WikiEducator is the Recipient of the 2008 MANeLA Award of Free Software for Content Authoring
Accra, Ghana, West Africa – May 30, 2008
International MANeLA Award Selection Committee (Chair Selection Committee, Dr. Laura Franklin, NVCC –USA)
WikiEducator is a community project sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning working collaboratively to develop free educational materials in support of national curricula at all levels and all sectors of the education landscape by 2015. Driven by the learning for development agenda we focus on:
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building capacity in the use of Mediawiki and related free software technologies for mass-collaboration in the authoring of free content;
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developing free content for use in schools, polytechnics, universities, vocational education institutions and informal education settings;
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facilitating the establishment of community networks and collaboration with existing free content initiatives in education;
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fostering new technologies that will widen access, improve quality and reduce the cost associated with providing education, primarily through the use of free content.
Only two years old, WikiEducator is within the top 1% of most visited websites in the world. The majority of WikiEducators are formal educators with more than half of our active contributors are over 45 years old. Our community are delighted with these statistics because this demonstrates a return to the core values of education -- namely to share knowledge freely. WikiEducator places a high priority on building skills and capacity and we have trained over 1000 teachers, lecturers and trainers since the inception of the project. We are confident that we can turn the digital divide into digital dividends using free content and open networks and hope that you will join us in this important mission.
