Guest Contributors
April 27th, 2007 by Shelby ThayerJoel Thierstein
Dr. Joel Thierstein serves as the Associate Provost for Innovative Scholarly Communication at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions. Prior to coming to Rice, Joel served as an Associate Professor and Director of New Media Communications at Oregon State University. He also served as a professor at Baylor University, Purdue University Calumet, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Dr. Thierstein has also served as a visiting professor of Communications Law at Syracuse University.
Writing extensively in telecommunications, Joel’s books include Birds In Flight: Satellites In The New Millennium, 3rd ed. and Religion, Law and Freedom: A Global Perspective. In addition, to Joel’s obvious commitment to open and sustainable education, he also has served as a Board member of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center since 2000 and Board Chair since 2003, and has worked extensively with the Conservation Centers for Species Survival.
Stuart Sim
Read Stuart’s Post (from 4/11/08): The Business of Open Source
Stuart Sim serves as the Chief Technology Officers and Chief Architect of Moodlerooms, which provides comprehensive technical support services to the Moodle course management system open source software.
Stuart has spent the past 15 years developing enterprise solutions around the world in the education and financial sectors. His core expertise is in the design and delivery of large-scale implementations using combinations of classic and innovative development methodologies in distributed multi-disciplinary environments.
Amee Godwin
Read Amee’s Post (from 3/1/08): On “Doing OER”
Amee Godwin serves as Program Director, OER Commons, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). Amee Godwin has over a decade of experience in applied research and development of community applications. Her work focuses on connecting technology, education, and collaboration. At ISKME, she guides the development of content, interactivity, and partnerships for OER Commons, a teaching and learning network for open educational resources.
Christine Geith
Read Christine’s Post (from 2/1/08): Can OER Really Impact Higher Education and Human Development?
Dr. Christine Geith is an assistant provost and executive director of Michigan State University’s MSUglobal, the university’s entrepreneurial business unit that works with academic partners across the campus and worldwide to develop online institutes, programs and services. She is responsible for developing strategic frameworks and business models and leading all activities that impact revenue growth.
Leigh Blackall
Read Leigh’s Post (from 11/29/07): Educational Development at Otago Polytechnic
Leigh Blackall specializes in networked learning and socially networked media and communications. He is employed as an Educational Developer at the Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand, and blogs his work to Learn Online.
Steve Foerster
Read Steve’s Post (from 11/14/07): Fair Use as a Complement to Open Licensing
Steve currently serves as the Director of E-Learning at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, where he oversees distance learning, instructional technology, and technical training. He is also on the Advisory Board of WikiEducator, a Commonwealth of Learning funded project to develop a complete set of open educational resources for all disciplines at the primary, secondary, and tertiary level by 2015. He migrated to the open education movement from having been an open source software enthusiast, and prefers dedicating content to the public domain rather than licensing it.
Michael Feldstein
Michael Feldstein is the author of the e-Literate weblog. He is a lifelong educator who has been involved in online learning for eleven years. Michael has been a member of eLearn Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board and is a current participant in the IMS. He is a frequent invited speaker on a range of e-learning-related topics. Most recently, he has been invited to speak on topics including e-learning usability, LMS evaluation methods, ePortfolios, and edupatents for organizations ranging from the eLearning Guild to the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council, and has been interviewed as an e-learning expert by a variety of media outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News and World Report.
Gary Schwartz
Gary Schwartz, Director of Communications & Middleware Technologies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has over 25 years experience in Higher Ed IT, first as a programmer, and subsequently in management. His present responsibilities include centralized email, directory, and web services and middleware, and web software development. He is the project manager and spokesperson for Bedework, the open source, enterprise calendaring system for Higher Ed.
David Wiley
David Wiley currently serves as an Associate Professor of Instructional Technology and also the Director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, (C()SL), at Utah State University. He is best known for having coined the term Open Content and creating the first open source-style license for non-software. His work on open content, open education, and informal online learning communities has been reported in many international outlets. His leadership in the open education resource is wildly recognized.
Rob Abel
Already a veteran Silicon Valley high tech entrepreneur, Rob Abel entered the world of educational technology in 1999 by joining Collegis (now SunGard Higher Education), the leading provider of information, academic, and online technology services in the U.S. higher education market. Prior to joining Collegis, he was responsible for development of products and services for online learning at Oracle. In 2004 Rob founded the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC) to conduct research on best practices in the use of technology in education. One study conducted near the end of 2005 looked specifically at the level and types of adoption of open source in the U.S. higher education market, sponsored by Sun, SCT, and Unicon. The report on this unique study is available online at the A-HEC Open Source Software Research site.
In February 2006 Rob was appointed as the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), a non-profit member consortium that have been focused on developing specifications and standards for interoperability exclusively in the learning sector for now over eleven years. Participation in IMS GLC includes an annual report on Learning Impact: Trends in Learning, Technology, and Standards. This report was inspired by the need to “connect the dots” between new and innovative learning technologies and the key global challenges of education leaders across sectors. IMS GLC has featured tracks on open technologies in its annual conference each of the last two years.
Gavin Baker
Gavin Baker is an IT and public policy consultant. Currently he is developing a student outreach campaign for SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, on the subject of open access to academic journal literature. Gavin also serves on the board of directors for FreeCulture.org, which is an international student organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology policy.
Dick Moore
Dick Moore serves as Director of Technology at Ufi, where he looks after four teams that design, build and maintain learndirect’s IT infrastructure. The concept of a ‘University for Industry’ led to the creation of Ufi, which in turn serves as an umbrella organization supporting learndirect. Learndirect is the world’s largest publicly funded e-learning platform with in excess of 2,5 million learners.
Mara Hancock
Mara Hancock serves as Associate Director for Educational Technology Services at UC Berkeley, and oversees the Learning Systems Group (LSG). She manages an extremely talented team of educational technologists, software programmers and architects, User Experience Designers, and training and support folks. We work with UC Berkeley faculty, students, and staff, as well as other educational technology professionals around the world to develop, adopt, and support collaboration and learning systems to enhance the teaching and learning experience.
Jean-Claude Dauphin
Jean-Claude Dauphin works at UNESCO HQ, Paris, in the Information Society Division. He has a software developer background and contributes to the development and dissemination of UNESCO information processing tools such as the Open Source Greenstone Digital Library system. He is also in charge of the UNESCO Free and Open Source portal and a member of the team in charge of UNESCO “ICT in Education, Sciences and Culture” activities. He is involved in activities related to Openness, and has a strong interest in FOSS Education solutions and open educational resources.
Craig Perue
Craig Perue was appointed as the first staff member in the Instruction Support Systems unit in the IT department of the largest University of the West Indies campus in 2003. Craig was responsible for stimulating faculty adoption of WebCT which was being implemented across the University that year. The programme was so successful that the campus outstripped its budget for WebCT licenses which then allowed Craig to lead the evaluation of open source alternatives and one of the largest early implementations of moodle (15,000 students) in January 2004. As the manager of the campus’s educational technology practice, he led the campus’s re-branding and development of moodle as OurVLE and the campus’s migration away from WebCT, as well as the successful evangelization of moodle throughout the University and the English-speaking Caribbean.
Dr. Farideh Mashayekh
Dr. Farideh Mashayekh serves as a Strategic Consultant in Educational Planning and Pedagogy with Pedagogy.ir. Much of her teaching, research, and other work have focused on systems approaches to planning adult education and lifelong learning and the application of cognitive and constructivist schools of thought in teaching-learning processes. In addition to being a prime mover behind Pedagogy.ir, she is a thought leader in the adult education community in Iran.
James Dalziel
James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology and Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Prior to his current roles, James helped lead the COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services) project, was a Director of WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an e-learning and assessment company, and was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sydney. James currently leads a number of projects including:
- LAMS
- MAMS (Meta Access Management System) - a national identity and access infrastructure project for the Australian higher education sector
- RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities) - a project investigating open standards authorization and e-Research workflows
- ASK-OSS (the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software) - a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australia higher education and research sector
Kim Tucker
Kim Tucker is our fourth guest contributor to this series and will be writing on a number of related topics that integrate Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and free knowledge and equality in education, while also posing questions about what we mean by equality in education and the implications for digital inclusion. The term “libre” refers to distinguish freeware (gratis software) from free software, which encompasses use, modification, and distribution. Kim is currently working as a researcher at the Meraka Institute, managed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. The main focus of his research is the introduction of technology and collaborative learning opportunities, and FLOSS for knowledge sharing and education. Kim also provides general advocacy of FLOSS and libre knowledge. His background includes some cognitive psychology, computer science lecturing, environmental decision support-systems development and other aspects of software development (Java, architecture, patterns, agile methodologies, etc.), and conservation biology (M.Sc.).
Pat Masson
Pat Masson’s contribution to the OSS series was from personal experience about the barriers to institutional adoption of open source software. Pat currently serves as the Chief Information Officer for New York College of Technology at Delhi. As CIO, Pat provides oversight, leadership and vision for the college’s Campus Information Services including enterprise applications, technical centers and labs, server/systems administration, network & telecommunications, online/distance learning as well as user support such as help desk services.
Wayne Mackintosh
Wayne Mackintosh contributed to the series in mid-April and talked about WikiEducator, the freedom culture, and education.
In addition to Wayne’s work on WikiEducator, he was the founding project leader of New Zealand’s eLearning XHTML editor (eXe) project. Wayne is a committed advocate and user of free software for education. He currently serves the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) as Education Specialist, eLearning and ICT Policy and is the founding director of the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning (CFDL) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Wayne has extensive experience in the theory and practice of open and distance learning (ODL). Prior to moving to New Zealand he spent eleven years working at the University of South Africa (UNISA), a distance learning institution and one of the world’s mega-universities.
Richard Wyles
Richard’s OSS series contribution focused around innovation for education and the infrastructure of New Zealand’s education system. Richard Wyles is a director and co-founder of Flexible Learning Network Ltd, a private company focused on flexible learning solutions for the education, corporate training and public sectors. For the past four years Richard has been leading national eLearning infrastructure projects in New Zealand, underpinned by open source and particularly Moodle. A full-time development team, now numbering around 10 programmers has been working continuously on Moodle and related open source projects since May 2004. Within a short period of time, Moodle is now the most widely used Learning Management System in New Zealand, particularly in the post-secondary vocational educational sector and increasingly within government sector departments.
Ruth Sabean
The first guest contributor in our OSS Series, Ruth Sabean serves as the assistant vice provost for educational technology in UCLA’s College of Letters and Science and director of educational technology in the university’s Office of Information Technology.
Sabean is responsible for developing strategic educational technology plans and initiatives for UCLA that will improve the student educational experience through technology. From 1993–2002, she was the assistant director for educational technology in UCLA’s Office of Instructional Development, following positions directing and managing academic computing services at Cornell University and UCLA, and an early career in software development. She is an active member of EDUCAUSE, Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC), and the New Media Consortium (NMC). She has served on the boards of SAC, the NMC, and the EDUCAUSE Advisory Committee on Teaching & Learning. Sabean holds an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh.
