User:SteveFoerster

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 [mailto:steve@hiresteve.com?Subject=WikiEducator 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 have four wonderful children who throughout most of 2012 will range in age from seven to fifteen.

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 is Director of Online Education for Virginia International University in Fairfax, Virginia. I also edit a blog called eLearners News and develop and teach a few 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. Both VIU and LCO use 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