Well, what better way to really feel the power of global communication than to throw myself into the Wiki revolution.In one of my net exploration escapades, I stumbled upon the Wikiversity website (I think I ended up there after checking out some info on the UNESCO Communication & Information site). I had never heard of it before, but was excited to see that a course was starting up this month, so I signed on!
The course is about "composing free and online educational resources", and is housed here on the Wikiversity page, and here on the course blog.
To provide a little more context and introduction about myself, I don't have a background in online education tools, so this will all be new to me. However, I am pursuing a Master's in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, through which I have been exploring how ICTs and new media can allow for new ways of interacting with international audiences.
This Wikiversity idea is a phenomenal example of this kind of global interaction. The 68 other people enrolled in this course are situated all around the world, who will be learning collaboratively in one virtual classroom!
The Annenberg School for Communication at USC is a great resource for helping me indulge in this field, as there are many centers and experts who devote their time to researching network culture.
I am currently taking a course on ICTs and International Development, whose course blog is here. We will be covering topics of open educational resources in a few weeks time...but hopefully thanks to this Wikiversity course I will already be an expert by then!
By the way -- In the ICT course my semester project involves creating a documentary about the debates surrounding the One Laptop Per Child. Therefore, I'm hoping this experience learning mroe about open educational resources will help me contribute to that debate more intelligently (by the way, if any of our fellow classmates has experiences with and/or a strong opinion about the OLPC, please leave me a comment, I'd like to speak to you and possibly interview you for the documentary!)
Because I am simultaneously in graduate school at the moment I'm concerned that I won't be able to keep up with all of our reading assignments...but I will take our instructor Teemu's challenge to heart and will try my best to be one of the ones left standing at the end of this 9 week course!
