OERF:About/Community communique

Announcement, 24 September 2008
Wayne Mackintosh, founder of the WikiEducator project and recently elected member of the WikiEducator Community Council will deliver the opening keynote entitled: WikiEducator: Delivering on the OER Promise at this year's Open Education conference in Logan, Utah.

The WikiEducator Community has 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. Wayne will report on the phenomenal growth and international success of the open-source WikiEducator project, and highlight the organizational dynamics and workings of our vibrant and growing WE Community.

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary celebrations of "Open Content", Wayne will announce plans for the WE project to expand its collaborative open education activities, and achieve greater scalability and sustainability in the international arena.

A New Era of Growth and Opportunity
As of May 1, 2009, WikiEducator will be headquarterd at the new International Centre for Open Education, at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand. Dr. Wayne Mackintosh will assume an executive role as the Founding Director of the International Centre for Open Education, and continue his groundbreaking work in leading the WikiEducator project, on a full-time basis.

As a result, WikiEducator will be able to expand its focus beyond the Commonwealth countries to support multiple language wiki installations. It will also be able to secure the funding necessary to invest in strategic software development features including, for example, the implementation of rich text editing and improving technical interoperability among different OER projects.

WikiEducator is deeply grateful for the commitment, resources and support of the Commonwealth of Learning, in establishing and incubating the WE project to its current level of success.

About Otago Polytechnic
As a global leader in the OER movement, Otago Polytechnic was the first tertiary education institution in the world to implement an OER-friendly intellectual property policy which defaults to a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). All open education content on WikiEducator is CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.

About the Commonwealth of Learning
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL), headquarterd in Vancouver, Canada is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.