Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform Education,...

Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform
Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materials Online

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Jan. 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A coalition of
educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and
publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over
the internet.
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched today, is part of a
dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone
online, regardless of income or geographic location. It encourages teachers
and students around the world to join a growing movement and use the web to
share, remix and translate classroom materials to make education more
accessible, effective, and flexible.
"Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to
the vast pool of knowledge on the web," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
and Wikia and one of the authors of the Declaration. "Everyone has something
to teach and everyone has something to learn."
According to the Declaration, teachers, students and communities would
benefit if publishers and governments made publicly-funded educational
materials freely available online. This will give students unlimited access to
high quality, constantly improving course materials, just as Wikipedia has
done in the world of reference materials.
Open education makes the link between teaching, learning and the
collaborative culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing
materials used in teaching as well as new approaches to learning where people
create and shape knowledge together. These new practices promise to provide
students with educational materials that are individually tailored to their
learning style. There are already over 100,000 such open educational resources
available on the Internet.
The Declaration is the result of a meeting of thirty open education
leaders in Cape Town, South Africa, organized late last year by the Open
Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. Participants identified key
strategies for developing open education. They encourage others to join and
sign the Declaration.
"Open sourcing education doesn't just make learning more accessible, it
makes it more collaborative, flexible and locally relevant," said Linux
Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who also recorded a video press briefing
(http://capetowndeclaration.blip.tv/). "Linux is succeeding exactly because of
this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open
education."
Open education is of particular relevance in developing and emerging
economies, creating the potential for affordable textbooks and learning
materials. It opens the door to small scale, local content producers likely to
create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses.
"Cultural diversity and local knowledge are a critical part of open
education," said Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology at the
University of Cape Town. "Countries like South Africa need to start producing
and sharing educational materials built on their own diverse cultural
heritage. Open education promises to make this kind of diverse publishing
possible."
The Declaration has already been translated into over a dozen languages
and the growing list of signatories includes: Jimmy Wales; Mark Shuttleworth;
Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of Real World Studios; Sir John Daniel,
President of Commonwealth of Learning; Thomas Alexander, former Director for
Education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Paul
N. Courant, University Librarian and former Provost, University of Michigan;
Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons; Andrey Kortunov,
President of the New Eurasia Foundation; and Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the
Central European University. Organizations endorsing the Declaration include:
Wikimedia Foundation; Public Library of Science; Commonwealth of Learning;
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; Canonical Ltd.; Centre
for Open and Sustainable Learning; Open Society Institute; and Shuttleworth
Foundation.
To read or sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, please visit:
http://www.capetowndeclaration.org.
SOURCE Open Society Institute

For U.S. Media, Alex Krstevski of Open Society Institute, +1-212-548-0311,
akrstevski@sorosny.org, or For U.K. and South African Media, Renee Conradie of
Emerging Media Communications, +27-11-792-4706, renee@emergingmedia.co.za, for
Open Society Institute