Hi everyone, I'm very pleased to share the news that our recent bid submitted to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been successful.
The OER Foundation has been awarded a grant of $200 000 to support strategic WikiEducator projects. This is a testament to our community's passion and commitment to collaborative models of OER creation and distribution. The WikiEducator community can stand proud and take a brief moment of reflection and celebrate what we have achieved! This is another significant milestone for the WikiEducator family and our wiki model of OER development. This generous funding support from the Hewlett foundation will enable us to: 1) Continue WikiEducator's work in hosting the world's largest wiki skills training project in the formal education sector. This grant will ensure that we can continue providing a minimum of one online Learning4Content workshop for the next 2 years. WikiEducator will continue to provide opportunities for educators around the world to acquire wiki skills for OER content development and collaboration. 2) Build a technology bridge for OER content interoperability between Connexions and the Mediawiki software platforms thus fostering further development and scalability of the OER ecosystem among projects which subscribe to the free cultural works definition. 3) Establish a national OER collaboration for the school sector in New Zealand with the view to developing resources and models that can be reused and remixed for other countries around the world. I would also like to congratulate our friends at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and their respective community projects. The Hewlett Foundation have also awarded the WMF a grant of $500,000 for general operating support of the largest free content initiative in the world. Congratulations to our free content partners at the WMF! This combined with the recent resolution of WMF projects to support the CC-BY-SA license is reason for celebration in the free culture movement --- particularly those projects which have remained true to licensing alternatives which meet the requirements of the free cultural works definition. I'm proud that the OER Foundation and WikiEducator have remained true to our core values modeling approaches for open philanthropy by developing all our funding proposals openly and transparently in the wiki. A special word of thanks to every WikiEducator who continues to demonstrate that the purpose of education is to share knowledge freely. Now onto making the future happen -- we have lots of work to do and we're going to need all the help we can get! 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 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 wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
