Figure 1: Rob Abel

In February 2006 Rob was appointed as the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), a non-profit member consortium that have been focused on developing specifications and standards for interoperability exclusively in the learning sector for now over eleven years. Participation in IMS GLC includes an annual report on Learning Impact: Trends in Learning, Technology, and Standards. This report was inspired by the need to “connect the dots” between new and innovative learning technologies and the key global challenges of education leaders across sectors. IMS GLC has featured tracks on open technologies in its annual conference each of the last two years.

Figure 4: Cole Camplese

Camplese has recently worked to integrate several new emerging technologies into curricular activities at Penn State to support digital expression. He and his team have lead the creation of the Blogs at Penn State, Podcasts at Penn State, and the Digital Commons. Camplese oversees the annual Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology, several community development events, and numerous other initiatives designed to support the adoption of technology for teaching and learning.

Figure 7: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein is the author of the e-Literate weblog. He is a lifelong educator who has been involved in online learning for eleven years. Michael has been a member of eLearn Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board and is a current participant in the IMS. He is a frequent invited speaker on a range of e-learning-related topics. Most recently, he has been invited to speak on topics including e-learning usability, LMS evaluation methods, ePortfolios, and edupatents for organizations ranging from the eLearning Guild to the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council, and has been interviewed as an e-learning expert by a variety of media outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News and World Report.

Figure 9: Christine Geith

Dr. Christine Geith is an assistant provost and executive director of Michigan State University’s MSUglobal, the university’s entrepreneurial business unit that works with academic partners across the campus and worldwide to develop online institutes, programs and services. She is responsible for developing strategic frameworks and business models and leading all activities that impact revenue growth.

Figure 11: 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.

Figure 12: Derek Keats

Derek is a marine biologist with strong interests in using technology to improve teaching-and-learning, to enable higher education to create Education 3.0, and to promote sustainable development.

Figure 13: Andy Lane

Promoted to Professor of Environmental Systems in 2005, he was appointed as Director of The Open University’s OpenLearn Initiative in 2006. He has authored or co-authored many teaching texts and research papers dealing with systems thinking and environmental management, the use of diagramming to aid systems thinking and study, and more recently the development and use of Open Educational Resources.

Figure 14: Wayne Mackintosh

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

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.

Figure 16: 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.

Figure 18: 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.

Figure 19: 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.

Figure 21: Stuart Sim

Stuart has spent the past 15 years developing enterprise solutions around the world in the education and financial sectors. His core expertise is in the design and delivery of large-scale implementations using combinations of classic and innovative development methodologies in distributed multi-disciplinary environments.

Figure 22: Joel Thierstein

Writing extensively in telecommunications, Joel’s books include Birds In Flight: Satellites In The New Millennium, 3rd ed. and Religion, Law and Freedom: A Global Perspective. In addition, to Joel’s obvious commitment to open and sustainable education, he also has served as a Board member of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center since 2000 and Board Chair since 2003, and has worked extensively with the Conservation Centers for Species Survival.

Figure 24: Martin Weller

His post will look at the SocialLearn project, which is the Open University’s attempt to create an open API-based social networking system for learning. He will look at the motivations behind the project, what it hopes to achieve and how the technology is being used as the medium through which the institution itself comes to understand the changes happening in society and in education as a result of digital technologies.

Figure 26: 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.