Open ed bio page

From OpenEd

Contents 1 Richard G Baraniuk 2 Peter Bateman 3 Karien Bezuidenhout 4 Ahrash N. Bissell, Ph.D. 5 Rhett Bowlin 6 Delia Browne 7 Darius Cuplinskas 8 James Dalziel 9 Heather Ford 10 Eve Gray 11 Melissa Hagemann 12 Mark Horner 13 Jason Hudson 14 Helen King 15 John Lesperance 16 Peter Levy 17 Jaroslaw Lipszyc 18 Lisa Petrides, Ph.D. 19 Andrew Rens 20 David Rosenfeld 21 Philipp Schmidt 22 Mark Surman 23 Aleesha Taylor 24 Jimmy Wales 25 Paul West 26 Werner Westerman 27 David Wiley

Richard G Baraniuk

Richard G. Baraniuk grew up in Winnipeg, Canada and received the B.Sc. degree in 1987 from the University of Manitoba, the M.Sc. degree in 1988 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in Electrical Engineering. In 1986, he was a research engineer with Omron Tateisi Electronics in Kyoto, Japan. While at the University of Illinois, he held a joint appointment with the CERL Sound Group and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. After spending 1992-1993 at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he is currently the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Engineering and a sporadic DJ for KTRU. He spent sabbaticals at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Télécommunications in Paris in 2001 and Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2002.

Dr. Baraniuk has been a Guest Editor of special issues for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on "Signal Processing and Networks" in 2002 and "Compressive Sampling" in 2008. He is currently an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks and Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis. He served as Co-Technical Program Chair for IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop in 2007 and is on several other conference technical program committees.

His research interests lie in the areas of signal and image processing and communications networks and include wavelets, natural image modeling, sensor networks, time-frequency analysis, and compressive sensing. His research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, AFRL, ARO, DOE, EPA, NATO, the Texas Instruments Leadership University Program, and several companies. Some recent press on the single-pixel, compressive sensing camera is available here.

In 1999, he launched Connexions, a non-profit publishing project that aims to bring textbooks and learning materials into the Internet Age. Connexions makes high-quality educational content available to anyone, anywhere, anytime for free on the web and at very low cost in print by inviting authors, educators, and learners worldwide to "create, rip, mix, and burn" textbooks, courses, and learning materials from its global open-access repository. Each month, Connexions' free educational materials are used by over half a million people from over 200 countries. Connexions is also the open-access content engine for the newly revived Rice University Press. Since 2002, Connexions has been supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, NSF, Rice University, and several friends of Rice. Dr. Baraniuk's career apogee was probably opening for Peter Gabriel at TED 2006 (talk). Some recent press on Connexions is available here.

Dr. Baraniuk received a NATO postdoctoral fellowship from NSERC in 1992, the National Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1994, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 1995, the Rosenbaum Fellowship from the Isaac Newton Institute of Cambridge University in 1998, the C. Holmes MacDonald National Outstanding Teaching Award from Eta Kappa Nu in 1999, the Charles Duncan Junior Faculty Achievement Award from Rice in 2000, the University of Illinois ECE Young Alumni Achievement Award in 2000, the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice in 2001, 2003, and 2006, the Hershel M. Rich Invention Award from Rice in 2007, and the Wavelet Pioneer Award from SPIE in 2008. He was selected one of Edutopia Magazine's "Daring Dozen" educators in 2007. Connexions received the Tech Museum Laureate Award from the Tech Museum of Innovation in 2006. He was co-author on a paper with Matthew Crouse and Robert Nowak that won the IEEE Signal Processing Society Junior Paper Award in 2001 and another with Vinay Ribeiro and Rolf Riedi that won the Passive and Active

Peter Bateman

Peter Bateman is a researcher at the Open University (UK). He holds a Masters Degree in Micro Technology in Education (UK), a Bachelor of Education Degree (Australia), and a PG Certificate in Online Instruction (USA). Born in Australia, he has worked in the education sector in Africa for the past 14 years during which time he has developed a particular interest in the application of appropriate technology supported pedagogies to increase access to Higher Education. Until recently he worked at the African Virtual University (AVU) in Nairobi, Kenya as Manager of the Open, Distance and eLearning (ODeL) Initiative where he coordinated programs aimed at assisting universities in the AVU network to participate in the development of an Open Educational Resources (OER) strategy. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Open University where he continues to investigate new paradigms for the OER movement in higher education in Africa.

His research is based on the premise that Higher Educational institutions in Africa, as centres for innovation and the creation of knowledge, must continually and progressively set the pace and direction for educational development and transformation and that, if well conceived, the OER movement holds great potential as one such innovation.

Karien Bezuidenhout

Karien Bezuidenhout is a Portfolio Manager at the Shuttleworth Foundation, a South African based think tank, tackling issues of openness and access in education and technology in the developing country context through international collaboration, towards local impact. Karien's primary areas of interest are Open and Collaborative Education and Intellectual Property Rights as they relate to openness and access in education and technology. The purpose of her work is to explore and promote policies and practices that enable and support collaboration and the sharing of knowledge in the information age, often through the use of information and communication technologies. Karien holds a masters degree in Futures Studies from the University of Stellenbosch Business School, also having studied at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town. She is also a Stockholm Challenge juror.

Ahrash N. Bissell, Ph.D.

Ahrash received his BS in Biology in 1994 from UC San Diego, followed by a Ph.D. in Biology in 2001 from the University of Oregon, where he pursued research on animal behavior and evolutionary genetics. Following the completion of his doctoral program, Ahrash moved to Duke University (Durham, NC), eventually becoming a Research Associate in Biology and the Assistant Director of the Academic Resource Center. While Ahrash continued an active research and teaching program in biology at Duke, the bulk of his time was focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning, especially in science. Key areas of interest include:

• educational technology, with special attention to basic skills development, learning disabilities, and web-based peer-learning environments.
• pedagogical and curriculum development.
• assessment (with a focus on critical-thinking skills and metacognition).
• facilitating interdisciplinary research, especially via open dissemination, data sharing, and web-based “communities of expertise.”

Ahrash was appointed the Executive Director of ccLearn in June, 2007. Ahrash is also a board member (and current International Director) for InnoWorks and a research consultant for the Alexandria Archive Institute.

Rhett Bowlin

Rhett Bowlin graduated with highest honors and a degree in comparative cultural history from Marlboro College, Vermont, with a focus in Hungarian cultural history. Following university, Rhett worked for World Learning, Inc. on their Summer Abroad Program before moving back to Hungary where he had studied as an undergraduate. Back in Hungary, Rhett joined the Open Society Institute in the spring of 1994, first working with OSI Budapest's Deputy Director before moving to the Higher Education Support Program (HESP), which supports the advancement of higher education in the humanities and social sciences. Rhett worked in several positions within the Higher Education Support Program before being appointed Director in September 2001. As Director, Rhett works with HESP staff in operating several regional faculty development programs across the traditional OSI region of Eastern and Central Europe, the former Soviet Union and Mongolia, and also providing institutional support to a select group of Network Institutions in the same region. While based in Budapest, HESP also works with field offices in Bishkek, Kiev and Tbilisi in running HESP's Academic Fellowship Program. At present, HESP is expanding its activities beyond the traditional region, with the first such expansion targeting junior faculty in Afghanistan and China's Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang regions. Other new initiatives under discussion would target Burma and Liberia.

Delia Browne

Delia is an extremely experienced intellectual property lawyer. Prior to her current role she worked at Minter Ellison Lawyers providing specialist copyright advice to the education sector. She also has considerable experience in entertainment law and assisted in setting up an entertainment and intellectual property practice at Michell Sillar Attorneys in Sydney.

She has considerable experience in law reform and lobbying. In her role as the Executive Director of the Arts Law Centre of Australia (1996 – 2002), she advised the arts sector in respect of legislative reforms and policy in intellectual property and taxation. She negotiated and drafted amendments to the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 and to A New Tax System (Integrity Measures) Act 2000. Her most recent success is the negotiation and implementation of the ATO Tax Ruling 2005/1 Carrying on business as a professional arts practitioner. This ruling is now regarded as the international benchmark on the tax treatment of artists.

In her role as the National Copyright Director of Australian Schools and TAFEs she manages the newly formed National Copyright Unit of Copyright Advisory Group (CAG) which provides specialist copyright advice to the schools and TAFE sector and conducts negotiations with copyright collecting societies on behalf of schools and TAFEs. In the last year, she led the successful lobbying efforts of the education sector which led to the introduction to new education specific exceptions, new flexible dealing exception and in to the Australian Copyright Act.

She and her unit are implementing smart copying strategies in the education sector, including the National Education Access Licence for Schools (NEALS).

Delia recently taught industrial and intellectual property at the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales and is a sought after conference and seminar speaker. She has an extensive publication record and is a member of the editorial boards of the Media Arts Law Review and New Zealand Intellectual Property Journal and wrote the Chapter on Moral Rights for Halsbury’s Laws of Australia.

Delia is based at the Department of Education and Training New South Wales Sydney Australia.

Darius Cuplinskas

Darius Cuplinskas is Director of the Information Program at the Open Society Institute, which supports a wide variety of initiatives on access to knowledge, civil society communications, and open information policy. He has many years of experience working with civil society, education and technology issues in transition and developing countries. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics.

James Dalziel

James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology and Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. James leads a number of open education projects including:

• LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) - an open source Learning Design system used by thousands of educators in over 80 countries, and translated into 23 languages (see www.lamsfoundation.org). James is a Director of the LAMS Foundation and LAMS International Pty Ltd.
• LAMS Community - a global community website for discussing the use of LAMS, and sharing Learning Designs created with LAMS under Creative Commons licenses. The website has 2500+ users, 200 designs downloaded 6000+ times, and 3000+ discussion forum postings (see www.lamscommunity.org).
• RAMS (Research Activity Management System) - a collaborative workflow system for Research groups, built on the core workflow infrastructure used for LAMS (see http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/rams/).
• MAMS (Meta Access Management System), a project to develop and deploy identity and access management infrastructure for the Australian higher education sector, based on the "Shibboleth" software developed by Internet 2. MAMS developed software (all OSS) includes: ShARPE (institutional privacy management), Autograph (personal privacy management), Federation Manager (federation management toolkit) and IAMSuite (secure shared workspace/"Virtual Organisation" system) – see www.federation.org.au .
• Australian Access Federation - the national production rollout of the outcomes of the MAMS project. As at July 2007, the testbed federation involves 900,000 identities across 15 universities, and a range of services in IT, library and e-learning domains (see www.aaf.edu.au).
• Muradora - a flexible web-based repository system (OSS) built over the Fedora repository software, including Shibboleth integration and XACML-based authorization (see http://drama.ramp.org.au/ ).
• ASK-OSS (the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software), a national advisory service on free and open source software issues in the Australia higher education and research sector (see www.ask-oss.mq.edu.au ).

James has also worked in open standards for education, including contributions to IMS, IEEE LTSC, ISO JTC1 SC36 and Standards Australian IT-19-1.

Heather Ford

Heather Ford is the Executive Director of iCommons (www.icommons.org), an organisation incubated by Creative Commons with the broad goal of connecting free culture, open content and open education communities around the world.

Heather is a South African who graduated from Rhodes University (www.ru.ac.za) with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and has a certificate in Telecommunications Policy, Law and Management from the University of the Witwatersrand Link Centre (http://link.wits.ac.za). After working in the United Kingdom for Greennet and Privacy International, she went on to Stanford University in 2003 where she was chosen as a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program (http://rdvp.org/). Volunteering for Creative Commons while she was at Stanford, she decided to go back to South Africa at the end of her studies to start Creative Commons South Africa (http://za.creativecommons.org) and a programme entitled 'Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons' (www.commons-sense.org) at the Wits University Link Centre. Heather is a co-founder of the South African non-profit organisation, ‘The African Commons Project’.

Eve Gray

I am a publisher and publishing strategy consultant and researcher with a passion for what digital media and their new strategic and business models can do to transform communications and knowledge transfer in the developing world and particularly in Africa. My moment of epiphany was in 1994, when I went to a university press publishers' conference in Washington and spent two days in an electronic publishing workshop listening to a variety of lively and committed geeks (who now run Silicon Valley) telling us what was happening in the shiny new world of the Internet. I came home babbling in tongues and it took my friends and colleagues around five years to realise that I was not mad, but prescient.

What I offer, then is a combination of skills and knowledge that help me bridge some of the polarities we face in trying to achieve open education. By vocation, I would have been a lecturer, had my life turned out differently. As a teacher and lecturer, I am aware that content is only part of the necessary mix in Open Education. By temperament, I am highly intuitive and, as a result, a strategic thinker. As a result, I like to bring together what is good about publishing - the editorial, product design, marketing and distribution skills that make for effective communications – with the potential that digital media bring for wide and low-cost dissemination as well as new ways of creating and disseminating knowledge. I like to combine the pragmatic business approaches that publishers adopt – of what medium, presentation and distribution channel is most appropriate – with the radical new possibilities of a multimedia, interactive Web 2.0 world. I have worked, as a publisher, mainly in scholarly and academic textbook publishing, but also in school textbooks, Adult Basic Education, Technical and Vocational Training, business skills development, and AIDS and public health, among others, so I am aware of the wide range of fields in which Open Education is needed. And, probably most of all, I am committed to growing the African voice in a very unbalanced global knowledge environment.

http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/gray_area http://www.evegray.co.za http://www.policy.hu/gray

Melissa Hagemann

Melissa Hagemann manages the Open Access Initiative within the Information Program of the Open Society Institute (OSI)/Soros foundations. Since convening the meeting in December 2001 which led to the development of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OSI has been active within the Open Access movement which advocates for the free online availability of peer-reviewed literature.

Melissa also works with the eIFL (electronic Information for Libraries) network to spread the benefits of Open Access among eIFL’s members in 50 developing and transition countries. Melissa has held several positions within OSI including managing OSI’s Regional Library Program from 1995-1997 based in Budapest as well as the Science Journals Donation Program from 1998-2001.

She was profiled as a SPARC Innovator in December 2006 for her work within the Open Access movement. Melissa is a member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation and has served on the Member of Experts’ Group of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Library Initiative.

Mark Horner

Mark is one of the co-founders of the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project which he started in 2002 along with fellow physics graduate students, Sam Halliday, Sarah Blyth, Rory Adams and Spencer Wheaton. The aim of the project is to write open-source high school science textbooks (physical science and mathematics) for grades 10-12, specifically for the South African school curriculum. The project relies on volunteer contributions for the compilation of royalty-free texts and, apart from being available digitally, the project aims to raise funds for printing the books and distributing them to under-resourced areas. Printing costs are estimated as being more than an order of magnitude less than purchasing royalty-laden alternatives. The project is run by volunteers but is supported by funding from the Shuttleworth Foundation which has enabled activities, like hackathons, to increase the speed of content creation as well as classroom trials to be completed.

Mark received his PhD in June 2007 in heavy-ion physics from the University of Cape Town, conducting his research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on the results from the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

Currently Mark is working full-time as a Research Officer at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town. He works on FHSST during his spare time.

Jason Hudson

This open source enthusiast and highly qualified Linux professional is the founder of the Freedom Toaster project and is currently a Portfolio Manager at the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Jason's primary areas of interest are Communication & Analytical Skills Development and Wireless & Telecommunications. The purpose of his work is to explore and promote policies and practices that tackle issues of openness and access in education and technology in the developing country context through international collaboration towards local impact. All to enable and support the creation of an innovative and effective education system that uses creative and applicable technology and pedagogy.

Helen King

Helen King is Principal Advisor to the Shuttleworth Foundation. She was originally tasked with defining international relations for the organisation, before moving into her present role where she is responsible for advising on all of the Foundations strategic and operational elements.

King was educated in Europe, South America and the Middle East. With ten years worth of experience working with international NGO's and agencies, she is driven by the belief that open technologies, content and processes have vast benefits and value to offer education, economies and communities in Africa.

John Lesperance

I work for the Ministry of Education, Seychelles in the Technical and Further Education Division as the Director for Further Education Development and I have been working for the Ministry of Education in various capacities for the last 27 years

My main mandates are to integrate the competency-based education and training across the post-secondary landscape, conceptualise and develop a post-secondary education and training framework, recommend strategies for the development and implementation of further education and training (including technical and vocational), and participate in the implementation of these.

During my 27 years at the Ministry of Education, I have held the posts of lecturer in Electrical Engineering, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning, IT and Teacher Education; Head of Foundation Studies, Director of the Industrial Training Centre, Coordinator for Technical Vocational Education and Training and most recently Director for Further Education Development.

Since 2006 I have been involved with the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) initiative, where Seychelles has played an important role. As a result of the VUSSC initiative, I have been involved in the development of open content and in the promotion of open source. I am now working on an e-learning project for the Ministry of Education where I am trying to promote the the idea of the blended learning model with a view to use content developed by VUSSC and to offer them using a combination of online and face to face which we hope will increase access to education and training opportunities in the Seychelles.

I also work as a consultant for the Seychelles Qualifications Authority. I develop policies and provide guidance and support in the developmental phase of the organisation.

Peter Levy

Peter Levy began his career as an analyst for Jupiter Communications where he reported on firms developing online content and subscription services for the youth market. He served as the Internet Strategist for Scholastic’s Education Group, where his responsibilities included spearheading the strategic and financial analysis which led to the acquisition of The Electronic Bookshelf. As the first employee and Vice President of Business Development for bigchalk.com, Peter helped to build the management team and directed the company’s extensive business development efforts. At Wireless Generation, Peter served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, where he oversaw a comprehensive rebranding effort and successfully negotiated partnerships with 14 leading publishers of books from children in grades K-2. Peter currently runs Levy & Company, a consulting practice serving a range of education companies and organizations including the Discovery Channel, McGraw-Hill, Scholastic, Inspiration Software, Time/Warner, the Target Foundation and the Canadian Consulate.

For Curriki, Peter directs all of the ongoing partnership arrangements with for-profit publishers, not-for-profit organizations and Ministries of Education. Recent Curriki partnerships include for-profits Nortel, Smarthinking and Cybersmart, non-profits such as AARP’s Retired Teacher Association and The Innovation Unit of the Department for Educational Services of the Ministry of Education in the United Kingdom.

Peter earned both a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication and a Master of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication with a Concentration in Curriculum and Instruction from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His graduate work focused on the development of online community and the similarities and differences with the formation of community in the proximate world.

His author credits include Getting Started on the Internet: an Easy and Practical Guide for Teachers, published by Scholastic Professional Books in 2000 as well as E-learning 2004 and E-learning 2001--analyst reports on the educational technology market for the New York office of the Canadian Consulate. He recently collaborated on the new program Tuition Without Tears, a comprehensive program designed to teach parents how to save and pay for college.

Jaroslaw Lipszyc

Jaroslaw Lipszyc - poet, editor, activist. For the last ten years he worked in a press as an editor (Życie Warszawy daily, Aktivist monthly). Quite recently switched his career to work in "third sector". President of Modern Poland Foundation. Coordinator of Free Textbooks project (http://wiki.wolnepoldreczniki.pl/). Board member of Internet Society Poland. Published two books (poems) and several articles about free software, free culture, commons etc. For the last two years he is reviewing books for Elle monthly (polish edition). Lives in Warsaw, Poland, with his wife and son.

Lisa Petrides, Ph.D.

Lisa Petrides, Ph.D. is president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), an independent non-profit educational research institute located in Half Moon Bay, CA. ISKME’s work includes applied research, innovative projects and field-building initiatives in the area of knowledge sharing in education. ISKME conducts research that seeks to understand how those within K-12 and higher education institutions (and the organizations that support them) build capacity to systematically collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create knowledge-driven environments focused on student learning and institutional success. ISKME projects include the development of research and tools for use and reuse of open content; developmental education and online learning; the supply and demand for information and knowledge sharing and accountability. A former professor in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Columbia University, Teachers College, she received a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University and an MBA from Sonoma State University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Educational Policy Research Division at Educational Testing Service.

Dr. Petrides is widely published and has given many keynote addresses. Her publications include: “Democratize the Data on Campuses,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education; “The Squeeze of Accountability in Higher Education: The Challenges of Using External Mandates to Create Internal Change,” in Planning for Higher Education; “Anatomy of Schools System Improvement: Performance-Driven Practices in Urban School Districts,” report prepared for NewSchools Venture Fund; Turning Knowledge Into Action: What’s Data Got To Do With It, published by the League for Innovation in the Community College; and “Organizational Learning and the Case for Knowledge-Based Systems,” in New Directions for Institutional Research.

Andrew Rens

Andrew Rens is the Legal Lead for Creative Commons South Africa (http://za.creativecommons.org), a co-founder and director of The African Commons Project ( http://theafricancommonsproject.wordpress.com/), a charter member of Freedom to Innovate South Africa (http://www.ftisa.org.za ) and a research associate at the LINK Center at the School of Public and Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Speaker: Education 3.0 , A2K2, Second Conference on Access to Knowledge, Yale Law School, April 26-9, 2007

Speaker: Copyright and Plagiarism in Blogging, Digital Citizens Indaba, Rhodes University, 14 September 2006 (http://dci.ru.ac.za/)

Speaker, National Science and Technology Forum ( http://www.nstf.org.za/) Intellectual Property Workshop , 21 June 2007, "Alchemists and Scientists: Secrets, Innovation and Gold"He writes on access to knowledge, the commons and intellectual property. He has authored 'Managing Risk and Oppourtunity in Creative Commons Enterprises', First Monday, June 2006 and co-authored 'Intellectual Property, Education and Access to Knowledge in Southern Africa' with Achal Prabhala, Dick Kawooya ICTSD, UNCTAD , TRALAC

http://www.iprsonline.org/unctadictsd/docs/ and blogs at aliquid novi (http://www.aliquidnovi.org/)

David Rosenfeld

David Rosenfeld is the Campus Program Director for the PIRGs. A fifteen-year veteran of the Student PIRGs, Mr. Rosenfeld currently works with the students and staff of student PIRG chapters around the country to develop and execute effective, cutting edge student-led social change projects around a variety of issues, including college affordability, voter participation and global warming. Prior to his current role, he was the Organizing Director of CALPIRG from 1999-2000, where he oversaw all aspects of CALPIRG’s program at the 9 University of California campuses, helping to registering tens of thousands of new student voters and passing renewable energy laws. During that time, he designed and launched the Make Textbooks Affordable campaign, pulling together a coalition of 17 Student PIRGs and student government associations from around the country and authoring six reports exposing the extent of the affordability problem presented by textbooks, the various abuses of the publishing industry and the paths to a solution. Mr. Rosenfeld also led the effort to organize over 700 mathematics and physics professors from 150 American universities to call upon Thomson Learning to cease issuing superfluous introductory textbook editions. Their work has been cited in news outlets in all 50 states including: the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, US News and World Report and USA Today. Mr. Rosenfeld now spends most of his time advising federal, state and university policy makers, as well as student activists on strategies to lower textbook prices, and is currently designing a new national effort aimed at increasing faculty demand and fluency with Open Textbooks. A native of New Jersey, Mr. Rosenfeld graduated from Rutgers University with a B.A. in Political Science. He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.

Philipp Schmidt

Philipp Schmidt is a researcher with an interest in open collaborative innovation processes. He has written and spoken extensively on the use and policy of free and open source software in Africa, during his position as Programme Manager with bridges.org. He is currently working with the University of the Western Cape, where his main areas of work are open education and the impact of copyright and patents on development and innovation. He is publishing free courseware and leading a research group that investigates rip-mix-learn practices in higher education. Philipp is also a research fellow at the United Nations University's MERIT institute and supported by the German Government's Center for Migration and Development. He is trying to keep track of the many interesting ways in which people are "sharing nicely" at http://bokaap.net

Mark Surman

Mark Surman is in the business of connecting things: people, ideas, everything. A community technology activist for almost 20 years, Mark is currently Director of telecentre.org, a $21 million program that invests in grassroots computing networks around the world. He is also an open philanthropy fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation and co-convenes conversations about open cities in his hometown of Toronto.Previously, Mark was president of the Commons Group, a research and strategy firm focused on collaboration, community building and social technology. He also served as Director of Content and Community at Web Networks, Canada's first and largest non-profit Internet provider, and worked on the team that designed and managed the Government of Ontario's Volunteer @ction Online grants program. Before that, Mark trained social activists to make their own documentaries and worked for a good number of commercial television stations.Mark's biggest fetishes are community, conversation and collaboration. He has facilitated over three dozen participatory workshops and unconferences, including Hollyhock's Web of Change, CopyCamp, PenguinDay.ca and countless telecentre.org events. “Passionate conversation,” says Mark, “is an essential fuel for building successful networks and communities.”In his years as an activist, consultant and funder, Mark has worked closely with some amazing people and organizations. His favourites include: Sarvodaya; Aspiration; the Association for Progressive Communications; the International Development Research Centre; Communicopia; Mary Helen Spence; rabble.ca; the Shuttleworth Foundation; Zhaba; the Centre for Social Innovation; and Microsoft (yes, really). "I wouldn't be me had I not worked with these folks," says Mark.

When he finds time, Mark likes to write about community, technology and changing the world. He's proud to have written things like From the Ground Up (a nice picture book about why telecentres matter), Commonspace (FT.com book about web 2.0, written before there was web 2.0) and Appropriating Technology for Social Change (SSRC research paper about activism on the Internet). When he was still an idealistic student, he wrote From VTR to Cyberspace, an illustrated essay about Gramsci, community television and the Internet. Now his idealistic ramblings appear on his blog.

Aleesha Taylor

Aleesha Taylor is a Senior Program Manager in the Open Society Institute’s Education Support Program. Prior to joining OSI in July 2007, Aleesha was a Lecturer in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she also completed her doctoral studies. At Teachers College, Aleesha designed and taught courses on gender and development, educational policy studies, and human rights. Her research in the field of international educational development centered on community participation in educational governance and policy processes in East Africa. In addition to an Ed.D. in international educational development from Teachers College, Aleesha holds degrees in psychology from Spelman College and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. She has managed and designed evaluation and professional development programs for educational programs in New York, Mongolia, Kosovo, Kenya and Tanzania. Currently, Aleesha coordinates activities related to the following initiatives undertaken by OSI’s Education Support Program: teacher training reform in Liberia, Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking, HIV/AIDS and education in Southern Africa, transparency & accountability, and the Network of Education Policy Centers (NEPC). Aleesha is also exploring the potential role that ESP can play in the growing Open Education Resources movement.

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for founding Wikipedia, as well as other wiki-related organizations, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

Wales received his Bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University and his Master's in finance from University of Alabama.

In January of 2001, Wales started Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and in mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, to support Wikipedia.

In 2004, Wales founded Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company based on principles similar to Wikipedia, which allows people to contribute information and opinions on any topic, in any language.

As part of his work at Wikia, Wales is developing a human-powered search engine, Search Wikia, which will be based on the same open, transparent, community-driven principles of Wikia and Wikipeida.

Paul West

Paul West, originally from South Africa, joined COL in August 2001 as Education Specialist, Knowledge Management and became Director, Knowledge Management and Information Technology in July 2006. His previous post at Technikon SA, in South Africa, saw him setting up the African Digital Library (www.africaeducation.org/adl) which serves users throughout the African continent who have Internet access. His work there also involved developing and impementing models for Information Communication Technology (ICT) Centres.

Paul moved to COL to work on knowledge management issues, incuding the management of internal knowledge assets and to harness the wealth of knowledge across the Commonwealth, and to make this accessible to those who need it. In this quest, he has created the “COL knowledge finder”, a virtual library of about one million documents that are available on the Internet (www.col.org/kf). In his work at COL, he has encouraged the use of open source software where it is appropriate to expand access to learning content, and IT systems to support teaching and learning. COL has a numbe rof tools at its disposal, including staff Intranet to compliment its public website, online collaboration tools and a learning object repository (www.col.org/lor). Paul is responsible for leading the “Virtual University for the Small States of the Commonwealth” initiative (www.col.org/vussc).

In his personal capacity, Paul writes an occasional technology newsletter called “Selected TechNotes” which is available on the Internet (http://selectedtech.blogspot.com). When not at work, Paul enjoys travel, reading and being outdoors.

Werner Westerman

History and Geography Teacher, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he works as investigator on academic research (FONDECYT and FONDEF funds) related to Educational Television. Enters in 1999 to Red Universitaria Nacional REUNA working in R&D projects as a methodologist and instructional designer in FONDEF's Alejandría: Videoteca digital para la educación superior and FDI's Difusión Inalámbrica IP. Enters in 2001, as co-founder, to Ciberanía Consultants where he manages and executes the innovation fund FONTEC project "Integrated System of Goods ands Sertvices for Primary Education".

Since 2004 is a e-learning consultant for the ILPES program, dependant of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC-UN).

Since 2003, founder and articulator of Educalibre, educational and technological community (future NGO corporation) that promotes free software's techonolgy and collaborative model in education. Also manages the chilean community of the free LMS Moodle. Member of the EXe International Advisory Group, a Commonwelath of Learning's initiative.

David Wiley

David Wiley is Director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at Utah State University. He was formerly a Visiting Scholar at the Open University of the Netherlands and a Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

He is the 1998 founder of OpenContent and author of the first open licenses for content. His research interests include open and sustainable education and intellectual property law. He holds a BFA in Music from Marshall University and a Ph.D. in Instructional Psychology and Technology from Brigham Young University.