I am pleased to announce the Apereo Fellows for 2016 - individuals who have made outstanding contributions to Apereo projects and their communities.
Matt Clare
Supporting and championing teaching and learning is the sole focus of Matt Clare’s career as manager of elearning in the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation at Brock University. Matt believes that good teaching and learning requires flexibility and opportunities for collaboration and autonomy, a focus on what works, and for all this to be within a climate of respect. Matt’s experience has shown him that open source software is one of the best ways to provide this.
Finding only moderate success at writing code, Matt has instead focused his contributions to open source software on challenges that require people to work together to solve. This is demonstrated through Matt’s leadership in the accessibility portfolio in Sakai, Sakai’s rA11y (review accessibility) plan, and his commitment to fostering dialogue about accessibility across Apereo.
Wilma Hodges
Wilma is the Director of Training and eLearning Initiatives at Longsight. She has worked with Sakai since 2009. Wilma led the Sakai Documentation Working Group in the re-write of the Online Help for Sakai 10 and served as the conference planning chair for the Sakai Virtual Conference in 2014 and 2015. Wilma has also been actively involved with several community projects, such as the Sakai Showcase webinar series, LEaP (Lessons Enhancement Project), STEP (Samigo Tests Enhancement Project), Apereo FARM (Funding and Resource Management), as well as usability testing and the UX Working Group.
Brian Jones
Brian started working at Western University in 2011, during the summer months when the institution transitioned from a closed sourced LMS to Sakai 2.9.1. He is a member of a 4-person development team responsible for maintaining and developing features for Western's LMS.
In the past year, Brian was selected to serve as a member of the Sakai Core Team. He is dedicated to progressing not only Western’s institution's flavor of Sakai, but also contributing any and all of his team's relevant work back to the community. Brian take’s great pride in knowing that he plays a part in positive and beneficial learning experiences not only for students, faculty and staff at Western, but also in the global Sakai community.
José Mariano Luján
José has been involved in the Sakai community since 2010 when he attended his first Euro Sakai conference in Spain. He works with Sakai at the ICT Area from the University of Murcia. He is also responsible for the technical coordination for a fully online master program which was awarded with a TWSIA Honorable Mention in 2012. He enjoys being involved with the community, always looking for ways to improve it, and trying hard to contribute back most of the work done by the University of Murcia’s team. He has participated in many conferences and he has been leading the S2U Team (Spanish Sakai Users) for over 3 years now. S2U is currently one of the most active Sakai teams worldwide. He has played an important role in developing community leadership in Spain and internationally. Over the past few years, he has increased his focus on the release of Sakai 11 becoming more active in many groups like the Core Team, QA, Morpheus, Conference planning, FARM and more.
Jacques Raynauld
Jacques is professor at HEC Montréal where he holds the Chair on teaching and learning technology for management education. He is currently the project advocate for Karuta, a next generation portfolio solution that recently came out of the incubation process (http://karutaproject.org/). Beside being a regular contributor the annual Apereo conferences in North-America and Europe, Jacques has organized a special ESUP-Apereo conference in Montreal in October 2015. In the past years, Jacques has been quite involved in the Sakai community where we was a team leader for the project OpenSyllabus which is still used and maintained at HEC Montréal.
Charles Severance
Charles is a Clinical Associate Professor and teaches in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He is the Chair of the Sakai Project Magament Committee (PMC) and works for Longsight, Inc. as Sakai Chief Strategist. Previously he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and worked with the IMS Global Learning Consortium promoting and developing standards for teaching and learning technology.
Charles teaches two popular MOOCs to students worldwide on the Coursera platform: Internet History, Technology, and Security and Programming for Everybody and is a long-time advocate of open educational resources to empower teachers.
Charles is the editor of the Computing Conversations column in IEEE Computer magazine that features a monthly article and video interview of a computing pioneer. Charles is the author of the book, "Sakai: Building an Open Source Community" that describes the early days of the open source Sakai project. Charles is also the author of the book, "Using Google App Engine" from O'Reilly and Associates and the book "Python for Informatics: Exploring Information". He also wrote the O'Reilly book titled, "High Performance Computing". Charles has a background in standards including serving as the vice-chair for the IEEE Posix P1003 standards effort and edited the Standards Column in IEEE Computer Magazine from 1995-1999.
Charles is active in media as a hobby, he has co-hosted several television shows including "Nothin but Net" produced by MediaOne and a nationally televised program about the Internet called "Internet:TCI". Charles appeared for over 10 years as an expert on Internet and Technology as a co-host of a live call-in radio program on the local Public Radio affiliate (www.wkar.org).
Chuck's hobbies include off-road motorcycle riding, karaoke and playing hockey.
Charles has a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Michigan State University.
Author
Ian Dolphin
Sincere thanks to the 2016 Apereo Fellows Committee, who always face a tough set of selection choices!
Ian Dolphin, Executive Director