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{{SteveFoerster_nav}}
{{Infobox_personal
|Name = Steve Foerster
|Occupation = eLearning Consultant
|Employer = [http://www.hiresteve.com Myself]
|Nationality = US by chance, [[Dominica]] by choice
|Email=steve@hiresteve.com
|Blog = http://hiresteve.com/blog
|Boxes ={{User pd}}{{User Caribbean}}{{User Researcher}}{{User Dominican}}{{User CIDER Fellow}} {{WikiCouncil}}{{User_WikiAmbassador}}{{User_Ubuntu_user}}
}}

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! Steve's recent blog entries
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! Public Domain Dedication
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|'''All contributions by this user hereby released into the public domain'''

I, Steve Foerster, waive all claim of copyright (economic and moral) for all content contributed by me to WikiEducator and immediately place any and all contributions by me to WikiEducator into the public domain. I grant anyone the right to use my work for any purpose, without any conditions, to be changed or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without any attribution or notice to me.

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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 [[User:Mackiwg|Wayne Mackintosh]] says, together we can do so much more.

I see the open education movement as a subset of the [http://freeculture.org free culture] movement.   As such I have been fairly active with [http://icommons.org 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 [[WikiEducator:Advisory_Board|International Advisory Board]], and in 2008 was elected to the first [[WikiEducator:Community_Council|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.  [[Ambassadors/Record_of_promotional-events#Steve_Foerster|Here's my personal record]].

As a just-for-fun WikiEducator activity, in July 2008 [[User:Minhaaj|Minhaaj ur Rehman]] and I started the [[UPE|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'm married to Adella Toulon, and have four wonderful children, Duncan, Fiona, Graham, and Noah, who (as of October 2009) range in age from twelve to four.

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 has most recently been as Director of E-Learning at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., but I resigned from that in June 2009 to do writing and consulting, and right now work primarily for [http://www.elearners.com eLearners.com] and [http://gradschools.com GradSchools.com].  I also occasionally develop and teach a few online IT courses for [http://www.lco.edu Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College], located in the beautiful north woods of the U.S. state of Wisconsin, an institution that uses [http://moodle.org Moodle] as their learning management system.

As if that's not enough, I'm also now in the midst of doctoral study, doing a Doctor of Health Education program through A.T. Still University.  My research area relates to the effectiveness of distance learning to disseminate nutritional information on a vegan diet, but if I can fit open educational resources in there somewhere I certainly will. For those who might want to see how I'm doing with this, I'm blogging about my doctoral experience [http://community.elearners.com/blogs/atsu/default.aspx here].

[[Category:WikiCaribbean]]
[[Category:WikiAmbassador]]