t Believe Everything You Read

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 the coveted Featured User Page award is bestowed 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 have four wonderful children who throughout most of 2013 will range in age from eight to sixteen.

While I'd love to spend all my time with my family or researching, developing, and promoting OERs, alas, there are bills to pay. While I spent ten years working for colleges and universities in various staff and administrative capacities, usually involving distance learning, I now work as an Education Specialist for MicroStrategy, a large business intelligence firm founded by Michael Saylor, whose other major project, the Saylor Foundation, produces online courses and textbooks as OERs. I've also edited a blog called eLearners News and developed and taught online IT and business courses for Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College, located in the beautiful north woods of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. Many institutions where I've worked and taught have used Moodle as their learning management system, and I've come to favor that platform not just because it's open source, but also because it's just generally well designed.

To learn more about me, feel free to visit my personal web site