Learning4Content/Workshops/Messages/L4C Adv Day1

The WikiEducator Community
Wikieducator is an exciting, fluid and dynamic environment of educators (formal and nonformal education) dedicated to exploring new approaches in education and adapting more traditional ones. WE is an open 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

For more, please review the WikiEducator Strategy

What's Happening in the Community

 * There is a considerable range of activity, with educators developing open educational resources (OERs) from all over the world. To get a sense of the WE Community and the activity going on in the wiki, please click: Recent Changes. You can check this regularly, by going to the Navigation box on the upper left side of your computer screen, and clicking "Recent Changes" (just under "Main Page").
 * Check out the most recent global traffic ranking of WikiEducator ~ as compared to the top websites in the world - (See: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/wikieducator.org - as of Sept. 9, 2008, WE are in the top 188,000 websites in the world!)
 * To gauge the Community activity, visit the main WE discussion group on Google Groups - http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator

Do the Basic Text Formating Tutorial

 * Do the tutorial Basic Text Editing

Download & Sign Your Learning Contract

 * A learning contract for this workshop will be placed by the facilitators as a sub page linked to your user page. Please read the Learning Contract - and sign it using wiki syntax - the same way you signed your introductory text in the pre workshop activity.

Share Your Idea for an Open Educational Resource (OER)

 * On your WE User Page, add the following wiki syntax: */OER/
 * This will automatically create a red link to another page on the wiki called OER (we call it a "sub-page) ~ for Open Educational Resource.
 * Click "save"
 * Now, go back and click that red link. This will automatically link you to your new OER page!!
 * Now, you can begin editing that page - by adding text to the input box that describes your idea for an OER on WikiEducator.
 * Make sure to briefly describe your edits when you SAVE YOUR WORK! - so it can be reflected in "Recent Changes"