Knowledge is power.
If you believe the above statement to be true, you likely also believe that without knowledge, there can be no power.
Readers who have been following us from the beginning will already know our passion for open-source education; we began as an interdisciplinary project designed and mandated to breakdown educational barriers to internationalize responsibility within the fashion industry.
The challenges facing the industry are social, cultural, environmental and economic; interdisciplinary problems demand interdisciplinary solutions. Education is our point of intervention.
If were going to make any headway whatsoever, educators and students need to feel empowered.
To make this happen, we’ve created an online learning hub for the community to share research and ideas. This is a working space for community leaders to collectively own.
Here is how it works:
- Go to the wiki page and check it out;
- Notice that anyone can edit/add content to the wiki, hence ‘open-source’;
- Log-in, create a Wikiversity account for yourself, your organization or your academic institution;
- Add content to a section already created, or click ‘add topic’ to get the ball rolling in another relevant topic;
- Upload links to resources you think would be of value to learners (this can be links to your own articles, books, and content).
While you don’t need to create an account to edit or add content, having an account will make sure that you, or your organization, gets the by line for what you have added.
The wiki is licensed through the Creative Commons, although we encourage you to upload links to resources, directing learners to libraries, university databases, organizational resources, etc.
This is an opportunity for our community to come together and create our own collective database for knowledge sharing, engagement and discussion.
Educators and students need to feel empowered, and we need to help them get there.
So what do you say? Are you with us?
Mary has a PhD in Sociology from University of Edinburgh, researching responsible fashion and transnational labour rights activism in the wake of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh.
