Ken Udas

Hello,

I hope that all is well. My name is Ken Udas. I have been professionally involved in a variety of roles in distance and online learning learning since the mid-90s. I am currently serving the University of Massachusetts (UMassOnline). I have also been, at various times, a passive advocate and an active participant in the freedom culture.

I see efforts like the OERu as important high potential models to positively catalyze actionable alternative thinking in an education sector that desperately needs change. Through participation in this dialogue I am keen to contribute to conceptualizing a credential (meeting Wayne's needs) and better understanding what this approach brings broadly to global capacity development that is also of institutional value.

Thank you Wayne for providing this opportunity. I am looking forward!

Cheers,

Ken

Very nice. Let’s just say that those one or two people within a particular institution who recognize that they do not have to work so hard to promote the benefits of teaching and learning are the president and provost.

What advice would you give them to move the cultural change agenda forward? Let’s say that this hypothetical is in a 2- or 4-year teaching institution.

-Ken

Hello,

My name is Ken Udas.  I serve at Penn State World Campus, which is Penn State’s online campus.  I also spent time in Central Europe in the mid-90’s as an educator and in Central Asia in 2002 & 2003 involved in coalition building to develop elearning capacity in the region.  I am very interested in this dialog.

I have been doing a bit of work recently in Open Educational Resources (OER), Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and Libre Knowledge. These topics seem to have some important implications for education in economically developing regions.

Hello.  I attended a meeting in Vancouver last May or so that brought together a number of folks from the Open Educational Resources and International Development Communities along with folks from the Wikimedia Foundation.  The meeting was organized by the Commonwealth of Learning and supported on WikiEducator.  Its goals were to help Wikimedia develop capacity as a low-barrier collaborative course authoring, cataloging, and presentation environment.  If there is any interest, here is the link to the meeting page:

http://www.wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank

It might be a bit stale now, but still of interest.

Hello, I thought that some of you might be interested in a Open Source Software in Education presentation series.  Beginning on March 12, 2007, a collection of international authors started posting brief online articles featuring their perspectives on the impact of Open Source Software (OSS) on education. The posts will appear biweekly on Terra Incognita. In addition to posting their perspectives, the authors will spend time responding to questions and engaging in dialog during the week following their initial postings. After a week of dialog about the posting a summary is produced and together along with the postings and discussion the content is reformatted and made available on WikiEducator as Open Educational Resources (OER).

If you are interested in viewing the posts and joining the dialog check out Terra Incognita.

If you are interested in learning more about the project, check out the Project Page on WikiEducator.