User:Wikirandy/Biography



Randy Fisher (aka WikiRandy) is a dedicated and passionate leader for open education. He has been instrumental in building the WikiEducator community (www.WikiEducator.org) - an international community of educators collaborating on the development of open education resources (OERs) in support of all national curricula by 2015, in line with the UN's Millennium Development Goals. His MA thesis was published entirely in WikiEducator (a first) -- Primal Needs Gone Digital: Educators Motivations in an Open Wiki Environment. Excerpts have been used to support grant applications to funding organizations.

Randy has extensive experience in facilitating stakeholder/community engagement, collaboration and performance; organization development and change/transition management; and sustainable and scalable project implementation. Randy excels at building strategic relationships and quality linkages and interpersonal connections.

Currently, Randy is a Senior Consultant, Organization and Business Development for the International Centre for Open Education at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, and an elected member WikiEducator Community Council. He is also a Senior Consultant with the Intersol Group, in Ottawa, Canada. Randy has participated in a range of international consultancies and projects including work for COL, Commonwealth Youth Program (ComSec), OER Africa, the University of British Columbia and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.

Previously, he was a project manager with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), an intergovernmental organisation based in Vancouver, Canada, supporting education specialists in E-Learning and ICT Policy; Governance; Higher Education, Media and International Organisations. He has helped build a sustainable and scalable WikiEducator community, He developed a community building methodology embedding action research, organization development and change/transition management support to accelerate stakeholder engagement, buy-in and ownership, to increase performance, innovation and growth in complex adaptive (and self-organising) ecosystems. He has led and contributed to numerous WikiEd projects and initiatives including: Learning4Content wiki skills training; Wiki Skills & Apprenticeship Certification Framework; WikiPublishing and Open Philanthropy.

He has provided organizational and programming development for COL's Community Media / Community Radio Community of Practice and LearnShare HIV/AIDS Africa, and facilitated the startup, performance, innovation and growth of wiki-related actions for COL's capacity building activities for Open Educational Resources in Media for Learning.

Before joining COL, he was a coordinator of a job matching program for a social service agency, in Vancouver, Canada. Prior, he co-founded iCentro Corporation, a network relationship management firm, with operations in Seattle, Vancouver and Ottawa. iCentro co-developed a network-building competency program and strategic action network methodology, delivered to public, private and NGO sector clients in the US and Canada. Before that, Randy Fisher Communications specialized strategic planning, partnering, marketing, market research and communications and writing. He began his career as a journalist, working for The Globe and Mail (Report on Business), CBC Radio and The Financial Post.

Randy is married and lives in Ottawa, Canada's capital city.

Qualifications:

MA, Fielding Graduate University, USA. BJ (postgraduate Journalism degree), University of King's College, Canada. BA (Political Science), McGill University, Canada; Instructional Design, Canada (diploma).