Wayne McIntosh of Wikieducator visited Otago Polytechnic yesterday, and provided an interesting talk/discussion regarding Wikieducator and it’s place in contemporary education.

As part of his talk he brought our attention to the Commonwealth Computer Navigator’s Certificate project.

The Commonweatlh Computer Navigator’s Certificate (CCNC) is a free content project to improve access to computer skills training. Building on the foundations of the Open ICDL project, the certificate is unique because it enhances the freedom of learners to aquire and enrich their basic ICT skills using free software.

… so it’s got some strong commonality with the Computer Literacy Resources for Teaching (CLRT) project I’m involved with. Helen Lindsay (the CLRT project leader) and I discussed this after the meeting, and agreed that we needed to have a look at it. I’ve been browsing the course, and it has a significantly different structure to the one envisioned for our project.

The CCNC is composed of a number of structured modules that will be created to a certain level before being released. The modules are designed to provide a complete education, and are focussed purely on freeware.

Our vision is to create more of a living library of open-content resources that can be used by teachers in supporting the computer literacy of their students.

So whereas it’s probably not appropriate to merge our efforts with the CCNC project, I’m sure that there are fertile grounds for collaboration & resource re-use. I’ve contacted them via their discussion board, and asked if they are interested in this type of collaboration. Lets see what comes from that.