Formal biography: Wayne Mackintosh

Wayne is a committed advocate and user of free software for education. He was the founding project leader of New Zealand's eLearning XHTML editor (eXe) project (www.exelearning.org) and founder of WikiEducator (www.WikiEducator.org) - an international community of educators collaborating on the development of free/libre teaching materials in support of all national curricula by 2015.

Wayne has extensive international experience in educational technology, learning design and the theory and practice of open and distance learning (ODL). Previously, he was Education Specialist, eLearning and ICT policy at the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), an intergovernmental organisation based in Vancouver, Canada. Before joining COL he was Associate Professor and founding director of the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning (CFDL) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. At the University of Auckland, he was tasked with eLearning strategy and leading CFDL's professional staff team. Prior to moving to New Zealand he spent eleven years working at the University of South Africa (UNISA), a distance learning institution and one of the world's mega-universities. Wayne has participated in a range of international consultancies and projects including work for COL, the International Monetary Fund, UNESCO and the World Bank. Wayne is a member of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons New Zealand and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education. Previously, Wayne served on Editorial Board of Open Learning for more than a decade, but now focuses on open access and open education research efforts.

Wayne is married with three children and lives close to Dunedin on the beautiful South Island of New Zealand.

Qualifications Ph.D. University of Bath, United Kingdom. MEd, BEd, BCom and Higher Education Diploma (Postgraduate), University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Helping the freedom culture to create, remix and reuse free teaching materials in support of all national curricula by 2015.

My biases

• I'm an educator and I wouldn't change my career for anything else.
• I believe that all learners and teachers should have the freedom to use the technologies of their choice. No learner should be denied access to an education because learning material is locked behind copyright or because people may not have the resources to pay for licensed software.
• Ubuntu GNU/Linux helps me to live and work as an upright citizen.
• All people of the world have a fundamental right to participate in the knowledge economy - access is not an excuse for using legacy technologies.
• Social innovation is the only way to ensure sustainable learning for development.

I spend most of my time in WikiEducator and hang out on the main discussion group. I still hold the record for the most posts to our main list and this is my main communication channel with the WikiEducator family. I'm also a member of the Teacher Collaboration Forum, WikiEducator Tech List, WikiEducator Community Council List and the OERNZ List. I'm a lazy microblogger and from time to time will post on my twitter, identi.ca and facebook accounts. Yes, I do resort to posting the same feed to all my social network accounts (I said I was a lazy microblogeer). My contributions in WikiEducator and the main discussion list are my blog.

Feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. My recent contributions in WikiEducator is the best place to keep up with what I'm doing. Further contact details are provided in my personal infobox on the right or send me an email. I always do my best to answer all emails -- but sometimes my inbox gets too full to attend to all my mail :-(. If urgent -- please send a copy with "URGENT" in the subject line.

• My family (Wendy, Anthony, Catherine and Jessica);
• Launching WikiEducator as a community to support and promote eduction in the developing world using free content and open networks;
• Founding project leader of the eLearning XHTML Editor (eXe) project helping to widen access to web publishing in education for all teachers using free software;
• Creating spaces to work with African educators in building free content for Africa by Africa through the (FLOSS4Edu) project;
• Widening access to ICT skills development for everyone through projects like the WikiEducator Newbie Tutorials and the Learning4Content initiative -- the world's largest wiki skills training project for educators;
• Supporting Kiwi teachers in building a national OER commons for New Zealand and sharing this experience to help other countries establish their own national OER portals;
• Invited to serve on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I am an active contributor to the WikiEducator project and am proud to be a top 50 editor. I love talking about WikiEducator and sharing our experiences in key notes and invited presentations. To date, I have raised over NZ$550,000 from the donor community to support WikiEducator's work and hope you will join us in raising more funding for our important mission. I've listed a few of my more substantive contributions so you can get a sense of my interests and what I've been up to in our WikiEducator family.

I dedicate my edits to the following pages to the public domain. With regard to the edits on these pages, I waive all of my rights to these specified edits worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighbouring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

• WikiEducator:Public_Domain

WikiEducator is one of the world's fastest growing and most productive wikis in the formal education sector. There are 63,770 registered users and you can make this one more by creating an account. WE are a community of educators with more than 70% of our users being teachers, lecturers or trainers working in the formal education sector.

As the founder of WikiEducator, I receive a fair number of emails and questions about the history of our project. This page provides a few links to resources on the early history and where you can find more information.

• I registered the wikieducator.org, wikieducator.net and wikieducator.com domains on 12 February 2006.
• I made my first edit on the demo site on 13 February 2006 - The day before Valentines day!
• You can read about our early history which was also published with a little more context under a blog post called WikiEducator: Memoirs, Myths, Misrepresentations and the Magic as part of the OSS and OER in Education Series. (Note: This was authored before COL implemented a
  Blogging policy
  confusing the boundaries between freedom of speech and corporate profile in a participatory website sponsored by the Agency.)
• In October 2007, I posted an audio slideshow about the WikiEducator project -- I should develop a new version with updates of the project and reflections on how well we've performed on our objectives.
• From the onset of WikiEducator, I was determined to implement a community governance model for the project. We started with a Interim International Advisory Board combined with a promise to our community that we would develop a Open Community Governance Policy and hold democratic elections for the establishment of the first WikiEducator Council once attaining 2,500 registered users. WE remained true to our community commitments and our election officer announced the outcome of the first WikiEducator elections on 19 September 2008. (These elections were an enlightening experience for an international agency concerned with issues of accountability and control in the unfamiliar territory of a global and open community project. Given the freedom of open source software, a parallel wiki installation was established by COL management in May 2008, preceding the announcement of WikiEducator's community elections in June 2008. Sadly, this move provided perceptual justifications to early concerns voiced from some commentators in non-commonwealth countries with reference to the international credibility of an open wiki project administered by an international agency. It was time to find a new home for our project.)
• The WikiEducator community had fast become an international exemplar for sustainable OER futures demonstrating the power of open communities collaborating at the heart of the educational endeavour: sharing knowledge freely. WE had outgrown our founding home at COL and I had the privilege of announcing a new and exciting future for WikiEducator on 24 September 2008 -- a new international home: The OER Foundation. WE provide more information about the shift in custodianship and reasons why this will promote and support our international endeavour for the social good of education.
• I have donated the wikieducator.org, wikieducator.net and wikieducator.com domains to the OER Foundation as an international non-profit organisation committed to open education so that we can ensure the future success of our collective work.
• The OER Foundation practices open philanthropy which means all our planning documents, funding proposals etc. are developed openly and transparently in the wiki.

We're making the future happen and am looking forward to the records we're going to break as we move forward on our journey to sustainable education futures!