Wow, it has been way too long. I hope those of you worried about whether or not any progress has been made have been following me (marknewlyn) and/or Siyavula on Twitter. Highlight We’ve been very busy and achieved what many, even I, thought impossible! Openly-licensed, Siyavula textbooks are being printed and distributed by the Department [...]

It has been quite a year so far for Siyavula. My rate of blogging is inversely correlated with real work (queue DDoS attack by blogging world) so the lack of activity should have told you that something was afoot. The focus this Fellowship year is to make Siyavula sustainable by taking Open Educational Resources (OERs) [...]

We recently did a little travelling around South Africa (Durban/Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg) running events where we raise awareness of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, the shared resources that are available, the tools that can be used and the communities that develop and support them. We are often asked why people should share. My intention [...]

In December last year I was lucky enough to be invited to the Big Ideas Festival, hosted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), as a rapid-fire speaker. The talks have been made available on YouTube so I thought that I’d point you to it from my blog: My favourite [...]

My blog has been very quiet for the last couple of months. It is not that I’ve not had anything to blog about but rather the contrary, I’ve just been too busy. I have spent some time creating two summaries of what I’ve been up to in 2010 so you can get a sense of the bigger picture. It also shows you what has happened in the last 2 months that I just haven’t had time to blog about.

Today I attended the opening day of the Innovate 2010 Schools ICT Conference held at The Cape Academy for Mathematics, Science and Technology in Cape Town. I saw a talk that made me rejoice and despair; laugh and cry and pull my hair out, all at the same time. The rejoicing and laughter Parklands College [...]

I have uploaded a bunch of the South African National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (Mathematics (All phases), Maths Literacy, Life Sciences and Physical Science) to a.nnotate.com for the education community to comment on. I definitely feel that this is open, collaborative and focused on school, and I am the Open and Collaborative Resources Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation after all and it should be quite a lot of fun if people get involved.

We keep getting asked which internet deals are the best by workshop participants and so we’ve promised to write something down to help them get started when hunting for the best deal. Here it is.

I’m experimenting with video blogging, take a look.

UNESCO are seeing the real world application of one of the freedoms of open licensing. The freedom to adapt, enhance and contextualise is one of the primary benefits that we allude to when advocating the adoption of OERs.