Hi Everyone, Happy Birthday WikiEducator! We are now maturing and growing up. This provides a solid foundation for us to move forward in widening access to scalable OER futures around the word :-).
Sadly, the majority of the world's population are undeserved when it comes to education. We need your help in planning our voluntary donation drive so that we can expand and extend our mission in working collaboratively with the free culture towards the development of free teaching materials in support of all national curricula. - WE believe that sharing teaching materials as OER can make difference in widening access to learning for all. - WE believe that supporting educators in acquiring the skills to develop OER collaboratively will help us in achieving our goals. In this regard, the OER Foundation oversees the world's largest wiki training project in education under the Learning4Content project. So what does this have to do with birthdays? Our WikiEducator domain names were registered on 12 February 2006. I made my first edits on the WikiEducator site on 13 Feb, and depending on where you are situated in the world --- our Birthday coincides with Valentines day :-). A good day for a birthday of an international OER project --- we can reflect and celebrate our love of education and our commitment to sharing knowledge freely. WE started with one registered user in 2006 and today, 12,700 educators have created a WikiEducator account. WE have provided training opportunities to thousands of teachers, lecturers and trainers in more than 120 different countries -- but we need to do more if we're going to achieve our vision and make a substantive contribution to the future sustainability of education. The OER Foundation is the legal entity responsible for supporting the technical and operational infrastructure of the WE community. As a registered charity we aim to foster the development of sustainable OER ecosystems. We derive our funding from three main sources: 1. International donors, international agencies and government contracts 2. Organisations that join the OER Foundation as contributing members -- We provide value added services in helping these members achieve their objectives using OER. ( http://wikieducator.org/OERF:Join#Table_of_OERF_membership_benefits_-_Detailed_Comparison) 3. Voluntary public donations We are now ready to plan and launch a public donation strategy. I need your help in developing a robust and successful donation plan for our collective work. In accordance with the OER Foundation's committment to open philanthropy, early drafts of our donation plan and thinking are being developed in the wiki: http://wikieducator.org/OERF:Donation_planning Please take a look and visit this page. You are invited to list any questions and/or suggestions on this wiki page as well. WE will monitor the page and do our best to answer all your questions. If you can volunteer a little time in helping us developing our donation plans, please list your names as well and the areas where you can assist us. WE need all the help we can get ;-). Looking forward to building OER futures together. Cheers Wayne -- Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D. Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Board of Directors, OER Foundation. Founder and Community Council Member, Wikieducator, www.wikieducator.org Mobile +64 21 2436 380 User Page: http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg Skype: WGMNZ1 Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
