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The act of teaching is fundamentally about sharing knowledge. OER embodies the purpose of teaching and is today’s most compelling manifestation of the core values of education in a digital world, that is, to share knowledge freely.

WikiEducator is a flagship project of the OER Foundation

Cape Town Open Education Declaration

At a glance: what makes Finland stand out “What visiting educators from over 50 countries have found in Finland is simple: well trained teachers and responsible children– Seppo Tella, professor of language education (and teaching matters),University of HelsinkiThe Finns have a high regard for and confidence in their schooling system and a high opinion of schooling.All teachers must hold a masters degree; most train for at least five and a half years.Status of teachers is high and teaching is one of the most coveted and popular professions.400 local councils or municipalities administer schools. Schools are free to tailor education to local needs. Government only sets overall objectives.Principal has key role in driving education, responsible for the school’s entire operation and pupil assessment and budget.Principals evaluate teacher performance focusing on mastery of the profession, pupil performance and ability to co-operate.No national evaluation system for teacher work, no external inspection system and no focus on league tables.Compulsory nine year basic schooling is free for all aged 7-16 years.Schools have a statutory obligation to maintain contact with homes.“Our objective is not to be the best in the OECD. Our objective is to provide the best possible education for our children

You can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)

Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.

Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.

In the hours and days after Ning’s announcement, the company’s message boards were filled, and it was deluged with hundreds of e-mail messages from teachers and nonprofit groups. It was also presented with an online petition signed by over 1,100 people asking it to waive its fees for educational and nonprofit groups.

Ning says it is taking a step in that direction with its effort to provide free service for teachers and their students.

keep its service free for educators

To take a famous example, the essential insight of the scientific revolution was peer review, the idea that science was a collaborative effort that included the feedback and participation of others. Peer review was a cultural institution that took the printing press for granted as a means of distributing research quickly and widely, but added the kind of cultural constraints that made it valuable.

We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources.