Wikipedia, Ubuntu founders back ‘open education’
The backers of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, announced on Tuesday, said the initiative is designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials.
The scheme is the result of a meeting of 30 open-education leaders in Cape Town, organised by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation ?the philanthropic organisation set up by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.
“We have seen over the last 20 years how open-source software, which is produced collaboratively, has been used to solve individual problems but then shared to solve everyone’s problems,” said Shuttleworth. “Today, I hope we will launch a process that will build something similarly compelling but for the educational field. It will be extraordinary one day to have teachers in New Zealand collaborating with students in China to create documents that will be used by learners in South America.”
According to the declaration, publishers and governments should make publicly funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students access to constantly updated course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials, the organisers claimed.
“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Wikipedia founder Wales, one of the authors of the declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”
