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Steve Foerster
About Steve	Main User Page  |  My Blog  |  My CV
My WikiEducator Projects	XXI Texts  |  User Page Expo
Community Participation	Most Recent Contributions  |  WikiAmbassador Record  |  Interim Advisory Board
Community Council 2008	Campaign Page  |  Vision for WikiEducator  |  Community Council Biography  |

Steve Foerster
Blog:	http://hiresteve.com
Employer:	Marymount University
Occupation:	Director of E-Learning
Nationality:	US by chance, Dominica by choice
	email
Content contributed by this user is released into the public domain. This person supports Caribbean cooperation. This user is a researcher of wikis and/or open educational resources. This user comes from, lives in, or just plain loves Dominica. This user is a CIDER Research Fellow or Graduate Student Fellow.

Sa ka fete? I'm Steve Foerster. From 2003 until 2007 I was Director of Instructional Technology for the Free Curricula Center, which had the goal of developing textbooks and Moodle courses as open educational resources. In late 2006 I attended the fourth Pan-Commonwealth Forum in Jamaica, and learned about WikiEducator. I became involved with WE at that time and when my colleagues at the Free Curricula Center learned that our efforts were largely duplicative, we chose to fold our materials into WE. As Wayne Mackintosh says, together we can do so much more.

I see the open education movement as a subset of the free culture movement. As such I have been fairly active with iCommons, the most publicly inclusive of the Creative Commons affiliated organizations. I attended the iCommons Summit in Croatia in 2007, and had the opportunity to talk about WikiEducator and meet with many like-minded people. I believe that we who do OERs should find as many opportunities as possible to cooperate with other branches of the free culture movement, especially the Open Access/Access to Knowledge movement, with which we have academia in common.

I'm part of WikiEducator's interim International Advisory Board, so if you have any comments or suggestions about us, please let me know by email. In addition, when I can, I promote WikiEducator through our Ambassadors program. Here's my personal record.

As a just-for-fun WikiEducator activity, in July 2008 Minhaaj ur Rehman and I started the User Page Expo, where once per month we'll bestow the coveted Featured User Page award on someone who has done something interesting with their user page. Nominations are always welcome!

Personal and Professional Notes

On a personal note, I'm joyfully married to the former Adella Toulon, and have four wonderful children, Duncan, Fiona, Graham, and Noah, who (as of June 2008) range in age from eleven to three.

While I'd love to spend all my time with my family or researching, developing, and promoting OERs, alas, there are bills to pay. To accomplish this, my day job is Director of E-Learning at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. I also do a little freelance writing and advising on distance learning topics, and for the last year have been developing and teaching a few online IT courses for La Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College, located in the beautiful north woods of the U.S. state of Wisconsin.

As if that's not enough, I'm also considering doctoral study, perhaps in something related to OERs or free culture, and doing a research PhD as an external student would be particularly appealing. If you're a faculty member at a university that supports this mode of study, and it's not insurmountable that I don't live in your country, I'd love to hear from you. I'm particularly but not exclusively interested in universities in the Commonwealth -- whether I get on well with my research supervisor is the most important thing. Well, that and what the fees are.