Mark Horner » Activity Dashboard

Activity Dashboard

The objective of this page is to provide a dashboard-view into my projects. It will be continuously updated and improved and I welcome suggestions to improve the clarity of the page.

I am currently working on a number of projects in the area of Open and Collaborative Resources, supported by a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation. My projects take place in South Africa and aim to support the current education system and curriculum by reinforcing the positive activities that really empower teachers. I am focused on the sustainable resolution of the massive need for educational resources in South Africa.

Challenge:
a general lack of cost-effective, high-quality, context-sensitive resources to meet the needs of teachers and learners

All of my projects are based on three core strategies:

Open Everything:
open standards, open formats and open processes.
Supporting Communities of Practice:
a single individual’s contribution can be massively amplified by their participation in a community of practice.
Appropriate use of Technology:
the appropriate use of technology can streamline and amplify the work of individuals and communities.

Teaching Value Chain

Using these strategies I want to support the good practices that already exist within the education sector. I like to see it as positively reinforcing and supporting the good in the education value chain. To give my projects context, I’ve included a graphic of the value chain showing where projects fit in. All of my projects reinforce and support each other, but are independent.

Mouseover project title for quick update window. Click and hold on popup to drag and mouseoff to close.

Siyavula

Website: www.siyavula.org.za

Goal:
ensure teachers have access to a comprehensive repository of openly licensed educational resources that are available online and sustainable.

Status:

  • Ratings, forums, open lenses, templates, tag vocabularies added to Connexions site
  • Seed content uploaded to Connexions and branded (~30 000 pages)
  • Community and Connexions manual developed
  • 400 teachers exposed to community process and trained to use site
  • Cluster of 22 schools in Kwa-Zulu Natal adopting project to support their cluster with DoE support
  • First resources being translated into isiXhosa
  • 3 training partners: Teach South Africa, AIMSSEC, AMESA
  • 3 content partners: SHAWCO, AMESA-KZN, SAWS
  • Seed content hit 183 000 times up to 31st Oct
  • Derivative works being created by Learn Aid Publishing (UK non-profit)
  • 3-year position on Connexions Consortium board and position on Technical Committee
  • ISKME monitoring and evaluation reveals sharing and OER-practices widespread offline

Presentations/Media:

Outlook:

  • Improved Quick Edit, Collection Editor and performance on Connexions
  • Streamlined process for printing through OpenPress
  • Comprehensive set of workgroups forming in our KZN cluster
  • AMESA-KZN content uploading sprints
  • Partnership with Inzalo Foundation
  • Training all North-West Province Curriculum Advisors
  • Training partners have pending requests for 400 more teachers to be trained in January

Recent related posts:

Read them all here …

Free High
School Science
Texts

Website: www.fhsst.org

Goal:
FHSST is a project that aims to provide free science and mathematics textbooks for Grades 10 to 12 science learners in South Africa.

Status:

  • Derivative works appearing:
    • Community College Open Textbook Project
    • Learn Aid Publishing
    • Mindset
  • Miriam Masulla of Purchase College, State University of New York using statistics material
  • Content uploaded to Connexions

Outlook:

  • First print-run through OpenPress
  • Revamp of feedback and tracking mechanisms for improved impact assessment and more rapid errata-handling
  • Collaboration with Mindset to produce further textbooks for:
    • Life Sciences
    • Mathematical Literacy
    • English
  • Collaboration with LearnAid Publishing on improved derivative works

Recent related posts:

Read them all here …

OpenPress

Website: www.openpress.co.za (coming soon!)

Goal: provide a print aggregation service that gives teachers access to the power of collaborative purchasing so that they can benefit from economies of scale.

Status:

  • Pilot process underway for printing FHSST Grade 10 Maths textbook
  • Requests for:
    • print runs with other resources made by teachers and Mindset
    • extension of the service to include DVDs

Outlook:

  • First print-run
  • Registration of company
  • Approved broker for school resources
  • Information website
  • Web-service development
  • Exploration of business models :
    • Standard markup on units
    • Open market place for printers to bid on print jobs
    • Author markup
    • Value-added services, layout, typesetting and covers production

Recent related posts:

Read them all here …

Connexions

Website: cnxconsortium.org

Goal: support the Connexions Consortium to drive Connexions to be the definitive OER platform.

Status:

  • 3-year board membership
  • Technical committee membership
  • Used experience to refine developer contracting model
  • Advocated University of Stellenbosch Business School to consider Connexions as an OpenCourseWare solution
  • Provided support for Connexions adoption as authoring platform as part of Dutch National OER Strategy

Outlook:

  • 3-year board membership
  • Technical committee membership
  • Mobile front-end development
FullMarks

Website: www.fullmarks.org.za (coming soon!)

Goal: provide an open assessment bank where teachers can rapidly set tests, capture and analyse results and collaborate.

Status:

  • Extending software built by HSRC, beta-testing phase
  • Identified a number of item uploading partners including:
    • national community of practice for Mathematics Literacy
    • curriculum advisors
    • schools
    • individual teachers

Outlook:

  • January 2010 software launch
  • National uploading sprint in late Jan/ early Feb
  • Collaboration with SchoolTool
  • Exploration of business models:
    • Subscriptions to aggregated and additional reporting useful for districts but not individual teachers
    • Subscriptions to question sets by independent organisations, for example a publisher
    • Subscriptions to question meta-data for additional reporting by independent organisations, for example a publisher
    • Crowdsourcing of questions/tests

Recent related posts:

Read them all here …

Siyavula

Website: www.siyavula.org.za
Goal:
ensure teachers have access to a comprehensive repository of openly licensed educational resources that are available online and sustainable.

Status:

  • Ratings, forums, open lenses, templates, tag vocabularies added to Connexions site
  • Seed content uploaded to Connexions and branded (~30 000 pages)
  • Community and Connexions manual developed
  • 400 teachers exposed to community process and trained to use site
  • Cluster of 22 schools in Kwa-Zulu Natal adopting project to support their cluster with DoE support
  • First resources being translated into isiXhosa
  • 3 training partners: Teach South Africa, AIMSSEC, AMESA
  • 3 content partners: SHAWCO, AMESA-KZN, SAWS
  • Seed content hit 183 000 times up to 31st Oct
  • Derivative works being created by Learn Aid Publishing (UK non-profit)
  • 3-year position on Connexions Consortium board and position on Technical Committee
  • ISKME monitoring and evaluation reveals sharing and OER-practices widespread offline

Presentations/Media:

Outlook:

  • Improved Quick Edit, Collection Editor and performance on Connexions
  • Streamlined process for printing through OpenPress
  • Comprehensive set of workgroups forming in our KZN cluster
  • AMESA-KZN content uploading sprints
  • Partnership with Inzalo Foundation
  • Training all North-West Province Curriculum Advisors
  • Training partners have pending requests for 400 more teachers to be trained in January

Recent related posts:


Read them all here …

Fellowship

My most recent posts related to more general matters in the world of South African education and the global OER movement.

Read them all here …

2 Comments »

  • I have a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation to work in the area of Open and Collaborative Resources. My Fellowship enables me to work on a number of projects in this area. I believe in the liberation of information and supporting education in South Africa.

    I manage the Siyavula project, where I co-ordinate the development of a comprehensive set of Open Educational Resources (OER) supporting the South African National Curriculum.

    Along with Sam Halliday, I co-founded the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project which launched in 2002 and has collaboratively produced a set of openly licenced science and mathematics textbooks

    In collaboration with Steve Song, Interconnectedness Fellow, I founded OpenPress, a project to deploy a print aggregation service to support teachers.

    I also run FullMarks, an open assessment bank, to help teachers rapidly generate tests, capture results and access reports based on those results.

    I have a PhD in physics from the University of Cape Town and conducted my research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on the results from the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

    My blog highlights the progress on my various projects and contains thoughts on the OER space as well as life in general.