Authors - OSS and OER in Education Series

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

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.

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.

Wayne Mackintosh

Wayne Mackintosh contributed to the series in mid-April and talked about WikiEducator, the freedom culture, and education. He is 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 develop

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.