WikiEducator: A return to the traditions of the academy?

Abstract

The Open Education Resource (OER) movement shows considerable potential to reduce cost, improve quality and widen access to educational opportunities. Facilitated by the power of social software in a connected world as evidenced by the phenomenal success of the Wikimedia Foundation projects and the WikiEducator initiative, educators can now take command of their own destiny by returning to the core value of education, namely to share knowledge freely.

This session will reflect and report on progress of the WikiEducator project by exploring (1) how the research and practice of Open Distance Learning can contribute to the success of emerging knowledge production models in the OER arena; (2) how social software is shifting the power of knowledge back to the academy where it belongs (3) and preliminary thoughts on the sustainability of peer-collaboration models of OER knowledge production.