WikiEducator:First Community Council Elections/bron

Campaign
I really believe in the principles of open and free education for anyone and everyone. Learning is what stands us apart as human beings. Free education can make the difference between living hopelessly - in poverty - or making the best of what the world has to offer. Wikieducator is helping us to make this happen in very practical ways - at the cliff face!

If I am elected to the WikiEducator Council I will advocate for the following:


 * 1) Better collaboration between global communities to share resources;
 * 2) More diverse educational resources - produced in partnership for communities who do not have online access;
 * 3) Educational approaches to support the United Nations Millenium goals;
 * 4) Wider use of Wikieducator nationally in New Zealand for sustainable tertiary education;
 * 5) More practical and streamlined use of resources on WikiEducator;
 * 6) Usability testing and research evaluation of Wikieducator resources for effective learning;
 * 7) Improved functionality of the Wikieducator platform for the "cautious" educator;
 * 8) More versatile design tools and features for the wiki pages.

History
My first introduction to WikiEducator happened in September 2006 when I added myself as a volunteer to help create a wiki version of the elearning Guidebook. I became interested in the Commonwealth of Learning initiatives in 2004 when I helped organise the PCF3 and DEANZ (Distance Education in New Zealand) conference in Dunedin. One of the outputs of the conference was a paper proposing strategies for helping meet the United Nations Millenium goals.

Course development
Since 2007, as an Educational Developer, I have both created and helped academic colleagues at Otago Polytechnic to create courses on Wikieducator. Namely:
 * The Anatomy and Physiology of Animals
 * HIVAIDS
 * Evaluation of eLearning for Best Practice
 * Designing for flexible learning practice
 * Facilitating online communities
 * Digital information literacy
 * Food Safety

I really enjoy using the Wikieducator platform in my teaching roles. I am using a weekly course schedule based on Leigh Blackall's design to provide tantalising tidbits of information on the course topics and links to a multitude of resources - already available on the Internet. There is so much to choose from and the difficulty is to keep the resource list manageable for the students. You can see what I have done in the Evaluation of eLearning for Best Practice course.

Research projects
I am also coordinating two research projects on Wikieducator. Namely:
 * The power of design on flexible learning
 * Digital information literacy

Contributions
As you will see I have made many contributions to Wikieducator since 2006.

User page
A further list of my activities can be found on my profile at Otago Polytechnic. My WikiEd User Page]is currently under development.

Confirmation of nomination

 * --Wayne Mackintosh 05:56, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
 * --Leighblackall 06:49, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
 * --Countrymike 03:38, 25 July 2008 (UTC)