Summary of Wayne Mackintosh's contribution to the "OSS and OER in Education Series." In this post, Wayne will be writing about his experience with WikiEducator, the freedom culture, and education.
Summary of wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic
“WikiEducator: Memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic,” the third installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on April 4, 2007, by Wayne Mackintosh, education specialist for eLearning and ICT Policy at the
Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and founding director of the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning (CFDL) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Wayne provided the focus of his article early on with the statement, “This is a post about freedom and how it can support education as a common good.” Wayne then framed his article around the intended role of WikiEducator in leading and supporting the development of an entirely free education curriculum by 2015. It is worth noting that Wayne’s work with WikiEducator clearly connects both Free and Open Source Software with Free Open Educational Content (OER).
WikiEducator is built on the OSS Wiki application
WikiMedia .
Wayne’s article has a reflective quality that includes sections on:
- The history of WikiEducator, focusing on the origins of the project and some of the early decisions that included selecting a domain name and potential collaborations.
- Growth in site use.
- How WikiEducator is evolving to meet the 2015 free curriculum objectives. Wayne indicates that WikiEducator is evolving to support engagement and experimentation, facilitating networking and supporting projects that are aligned with COL’s commitment of learning for development.
- Myths about the university and public education. The treatment of these myths shed light on some of the connections between technology and education, and by extension, the impact of OSS and Open Content on the sustainability of educational systems. Wayne provides a provocative and intriguing argument for rethinking the current structure of higher education economics. These myths included:
- “Universities have been around a long time - technology doesn’t restructure our pedagogy“
- Publicly funded education is economically sustainable as a common good.“
- Misrepresentations of Wayne’s comments and arguments. This is another interesting and provocative section, which probably generated the lion’s share of comments. The first misrepresentation addressed is, “it’s far better to have a poor-quality educational resource that is free, than a high-quality resource that is non-free,” which Wayne retraces to arguments about licensing content to make it most useable (avoiding the use of the noncommercial restriction). The second misrepresentation, “monolithic learning management systems are a barrier to widening access to education through eLearning,” is linked to Wayne’s assertion that learning management systems have dominated and constrained how we think about structuring and supporting eLearning, effectively stifling dialog about personalized learning environments and other alternative approaches to learning and communication support environments.
- The section titled “The Magic of WikiEducator” is Wayne’s opportunity to frame that section’s dialog by reflecting on the impact he has seen WikiEducator have on practitioners and projects that are aligned in a loosely coupled network with the basic Commonwealth of Learning commitment to educational development and the tangible objectives of a free curriculum by 2015.
