Online Education

There are many demonstrations of the power of community collaboration over the net - MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), Curriki and Wiki Educator being fairly good examples.

Several African countries have joined the Wiki Educator FLOSS4Edu project; but SA is noticeably absent - as with the OLPC project (although there is a small hope of a groundswell movement at www.laptop.org.za.

If one were to bet - Wiki Educator would seem a surer thing than the apparent reinventing of the wheel that is being attempted by a local startup called eduwiki - who appear to focus exclusively on the South African syllabus.

It seems glaringly apparent that in order to succeed all efforts should be global in general, and regionalized as a natural extension of their universal applicability. Even (especially?) language lessons.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the fragmentation and consequent duplications of effort are all rather pointless.

Copyright issues are another major problem, and Wiki Educator is revising several old, but still valid, text books:

WikiEducator: Projects
XXI Texts is a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain, such as those published in the United States prior to 1923, and revise them to be relevant to students in the twenty-first century. While works that old from some disciplines are nothing more that historical curiosities, in other disciplines where basic knowledge has not changed for some time older textbooks can be surprisingly relevant.

WikiNews.Org . . .