Interview to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

At Slashdot.

Free content. That’s it.

It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.

[…]

I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person.

[…]

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

[via elearnspace]

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TimeBank and Virtual Volunteering

Surfing through imabrokekid I got to TimeBank, a volunteering national campaing settled in the UK and funded by the BBC. It is sort of a “marketplace” such as Hacesfalta.org in Spain.

They have a Virtual Volunteering section. The intention is good but the info is quite poor (i.e. no reference to UN Online Volunteers at all) and their list of tasks you can do as an e-volunteer just skips the most – for me – important of they all: training.

I thing online volunteering still has to reach shape and weight as a concept. I’d like and help to it :)

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Online volunteers for web development

Scott posts for help to gather some online volunteers and help him and the Peace Corps to build web sites for NGOs and other development organizations.

He’s now trying to build a site where to work with these volunteers.

Hope we could help somehow.

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E-LANE

A project we‘d like to join: E-LANE

The E-Lane project proposes the integration of solid applications already used in the context of elearning as an open software elearning platform, the design of an innovative teaching methodology oriented towards this platform, and the integration of course content from some of the most prestigious educational institutions in Europe and Latin America with the objective of providing the society with low cost educational material.

The aim is to maximize the impact of this project both at the level of academic and non academic training and to promote a solid environment for long life learning in the future information society.

Some more information about the project (tip by Llu

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ICT4D Online Course

I’m happy I found Barbara Fillip’s blog, Knowledge for Development , and the site she’s president of, Knowledge for Development, LLC. Both are full of useful information, resources and courses.

One of these courses, ICT4D – Information and Communication Technologies for Development, has its training materials available online.

The modules of the course are:
1. What is ICT4D?
2. What is the Digital Divide?
3. Addressing the Digital Divide
4. ICTs and Learning
5. ICTs for Better Health
6. ICTs and Agriculture
7. eCommerce
8. eGovernance
9. Telecenters
10. Knowledge Networking

All of them have a first part explaining concepts, theory and experiences and after there’s a second part including readings, exercises, a quiz, and external resources. I’m really impressed with the huge amount of good information there and hope I have time these holidays to read all of it. Promise I will.

By the way, all contents are licensed under a Creative Commons License

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The OpenCourseWare Initiative: A New Model for Sharing

Anne H. Margulies, Executive Director of the MIT’s OpenCourseWare explains in a video what the whole thing is all about.

The video’s lenght is 37:35 and you can choose different qualities depending on your connection (including an audio-only version).

[Hat tip: César]

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