Making connections

A revolutionary education system is sweeping the world and the blackboard is right here, in Dunedin. Nigel Benson learns new stuff.

"This is the most rewarding thing I have done in my whole career," Dr Wayne Mackintosh muses in the sun outside Otago Polytechnic.

It's one of the last things he says during our interview.

And it's also, perhaps, the most revealing.

Dr Mackintosh (46) has good reason to feel satisfied.

More than nine million of them, in fact.

His brainchild, WikiEducator, has become an educational phenomenon taking the world by storm, linking learners with free learning materials through the medium of the internet.

"It's a return to the core values of education, the sharing of knowledge and learning materials.

"It's about sharing knowledge and the sustainability of education.

"We want to build a community and offer free training to any warm-blooded mammal on the planet to acquire," Dr Mackintosh says.

Home base for this global and borderless, boundless utopian vision is Dunedin's Otago Polytechnic campus, which Dr Mackintosh says is an exemplar of his brave new world of education.

Indeed, the polytechnic has embraced the WikiEducator philosophy of sharing knowledge.

Sharing it freely, willingly and globally.

While WikiEducator may be relatively little known outside education circles to date, most will have come across its internet cousin, Wikipedia, that growing interactive repository of wisdom with an answer for almost any internet search.

"What Wikipedia has done for knowledge it is now doing for educating systems. [WikiEducator's] an amazing project in which New Zealand is taking the lead," Dr Mackintosh says.

It is still a young project but has grown quickly.

Dr Mackintosh set up the prototype of WikiEducator on a desktop machine in February, 2006, and registered the WikiEducator domain name the same month.

WikiEducator is now being used by more than 110 countries and receiving more than nine million hits a month.

It became an independent entity on July 1, headquartered at the new International Centre for Open Education at Otago Polytechnic.

"This global interaction is centred here.

"It's headquartered here in Dunedin," Dr Mackintosh says.

This is, though, a genuinely international enterprise, so the WikiEducator website (WikiEducator.org) - powered by open source (i.e. free) software, naturally - is hosted by the Athabasca University, in Alberta, Canada, and it also has the backing of the Canada-based Commonwealth of Learning.

Through the website, educators anywhere in the world can share classroom resources, lecture notes, textbooks and planning and policy documents.

Users make donations to a virtual honesty box, with the money used to commission more resources and to train more people to use the site.

The ability of the Otago institution to become involved has been aided by its approach to intellectual property.

"Otago Polytechnic is the first tertiary institution in the world to adopt a creative commons open content intellectual property policy," Dr Mackintosh says.

The policy allows others to copy, distribute and transmit and adapt materials generated there, as long as credit is given.

"For example, midwifery training materials developed on WikiEducator at Otago Polytechnic can help deliver babies in Bangladesh, because the materials can be customised and adapted for local contexts and cultures," Dr Mackintosh says.

"The issue here is life skills for the future.

"It should be possible, technologically, to develop free digital resources for every subject on the planet."

Dr Mackintosh intends to develop free digital resources in support of all national curricula by 2015.

He has previously worked as an education specialist at the Commonwealth of Learning, University of South Africa and University of Auckland, where he founded the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning.

"It's an obsession for me.

"My passion is education.

"I'm a teacher by training and teachers want to collaborate.

"Give them space to do this and it comes naturally," he says.