Horty Kim

I was invited to attend a meeting on Friday ,August 17 at the Learning Centre to meet Wayne MacKintosh from the Commonwealth of Learning and I learned a thing or two.

It was a great chance to meet other Otago Polytechnic staff who are working on flexible delivery options for their respective courses as well as listen to Wayne explain his work in on line education.I really liked his philosophy on free education and his vision to help facillitate the availability of free education to all countries,in all languages by 2015!

I took along my camera and did a bit of video and I will try to nutshell some stuff but Wayne can say it best and I just love his accent!
In the first bit of video Wayne introduces himself and explains that he works for the CoL on two levels-the policy level and on an implementation level.He is a board member of the Wiki Media Foundation and in fact CoL founded WikiEducator.What is WikiEducator you are wondering?The previous link will help you get a handle on wiki.Wayne is also involved in developing funding proposals and it is one of the areas he works in that he is most proud of.I apologize that Wayne is sideways in the first part of the video, but then again he does a lot of things differently.

Wayne brought along an informative presentation which included some sobering statistics on how many people did not receive a secondary education let alone a tertiary education.Who could not help but wonder how much better off the whole world would be if more people learned how to learn?One of the things that was most striking about his desktop was that I did not recognize any of the software he was using?What the?I soon learned that Wayne only uses free software.Another interesting and contagious philosophy.

There is a story in today’ ODT on page 5 if you want a further read.(Also in the ODT photo is Sunshine Connelly who has done some excellent video and editing for some of the units Leigh Blackall and I have been loading to wiki.)And sweet when IgoogledLeigh2giveualink he had already uploaded the article!Good value!Anyway back to the sublime work Sunshine does…Check out this one with Jerry Lynch ,our arboriculture lecturer!

Back to the meeting with Wayne…this next little vid is where I had to leave and teach machinery for horticulture but the discussion is now looking at some wiki examples,specifically on loading handouts and worksheets onto the wiki skeleton and some exciting developments in terms of html to PDF,which will enable me to quickly transfer info from my blog to a wiki.

Yah so some interesting stuff and very interesting people…After reflection I wish i had commented on how being involved in developing flexible options in education has helped me to embrace e learning.I am really enjoying pulling together information and resources.I especially enjoy creating new resources where the lineage is known.I mean it is not unusual to open a folder for a specific unit which contains helpful worksheets,handouts,supporting notes etc and not really know where ALL the info came from?When we create a new resource we can attach our good name to it(otago polytechnic) and be confident that we are sharing useful and original information and at the same time always acknowledging or attributing information from other reputable sources.

Ovah and out.