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User:Wikirandy

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Website:Randy Fisher, MA, Organization Management & Development
Employer:Intersol Group Ltd., Ottawa, Canada
Occupation:Facilitator, Community-Builder, Senior Consultant
Other roles:Elected Member of WikiEd's Community Council
Nationality:Canadian
Country:Canada
email
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Contents


About WikiRandy (aka Randy Fisher), MA, OMD

I have 15+ years of experience related to stakeholder engagement, project management, coordination and implementation. I have expertise in Change Management and Performance Improvement; Organizational Design & Development, Building Sustainable Projects, Communities and Networks; and in using wikis, blogs and social networking tools for collaboration, participatory learning and engagement. I am an elected member of the first WikiEducator Community Council. Currently, I am a Senior Consultant for the Intersol Group, in Ottawa, Canada.

I have experience in education, forestry, energy, government (public policy) and nonprofits (including social / immigrant services), in business, marketing, communications and HR services. I have advised, trained and coached front-line staff, technical and IT specialists, middle managers and executives. In 2008, I wrote the Winter 2008 cover story for the BC Human Resources Management Association: Mergers & Acquisitions: Are You Ready?. Please see my full CV/Resume, and My Portfolio

MA Thesis

I have just completed my MA, in Organization Management and Development from Fielding Graduate University. Please see my thesis: Primal Needs Gone Digital: Educators' Motivations in an Open Wiki Environment. It was written and published entirely on WikiEducator.

My Abilities

  • Strategic thinker, and able to operationalize / implement the vision
  • Strong analytical, investigative and synthesizing skills
  • Able to bridge business and technology worlds - excellent communication skills especially with technical folks!
  • Able to increase employee engagement, collaboration, and performance in teams, communities, and strategic partnerships
    • excellent facilitation skills and community-building expertise
    • skilled at mentoring others and community development - online and face-to-face
    • works well with diverse, multicultural employees
    • designs and develops education / ODL / e-learning materials, communities - F2F or distributed/virtual environments, in Canada and internationally
    • supports WikiEducator Pilot Projects process

I also like to do the Wiki-Wiki!


Contact Me!

I am interested in consulting engagements. Please contact me at: wikirandy AT intersol dot ca Ottawa, Canada +1 613.230.6424 x144 (EST)

  • Skype: wikirandy

Project Activities (2009)

Intersol Group, Ottawa, Canada

Senior Consultant & Facilitator, specializing in facilitation, collaboration and stakeholder/community engagement; change/transition management; organization development; sustainable and scalable project implementation: Projects include:

  • One Change, Ottawa, Canada. -- Facilitating consultations with internal and external stakeholders for website redesign and community engagement.


International Centre for Open Education / Open Education Resource (OER) Foundation, New Zealand

  • Senior Consultant, Organization & Business Development

Commonwealth Youth Programme, Regional Centre for Africa, Lusaka, Zambia

  • Facilitating the development of OERs and a peacebuilding social network for African youth (Youth4Peace). Coaching a local rapporteur to build organizational capacity. Developing an orientation manual, contributors' guide, reporting guidelines and monitoring and evaluation framework, and 2-day workshop.

University of British Columbia, Learning Exchange (Community Service Learning), Vancouver, BC

  • Leadership coaching and workshop planning for an online web portal / community of practice for project leaders, faculty, students and partner NGOs in community service learning.


My WikiEducator Links

Image:ImgColoricon_digg.png Digg this Image:ImgColoricon_delicious.png Post to del.icio.us Image:ImgColoricon_furl.png Post to Furl Image:ImgColoricon_magnolia.png Post to Magnolia Image:ImgColoricon_yahoo.png Post to Yahoo

Activities, Projects & Links

Culinary Education Home Learning4Content

  1. Revised L4C Workshops
  2. L4C-Advance Pilot Workshop
  3. Advanced_Users
  4. L4C-Community Media, Nov. 3-7, 2008
  5. eL4C12
  6. People_I_Have_Trained

Jewish Education (open)

Organization Development

  1. HR-Employee Handbook
    1. Job Descriptions

Proposals

  1. Participatory Learning - MacArthur Foundation
  2. Digital Media (News) - Knight Foundation
  3. Free Content for Sustainable Ecosystems
    1. Mothers of Intention
  4. Social_Entrepreneurship





Community-Building

  1. Setting up WikiEducator is Quick & Easy
  2. Community Building Project
  3. Community_building_project/Communications
  4. Request for Donations - Sample Letter of Request
  5. Benefits of Contributing / Donating Learning Materials - linked to Main Donations page

Clusters, Nodes

Community Media

  1. Welcome_Note
  2. M4L-Draft Notes
  3. Monthly Evaluation (2009)

Heywire8 Think Tank on OERs, New Zealand August 2008

HIV AIDS


Nodes

WikiGovernance

WikiRandy at the 2009 Open Ed conference

Our very own WikiRandy at the 2009 Open Ed conference: "Open education is a sustainable and renewable resource" (15:52).--Benjamin Stewart 22:42, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

ALT-C 2009 - Keynote Speech on 9 September 2009 by Martin Bean

Keynote speech by Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor Designate at the Open University at "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence, and change, the 2009 conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). Session given in Manchester, UK, on Wednesday 9 September, at 11.55. For other assets associated with this talk please go to http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2009/keynotes.html. Made publicly available by ALT under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/2.0/uk/. [?]


Links

WikiEngagement


WikiGovernance



My Project Focus Areas


Open Educational Content / Resources


WikiEducators from Papua New Guinea
WikiEducators from Papua New Guinea


Tutorials

My Sandbox

Reaching Our Targets (Learning 4 Content Workshops in the Commonwealth)

PDF_down.png Report: Learning4Content - The first 18 months - Download 1.7 MB


L4C Vital Statistics- 30 June 2009
No. of online workshops 28
No. of face-to-face workshops 58
No of countries (f-t-f workshops) 34
Participants registered 3001
No. of learning contracts signed 1280

Featured L4C Graduate

"The future is brighter on the WikiEducator side!"
"The future is brighter on the WikiEducator side!"
WikiEducator is not only ground-breaking, its foresight is defining history, and must forever be developed and continued.

I am Victor Mensah, a Ghanaian working for the Commonwealth Secretariat at the Commonwealth Youth Programme Regional Centre for Africa, in Zambia.

I subscribe to several listserves and forums, but the WikiEducator forum is unique. With intellectual discussions garnished with a friendly atmosphere, you feel at home straight away. I sensed a "family connection" to WikiEducators like Leigh (New Zealand), Randy (Canada), Leo (China), and Declan (USA), just to mention a few. The first thing I did after joining this forum was to register for the first Learning4Content workshop. The facilitators have been an inspiration -- motivating and supporting me to complete my training notwithstanding my work demands and a hectic travel schedule. Read more ...



Opinion Leaders

My WikiEducator Purpose

The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:

  • planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
  • development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
  • building of capacity and sustainable communities of support for educators;
  • work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs;
  • networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

Note: I think there is a distinction between "A community of support" and "Communities of Support". Overall, WikiEducator can be considered a "community of support" - however, over time, as educators develop content, they will develop sub-communities or 'communities-in-communities' where they will benefit from support from each other. Thus, "communities of support" seems more likely, particularly as WikiEducator evolves.

My Perspective from the Tectonic Shift Think Tank Conference

While attending the Tectonic shift think tank held at COL, I noted the following:

  • Always be aware of the human factor in technology / community creation.
  • Make sure the technologies/technologists serve the users. Use every opportunity to engage others, and learn individually and collectively.
  • Know your stakeholders well, and their interests.
  • Communicate effectively, by multiple means at varying frequencies within the group and externally.
  • Wikis are a paradigm-shift - and also represent a power-shift: Remember that fear and anxiety are ever-present - before we ever started talking about MediaWiki / Wikieducator!
  • Give laggards (or perceived laggards) an opportunity to participate at their level.
  • Respond to feedback.
  • KISS..and...keep our eyes on the prize ~ individually and writ-large (i.e., Millennium Development Goals).
  • Exercise self-reflection
  • Try to find the humour / enjoy the laughter!

Attribution

When someone uses some work that I've created, I'd like to be notified about it on my User Talk/Discussion Page. I would also like that you attribute it to Randy Fisher, in a place of prominence equivalent to how prominent it features in your work! Thanks...

Templates


Alternate foto of moi (in a Japanese Restaurant in Vancouver, Canada
Alternate foto of moi (in a Japanese Restaurant in Vancouver, Canada

Great photo of Wayne @ PCF5: http://www.wikieducator.org/Image:Pcf5we7.jpg

This user is a WikiNeighbour
for WikiEducator.
This user is a researcher of wikis and/or open educational resources.
Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page.


Definition of Participatory Learning

Participatory Learning includes the ways in which new technologies enable learners (of any age) to contribute in diverse ways to individual and shared learning goals. Through games, wikis, blogs, virtual environments, social network sites, cell phones, mobile devices, and other digital platforms, learners can participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another's projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Participatory learners come together to aggregate their ideas and experiences in a way that makes the whole ultimately greater than the sum of the parts.

Notes

{{Note|Gurmit - if you want to start putting text on this page....just click the "edit" tab - 3rd from the right at the top of the screen (next to the globe - User Page - Discussion - Edit. I will be notified when you change your page, so I will go in and help you out... when I do, you will be notified too! ~ so please watch what I am doing, so you can do it too!

{{Note|Randy - what text should/could I put here on your page?

Presentations

Learning MediaWiki Skills

  • Suspend your judgment – about where you think / feel you should be in terms of mastering this stuff.
  • Refresh your screen when you visit a page – to make sure that you have the latest version
  • Observe and reflect on changes you see in the wiki – (i.e., when I go in and make a change, look at the code ~ i.e., what I’ve done….)
  • Do not ignore the great Resources in this community: tutorials and people.



Template:WikiRandyWikiStatus

Simple Table Syntax

WE is running a simple table extension (formerly called tabbeddata) that makes it "simpler" to add data to a table.

To make a table that uses commas for separating columns and <return> for the rows, try:

Hi Hello Yes
Bye Good Night No


You can find more information on the syntax and examples at:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TabbedData

Questions

Resources

Quotable Quotes

Change your expectations, and the results suddenly improve. - Randy Fisher


"If we aren’t willing to be affected by the Other, then what, really, is the point of engagement at all? - Paul B. Hartzog in http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-long-tail-of-respect/2009/11/05
Self-organising, peer production communities are very different from the traditional model, hence the fear of organisations to try it out. Administrators and decision-makers who don't have experience of the effectiveness and agility of self-organising systems find it hard to take decisions committing time and resources to this kind of approach. In some respects, its like learning to swim -- you have got to get your feet wet. One way that has worked well for us is the pilot project approach. We encourage and support organisations to test the waters with a small but focused project. Once members of the project team see and experience the benefits of the self-organising approach -- they're sold. It takes time -- but authentic experience is a powerful approach in supporting organisations with incremental transformation. - Wayne Mackintosh, November 2009
"We chose the co-op model because the most logical way to combat problems so large is by co-operation. Community spirit is the most sustainable and renewable energy there is." Rock Radovan, President and Founding Member, Sustainable Ottawa – http://www.sustainableottawa.ca

In “Saying Yes to Solar”, by Patrick Langston, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Saturday, June 21, 2008. Retrieved December 25, 2008 from http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/homes/story.html?id=421525df-2ae7-4a86-87c9-eae8e63e229f&p=2

"Projects plans come and go, but stakeholders remain the same." -Randy Fisher, to Chris from Australia, Dec. 29, 2008

Thought For The Day
The way to avoid mistakes is to gain experience. The way to gain experience is to make mistakes.

Educating Tribal Girls, Pune-India.



Attribution Info

I would suggest using the licence statement on the home page, with a note that all sub pages are licensed accordingly. Then a discrete footer template on each page. The Creative Commons site will have have wording and display options.

One of our technical and policy tasks is to sort out license policy and technical adaptations to make this easier to manage and attribute the license.

http://www.wikieducator.org/Help:Displaying_Special_Characters