Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Dear Team Mozilla

With great excitement I apply for the position of “Curriculum and Community Systems Designer”. I have many years working in Curriculum and Community design and deeply enjoy extending existing curriculum and building new curriculum from the ground up. I love to help people learn new things, especially in the technology realm. I have contributed to the building of OER and related communities for the past five years and focused my graduate studies within this capacity. My foundational work with WikiEducator provided me opportunities to learn a great deal about collaboratively building international communities and curriculum and in being a primary contributor to this very successful online higher education learning community.

I also possess many years working in software and web development where I have managed many projects and have been successful in many roles including analysis, design and requirements gathering. I have a proven history of community stewardship and in gathering community needs to grow and improve the community. I have built many web properties in many different capacities from small start-ups, municipal engagements, provincial learning communities and global OER initiatives.

I am well prepared to evangelize curriculum and badges technologies as, in the past, I have participated in many conferences as both an attendee and a speaker. I look forward to meeting other people with similar interests and to work collaboratively with conference attendees in improving upon shared visions.

I actively blog, tweet, tag and collaborate in social media. I actively contribute to wikiversity and am currently building curriculum around mobile application development and emerging pedagogical approaches. I have designed and taught many courses both on college campuses and online. Within my recent experiences I have focused my teaching skills on online and blended approaches. I continue to encourage people to be life-long learners.

My career has followed two parallel paths; one in education, teaching and building educational communities and learning technologies. The other as a project manager, solutions architect, database administrator and software developer. I actively seek opportunities that blend the two. Applying for this position is the most excited I have ever been in making an application. I believe it brings together both my areas of competency extremely well. The best way to get a sense of my experience is to review a number of my professional and personal artefacts;
Sincerely,
Peter Rawsthorne
peter@rawsthorne.org