In a comment to my recent ill-considered ramblings on OpenCourseWare, Leigh Blackall advocated ‘truly OPEN source and not just “free”‘ approaches to open education. Point taken — if there is one additional point I wish I had made in that original post, it is that open education takes many forms… I, for one, think that John Willinsky’s wiki combining authentic teacher training and a database of useful lesson plans is every bit as much a contribution to open education as a collection of PDF’ed lecture notes assembled as a course.
One of the sites Leigh cited as a natural platform for open educators is WikiEducator, which is a very impressive project with lots on the go.
One, via Stephen Downes, I learn that WikiEducator is piloting a collaborative video project that may eventually benefit Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-powered environments. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I have never heard of Kaltura, especially since they have gathered some buzz previously…
Two, WikiEducator will be leading a very cool ongoing web seminar as part of the Learning4Content project which looks like a great opportunity to hone MediaWiki authoring skills and also to get a sense of a novel pedagogical model. Gotta love the Learner Contract: in return for your training, you deliver an open educational resource. I’m signing up.
Finally, WikiEducator will be hosting the ongoing development of the OER Handbook. (Here’s the blog.)
I hadn’t heard of Kaltura either … but it looks good!
You can check out the Kaltura wiki extension here: http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki and more info here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Collaborative_Video
Thanks for the additional info — I’ll be watching for Kultura!