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From Society and the Environment
Welcome to the Society and the Environment open education course development wiki
This wiki has been set up for the collaborative specification and writing of what will eventually be a freely available learning resource for individuals and groups who are interested in studying and understanding the complex relationships between societies and the environment. Rather than try to second-guess what individuals and groups may be interested in studying, a collaboratively designed course (perhaps as a set of related smaller modules) is likely to be more relevant to potential learners and groups. In addition, the collaborative course design process could evolve into a collaborative effort to write the course including discovering and evaluate open resources and materials to incorporate into the course content and learning activities. Beyon this, perhaps, is the possibility that potential learners who help in the course design, writing and resource discovery could also act as community learning facilitators. The ultimate ambition is for an open learning community that collaboratively specifies, writes, resources and learns about society and the environment to meet their individual and group needs and objectives. A learning network like this would constantly update and renew itself and its resources. The various roles and forms of commitment and engagement in this community enterprise might be summarised (rather grandiosely) as "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" - to paraphrase Marx.
A number of 'seed' pages have been created and added to the navigation menu in the lefthand sidebar - Course structure, Issues and Topics, Perspectives, Learners and Resources. If you are new to Mediawiki you can get basic advice on creating new pages from the Help page.
If you are interested in helping out with this please register an account for the wiki and create pages for topics and issues you are interested in and contribute to discussions on other pages. If you have any comments on the overall project please make them on this page's discussion page, accessed via the 'discussion' tab in the main menu bar above. At the moment this wiki is completely open and it would be great to keep it this way if possible. If necessary, it will be locked down to registered users editing only.
At this stage the wiki is primarily for the design and writing process. However, a related discussion is to be had about the forms of Web 2.0 applications and platforms that will be used to support individual and group learning activities and processes. Pages can be created here to take that discussion forward too.
Terry Wassall [t.wassall(at)leeds.ac.uk http://twitter.com/TerryWassall]
