Updated Sun July 18, 2010 – see WebAfrica addition

In workshops for Siyavula, FullMarks or Connexions we require internet access which has proven to be quite a challenge at some venues (read more about our favourite solution here). This particular challenge always elicits one particular question from the audience: “What is the best/cheapest deal for internet access?” There is no right answer but a lot of our workshop participants are so overwhelmed they don’t even know where to start looking. So here are some personal thoughts on what to start with based on my personal access at home. If you know of better deals please leave a comment so that we can be sure to give the educators in our workshops the best information.

I don’t endorse/support/guarantee any of these products or information. This is just some advice to help get you started when looking for the best deal – you are ultimately responsible for your own choice. I’ve put my choice at the bottom so you know where my money is going.

Companies update their packages all the time but remember that prices should be coming down so you should not pay more than the options listed here but if you can find a cheaper one go for it. These are the best deals we know about but hopefully better deals will be available soon.

Every different kind of service has a different acronym and there are sometimes, not always, technical differences. This is not a training resource just a quick pointer so if you want to learn what it all means you will need to do a little more research.

DSL / ADSL / iDSL (what iBurst call their ADSL package)

Important points:

• You need a Telkom line and you will have to pay Telkom a monthly fee
• This is before you actually get internet access – this is just the possibility of internet access.
• You need to connect through your Telkom line so this is a fixed solution – you can’t move from place to place with it.
• You also need an Internet Service Provider (ISP) – Telkom do this but you can easily use someone else
• Generally, this is the cheapest, fastest solution.

You can buy a certain amount of data that you can download (called a capped account) and you usually pay per Gigabyte (GB, gig). Best deal I know about here is:

1. Telkom line with ADSL activated (any speed – 384k (slow) or 512k (a bit faster) or 4096k (also called 4 Meg)
   (fast)) but with AfriHost as your ISP (R29 per GB – no long term contract)

2. Updated – WebAfrica left me a comment below that they’ve got a better deal – you can get 1GB for R59 but then top up at R15 per GB which means that if you are buying 5GB its cheaper to buy their 1GB option and then top-up to 5GB. Note – top-up prices change rapidly – notice that the WebAfrica price for 4GB per month is R199 – so even that is more expensive than their own 1GB deal topped up to 5GB – which tells me to keep a careful eye on this.

Or you can pay a fixed monthly fee and download as much as you liked (this is an uncapped account). Best deals:

• Telkom line with ADSL activated (any speed – 384k (slow) or 512k (a bit faster) or 4 Meg
  (fast) but with:
  1. AfriHost as your ISP – R197 per month
  2. MWeb as your ISP – R219 per month (they have ads on TV you might have seen – bigger marketing budget than AfriHost)

Generally an uncapped account is good where you have multiple people accessing the account and don’t want to worry about how quickly your cap is going to be used up. Uncapped accounts generally don’t deliver quite the same performance as a capped account.

Shaped versus un-shaped accounts. The bandwidth for shaped accounts is dynamically managed by the ISP. They will typically throttle file-sharing programs like bittorrent. If you are not planning to use bittorrent or other high-demand applications, you are probably OK with a shaped account. If you don’t know what those are then you aren’t planning to use them!

3G / Wireless / HDSPA / WiMAX and other funky acronyms

Important points:

• This is when you connect through your cellphone network – just like browsing the internet on your phone
• You don’t need to be tied to a Telkom line
• You do need decent signal so you can use this anywhere you can pick up a decent signal
• Cellphone reception isn’t sufficient, you must be able to pick up 3G / EDGE / HSDPA
• You will connect your laptop or computer to a device (dongle, cellphone) that will connect to the internet wirelessly (just like the difference between Telkom phones and cellphones)

Generally this is the more flexible option giving you access in many different places but is more expensive and slower. It can be a good idea to have a 3G account as a backup for time when you are either on the road or when your other account is down for any reason.

Best deal I know about:

1. MTN cheapest rates for data bundles and best out-of-bundle rates .

My Personal Approach

To start off with (back in 2007) I didn’t want to be tied to Telkom for a long-term contract. Telkom doesn’t feel to me like the provider that’ll give you the best deal, service or most innovative products. I had Telkom install my phone line on a Closer 4 package which includes ADSL and the ADSL modem but with no service provider specified. I knew from previous experience that most of my internet usage will be from a single location and so a mobile solution wasn’t necessary.

I have the slowest ADSL account (384k). I must admit that I cannot see why anyone would buy the middle speed ADSL account (512k), its only a little bit faster but at double price because the fastest option (4Meg) is only a bit more expensive than 512k but is 8 times faster (max speed). Here are the current Telkom monthly prices with the speed increase:

• 384k – R152 per month
• 512k – R326 per month: 2.14 times more expensive but only 1.33 times faster than 384k
• 4096k – R413 per month: 2.71 time more expensive but 10.66 times faster than 384k and 8 time faster than 512k

You are not getting the bang for your buck with the 512k deal.

Next you need to choose an ISP. I chose Web Africa as my ISP to start off with. They had a pay-as-you-go option (for R70 per gig at the time), no sign-up fees, roll-over, auto top-up, no contract to tie you in and I had heard good things. At the time this was a pretty good deal. I was happy with this for quite a while.

Then SEACOM came along (2009), ICASA had to allow more people into the market and we finally started to see potential competition.

I had used Web Africa for a couple of years so I had a good idea of what my monthly internet usage was like. This really helps when deciding if you need a capped or uncapped line. I really like the advice given on the AfriHost website about choosing which is best for you – it works really well if you know your usage.

AfriHost offered a R29 per gig deal with no long term contract. As I had no contract with Web Africa I could easily switch and try it out for one month and if I didn’t like it just go back to Web Africa. The Afrihost option works really well for me. My typical internet usage is 5 gig per month so on Web Africa thats a bit more than R300 per month for my data. On AfriHost I get that for R145 with a simple top-up option if I need more.

I would like to go to a 4096k line as a number of websites I use (mostly google services) have issues with the speed at times but then would probably like an uncapped line too which then increases the cost significantly. A capped account keeps my 384k option faster than it would be if I chose an uncapped 384k option – which I have considered but I can’t afford my connection to be any slower.

If I upgrade my speed I will probably still stick with a capped account for a while to see if the increased speed really changes what I do on the net and help me decide if I really need an uncapped account

Vlogging from Mark Horner on Vimeo.

Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute introduced me to some representatives from UNESCO who wanted to discuss Open Educational Resources and specifically some the issues relating to the choice of platform. Previously I had met a number of UNESCO people working in the OER space – advocating OERs in teaching etc. at the e-Learning Africa conference in Accra, Ghana in 2008, but this was more to do with an internal UNESCO strategy.

Neels van der Westhuizen and I met with Abel Caine, Igor Nuk and Jaco du Toit on the 3^rd of March. The UNESCO initiative they described is different from Siyavula and school OER projects yet highlights some of the benefits of OERs so I thought I jot down some notes about it.

UNESCO often convenes panels of experts to write framework documents, documents intended to support member states in wide variety of activities. These documents are not prescriptions and are written with a large amount of flexibility embedded in them. One particular example that we were shown was a framework document for a university level journalism degree. The document included the possibility of running the course over 3 or 4 years, as well as being easy to restructure etc. The course could easily be implemented but also adapted to meet more specific needs.

What is important here is that member states have the freedom to use and adapt these courses without penalty (I actually don’t know what licence they are released under but it is the freedom to make adaptations that is important). These courses are essentially open with derivative works being allowed. In this sense they have the same freedoms as OERs, they be copied, adapted, enhanced and distributed.

It turns out that member states do take advantage of these freedoms because, as in education, one size doesn’t fit all. Many of the member states that have used framework documents have adapted them to meet their needs. These adaptations often relate to context but also to other unforeseen needs and challenges. This is similar to the issue in education where there is no way any single educational resource can be applicable or appropriate in every context.

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. There is little question that the customisation of resources is essential in education.

The problem for UNESCO is that many of these adaptations are being lost to the broader member state community because they are not being fed back to UNESCO. So other member states aren’t able to feed off each others time and innovation. I would argue that if all of the work and innovation were showcased in one place it would lead to further improvements.

We have exactly this problem with the FHSST project, people are using, adapting and enhancing the resources but we’re not tracking it in any way and the enhancements aren’t being fed back to the core resources (we are in the process of trying to address this).

UNESCO are looking to roll-out an internal platform that allows member states to see the innovations of other states so that they will more freedom and diversity for their own implementations. It will also provide a place to showcase the uptake, diversity and innovation of framework documents and build a much stronger community around UNESCO’s work in this area.

AMESA is the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa, making mathematics the only school subject for which there is a national association in South Africa. I think that educators in all subject areas should have a national body that organises an annual conference to help drive their subject area as well as the professional development of educators.

I was invited to participate on a panel at the AMESA Congress this year on a panel on professional development. One of my colleagues, upon hearing this, immediately said to me “What do you know about that?”. Formally, nothing. Given the Siyavula roll-out plan, my time with the community facilitators, the research the Foundation did into teaching teachers and my time working on a big physics experiment I thought I could find something to contribute.

I went to talk about a less formal approach to professional development; more a process and environment that ensures that professional development is happening continuously rather than a paper chase for formal qualifications. A process built on things that you already know, that have already proven themselves and that harnesses the latent knowledge and experience of teachers in the field (at the chalk-face if you like). A process that will also create a sense of belonging and inclusion.

Education

Education is evolving continuously, perhaps slowly, but continuously. Need for change is becoming more urgent all the time, especially with South Africa wanting to migrate to a knowledge-based economy which will require entirely different skills from a resource-based economy.

Needs, methodologies, resources and tools are all changing as well as the circumstances in which they need to be applied. This is further complicated by the fact that a variety of circumstances need to be addressed, often simultaneously.

Not to forget the fact that at the moment, in South Africa, we are struggling to address basic numeracy and literacy needs, irrespective of your preferred economy! Taking this into account and the fact that the perfect education system is something many more developed countries are still in search of, makes a lot of educators feel like nobody has the answer and that little progress is being made.

Science

Modern science has many of the same challenges:

• constantly shifting goals,
• constantly changing methodologies, and
• no knowledge of final solution.

Yet progress is made continuously despite these obstacles – impressive and often astounding progress – everything from expanding our understanding of fundamental particles to the devices you have in your pockets that connect wirelessly through 3G, bluetooth, wifi, and more with GPS’s, cameras and radios.

How is this achieved?

All participants work tirelessly towards the goal without a well defined roadmap but rather a well-defined process of layered peer-review, continuously doing their best, testing the results and comparing methodologies etc., providing each other with constraints, ideas and challenges to continuously make progress.

In science the critical assessment of ideas is conducted in ever expanding circles of review – first local groups or departments – then workshops – then local conferences – then international conferences and then international peer-reviewed journals. It is important to not that the the informal peer review, which takes place long before formal journals, results in significant benefit and progress through critical assessment.

Professionals

Professional organisations/people continuously assess how effective they are at their core duties, continuously adapting their methodologies to be better, faster, more effective, more efficient, and more sensitive to the ever changing needs of their clients and the broader environment in which they work.

This typically happens through continuous review at all levels, personal review with a sense of personal accountability, local peer-review within their current group, department etc., institutional peer-review within their broader organisation, national peer-review at local conferences and international or global peer-review at international conferences. Then, of course, we also have peer-reviewed journals.

The many layers of review also ensure that information flows globally as well.

Groups that are effective at defining their purpose, sharing effectively and creating a communal knowledge-base of resources, ideas, methodologies and technologies are called communities of practice (COP). Scientists and other professionals typically form many layers of communities of practice.

Communities of Practice

We need to create an enabling environment for educators to form the same layered structures of communities of practice. AMESA has got half of the problem solved, they have a national congress, and have chapters in each province. What would take things to the next level would be many small grass-roots communities of practice that are affiliated with the provincial structures.

If teachers come together in an environment of trust they would be able to discuss what works and share ideas, if they consider the environment informal with no punitive measures for performance, then they can also share what doesn’t work, what they don’t understand and be more transparent about their weaknesses. This is essential if these weaknesses are to be addressed effectively, or at all.

In the current environment a lot of trust is lacking with things like classroom observation being hated because they can lead to punitive measures against under-performing teachers. It is precisely this information that needs to be shared so that we can support those teachers to overcome their weaknesses. This sort of trust is typical of a true community. The environment where teachers can receive in-classroom review, without fear, needs to be created from the policy side, or done informally by the teaching body themselves.

There really is no need to make a case for communities of practice as the benefits are well documented in many peer-reviewed journals across many disciplines. What is important to emphasise is the voluntary nature of the communities and that it is impossible to enforce their formation.

Seeds for Communities of Practice

In my work to support teachers and curriculum advisors to be more effective, I adopt an approach that focuses on the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs), which immediately allows for the re-packaging, contextualisation and improvement of educational resources, by communities of practice, which supports load-sharing, professional development, empowerment and the development of a sense of belonging for the participants.

To do this effectively we need to support the communities in ways that are reinforcing and this is done by providing a suite of complementary projects that support the essence of the full teaching value chain:

Wrapping communities of practice around an open, collaborative approach to sharing content, knowledge, ideas, techniques and challenges will have benefits for all the participants and provide opportunities for development. Using technology appropriately will allow processes and communities of practice to co-exist at many levels. For example, teachers could participate in the local community of practice for their geographical area, as well as a provincial community of practice and then also a national one.

The bottom-line is that participation in a community of practice is an incredibly powerful driver for continuous professional development.

My blog post about Mbilwi Secondary School triggered an unexpected blast from the past, I was contacted by Dr. Azwinndini Muronga. I used to be a member of the UCT-CERN Research Centre at the University of Cape Town while working on my PhD and have had very little contact with the unit since beginning at the Foundation. Azwinndini joined the unit while I was there and is now a senior lecturer at UCT.

It turns out that Mbilwi has been doing an excellent job of interesting its students in science for many years as Azwinndini was quick to point out that he too attended Mbilwi. Azwinndini mentioned the possibility of going back to the school to talk to the students and I suggested that we might be able to support the school with some of the OER resources we’re looking to print and I think we’ve got a great opportunity to spread OERs, create new partnerships and even get Mbilwi feeding back into the OER world.

It was nice to be able to reconnect with Azwinndini as we really have an opportunity to give Mbilwi further recognition for their achievements as well as give me an opportunity to work on the UCT Physics Department to think about the impact of OERs (hint, hint).

I talk a lot about communities of practice (CoP) in my work around Siyavula and the concept is key to the strategy and sustainability. Before talking about why we chose Connexions, our community strategy or the impact of the recent announcement by the Minister of Basic Education I need to make sure we’ve got a definition of CoPs handy. I would like to emphasise what CoPs are, their benefits and what they are not.

Communities of Practice

CoP research was pioneered by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave and Etienne has a nice, succinct definiton on his CoP page which I’ll reproduce here:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

CoPs have:

• a domain or area in which all members share an interest,
• members engage in discussion and activities, helping each other and sharing information and
• members who are practitioners and develop a shared set of resources, knowledge, experience, tool and techniques.

In working with teachers there is ample opportunity to support the formation of communities of practice. Teachers have a common domain, they can benefit from discussion and sharing information and their shared experience, tools and techniques will improve classroom practice. In fact, it has been shown (see for example: Zaslavsky, O., & Leikin, R. (2004)  Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 7, 5 – 32 and Graven, M. (2005) Pythagoras, 61, 2 – 10) that participating in communities of practice is a powerful form of professional development for teachers.

There has been a lot written on CoPs and I’m not going to delve into it here, what I do want to mention are a few anecdotes related to what communities of practice are not.

Forced Groups

I often suggest that people consider working together with the hope that a community of practice will emerge and this is often met with the standard refrain “One person ends up doing all the work!”. My own experience is similar. When forced to work in a group for projects one person often ended up doing all the work (I’m not even going to pretend it was me).

However, forced group-work failing is not a counter-argument to CoPs being useful. It is merely an illustration that you can’t force people to be a community. My own feeling about forced group-work is that nobody wants to be there, the group dynamics haven’t ironed themselves out yet, nobody feels comfortable and the pressure builds up until someone just wants out. After a while this behaviour is reinforced sufficiently that someone takes on the task as soon as the group forms and none of the group workings are ever sorted out.

Rapid Deployment

CoPs are communities, no matter which group development process you favour, all teams or communities grow and this takes time. The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing process, proposed by Bruce Tuckman, is one well known example of how the process has been categorised. What is important is that there is an organic process a group of people have to experience before they perform (i.e. they are a community, never mind a community of practice).

The challenge here is that even if an organisation has bought into the idea of communities, they take time to evolve and not all are successful. It is impossible to include communities as deliverables on a timeline. The harder you try the more frustrated you are likely to become.

Purpose

Communities consist of people, it’d be much easier, if much more boring, to manage them if they didn’t, but they do. So, assuming we get some people together and they overcome their group dynamics, achieve the ability to communicate effectively, share ideas, information and even criticism, they still need a purpose to bring them together to be community of practice. The thing about people is that they want to be able to choose.

If people are going to find the time and energy to participate, to overcome the group dynamics, accept and give criticism, then they need to resonate with the purpose of community. The easiest way to achieve this is to allow the communities to decide their own purpose. You will probably also have to accept that their purpose isn’t going to be identical to the one you’d like them to have.

Forcing a group together to immediately work on something they’re not interested in is clearly going to be a disaster. For success we have to rectify all the mistakes in that process, not just one of them. So if we’re somehow going to use CoPs in our work we need to keep this and much, much more in mind. With a lot of help from Hélène Smit, Layo Seriki and Judith Haupt,  I do try but I’ll save the details for another blog post.

I believe that sustainable solutions to the challenges facing South Africa, HIV/AIDS, unemployment, rampant violent crime, corruption and the like, cannot be found without ensuring that all South Africans have access to a proper education. Imagine poorly educated policemen trying to solve crimes, insufficient or poorly trained doctors dealing with TB outbreaks, young entrepreneurs who can’t do basic numeracy trying to start new businesses, etc. What am I on about you might ask? Well, I see helping education as the key to a peaceful and happy future in South Africa for myself, my family and other South Africans; our collective future depends on it. I think that organisations or individuals who conduct themselves in an underhanded way to take advantage of the education system are reprehensible. They are jeopardising our future!

Often, when presenting Siyavula or FHSST, I am asked about the “poor publishers”. Please don’t mistake that for sarcasm, people literally use the phrase “poor publishers”. People are concerned that free, open, volunteer content projects are somehow going to destroy big business. For the record, we’d love to see the publishers participating in the Open Educational Resources (OER) arena and there are a number of ways this can happen. This post isn’t about OER business models for publishers though, its about whether the “poor” part is justified.

Publishers and Market Forces

The rise of OERs, and platforms to support them, are market forces in the world of publishing. Many other markets have had to respond to changing cultures and technology. The large international publishers have no excuse for not being aware of what is happening around open content. The publicity around Wikipedia alone should have made them all sit up and take notice. Businesses that don’t respond to changing markets allow themselves to become irrelevant. The publishers have had more than enough time, and they have more than sufficient monetary reserves to have done research aplenty into the technology, licences and developments taking place. If they haven’t, then, quite frankly, they deserve to feel a little market pressure.

I was pointed to a great article a while back on the future of scientific publishing written by Michael Nielsen, which expands on some of the reasons that publishers are feeling a bit of pressure at the moment. Many of the ideas mentioned, relating to why large businesses struggle to adapt, are applicable to all areas of publishing and I strongly recommend giving it a read. Nielsen points out that the very traditional structures that have led to the publishers’ success are now holding them back. They do need to adapt to survive and some of them won’t make it.

Publishers and Underhanded Tactics

Publishers feel the need to strengthen the messaging around their copyright in school textbooks.

Here is a scanned page from a South African school textbook published by  a well known publisher. I have tried to obscure everything except the message of interest and am looking forward to an angry letter from a publisher, which I’ll be sure to share.

It is important to note that this message is in addition to the standard copyright notice. This message can only have been added through a series of deliberate actions by the publisher. It certainly didn’t get there by accident. Someone with sufficient authority within the publishing house made this decision and, one can only assume, they consulted their lawyers regarding the language. It would be ludicrous to make statements about the law without checking.

Given the language of the message, it can only have been added for one purpose and that is to stop some set of people photocopying pages out of this book. I guess that the publisher became aware of some people photocopying this book or other titles in their catalogue and felt that such a message would stop them. It could have been anybody, but let us be realistic, this is a grade-specific school textbook. There are two groups of people who will ever look at this book: teachers and learners. This means that it must have been one of these groups that had been photocopying pages.

If you visit the website for the Publishers’ Association of South Africa you will find this text:

Am I allowed to photocopy part of a book for my own personal and private use?
Copyright is not infringed by any fair dealing with a literary work for the purposes of the personal or private use of the work by the person making the copy. What is ‘fair’ in any given situation will always depend on the circumstances of that situation.

Is it correct that as long as I photocopy 10% or less of a published work, this is permitted?
No, it’s not correct. The Copyright Act says nothing about any percentage. 10% may be ‘fair’ but then again, it may not, since the test for fair dealing is qualitative as well as quantitative.

But surely I am allowed to make more than one copy if there is no commercial gain involved?
The regulations to the Act offer certain concessions for educational institutions and for non-profit libraries. These include a defined number of multiple copies strictly for classroom use or discussion, but exclude compilations.

I want my each of students to copy for themselves an article from a journal. Can I put a photocopy of the article on the reserve shelf in my educational institution’s library for each student to copy under ‘fair dealing’?
No. The copy on the reserve shelf is an infringing copy because it is not made for the private use or study of the person making it.

How about if I put the journal itself (not a photocopy) on the reserve shelf and tell my students to copy it for themselves?
Although each student may make a ‘fair dealing’ copy, 100 students each making a copy results in 100 copies, whereas fair dealing is intended to apply in the case of the single copy made by the person using the work.

What this is telling you is that there are fair dealing and educational exceptions to the rule stated categorically in the message publishers have chosen to add. Furthermore, those exceptions apply specifically in the contexts of the only reasonable audiences for the textbook. Despite the fact that these exceptions exist, and the publishers are well aware of them, they have chosen not to mention them in any way. As far as I am concerned, the message publishers have added is incorrect in the majority of circumstances that it is trying to influence.

Now, do teachers and learners know about these exceptions? Learners probably don’t, I certainly didn’t when I was at school, and teachers might. If teachers do, then adding this message is redundant because teachers know that it has all sorts of caveats attached and wouldn’t change their activities. But the message was added and so I can only assume that the majority of teachers don’t know about the exceptions and (publishers clearly hope) will be influenced by the message. This message would only have been added deliberately as a means to try to change their behaviour.

Remember, this book is only useful in an educational context to learners and teachers and so the educational exceptions will apply very often, allowing photocopying of this book.

Quick summary:

• a deliberate message in addition to the copyright notice has been added
• it targets teachers and learners
• who have legal exceptions to the message
• adding the message only makes sense if they don’t know about the exceptions

So I’m left to conclude that the publisher has added a message to intimidate teachers and learners, playing on their ignorance, knowing full well that exceptions, that teachers and learners could benefit from, do exist!

I see this message as a very aggressive defensive-response to activities taking place. Activities that may well be legal and that are taking place because we have an education system that is under-resourced and under pressure. This is not a positive response designed to help anyone, not even the publisher.

Rich Publishers

I get irritated when people only complain about problems and never suggest solutions. Is there a possible positive response under these circumstances? I think so. In fact, I think that it could be so positive that it would help the publisher gain market share and real favour as well as help education.

My imaginary publishing company would have had this message (with a lawyer to check the language first of course):

You may only photocopy pages from this textbook if you are invoking fair dealing or educational exceptions to our copyright terms. If you find yourself in a position where you need to make photocopies for educational purposes, please let us know. This information will help us to identify where books are needed, which books are being used, and whether or not our distribution is working effectively.

Why do I think that mine is better (it is too long!)? Mine has benefits for everyone because it promotes better information flow making those doing the copying allies of the publishers rather than their enemies. Here are some of the benefits that occurred to me off the top of my head:

• Publishers’ benefits:
  • identify areas where there is a lack of textbooks for future market expansion (where are books needed?)
  • identify which books are really popular (which books are being copied?)
  • identify if distribution channels are working properly (should they already have our books?)
  • identify if only selected sections of books are being copied to identify which book sections are hitting the mark (which pieces of our books are popular?)
• Teachers’ and learners’ benefits:
  • better equipped to access resources to improve education
  • broader access to educational resources without fear of legal repercussions
  • better awareness of their rights
  • feedback channel to publishers which will help improve content in the long run

Rather than clamping down, big publishers could in fact gain more market presence by opening up a little bit and using this information to improve their products and services. Further, this may ultimately lead to an increase in total market size as the educated population grows.

Back to my original topic: “poor publishers”? Quite frankly, my sympathy goes to the learners who have to share one book between four and cannot do their homework properly, while publishing house executives sit in plush offices dreaming up misleading copyright messages to intimidate teachers and learners.

The Sunday Times newspaper commissioned a study of South African schools which they released this last weekend. There is a lot of information in the report and one could spend a lot of time unpacking it. The Sunday Times chose to highlight some things that would definitely lead to a fair amount of debate, some of the classic ones being:

• same-sex versus co-ed schools, and
• girls being smarter than boys.

I’m not really very interested in venturing down either of those paths at this time, or at any time for that matter.

The report is worth a couple of blog posts but I’d like to start by just focusing on one school that was mentioned. Mbilwi Secondary School was ranked in the survey as the top science school in the country. It is a school that I have never heard and, I am quite sure, many other people had never heard of. I haven’t done any additional research on Mbilwi … yet, but there are somethings that jump out at me from the report:

• Mbilwi has large classes, and
• students have to share study guides.

Why do those fact jump out? Large classes and a lack of resources are often cited reasons for poor preformance at schools. Reading a little further they point out just how large the classes are (pupil:teacher ratio of 56:1) and that the school attributes their success to:

• identifying weak learners at the beginning of matric and providing extra support 4 days a week right up until the final exams,
• extra tuition on Saturdays, and
• focusing on more than Grade 12 but working to help learners from Grade 8.

These are the reported statistics that allowed them to achieve the top spot (Matric 2008 numbers):

• 201 Matrics cadidates
• Pass rate 100%
• Univeristy entrance 93%
• 309 A symbols
• 80% passed Maths with more than 50%
• 75% passed Science with more 50%

My take-away from this is that a lot can be done with the right attitude. If the learners didn’t want to learn the extra tuition wouldn’t mean anything, if the teachers didn’t care but were forced to provide the extra tuition they’d not do a very good job. The fact that they do it, do it well and that it is well received tells me that everyone involved with Mbilwi has reaslised that the problem is not insurmountable and that hard work can pay off, if everyone does their best working together.

Another point I can’t help but mention,  EVEN THE NUMBER 1 science school in South Africa will benefit from having access to FHSST, Siyavula and OpenPress to solve their resources problems.

I was quite excited to see a press release from the Office of the Governor for the state of California: Governor Schwarzenegger Signs Legislation Furthering Digital Textbook Initiative. But then I noticed one of the components signed off:

SB 48 by Senator Elaine Alquist (D-San Jose) requires that any individual, firm, partnership or corporation that offers textbooks for sale at the University of California, the California State University, the California Community Colleges or any private postsecondary education institution in the state, to the extent practicable, make them available, in whole or in part, for sale in an electronic format by January 1, 2020.

Before we discuss this further lets remind ourselves of the context. We’re talking about developments in a digital space, in the world of OERs where the movement has been accelerating significantly this year with projects like Connexions, CK12, Flat World Knowledge and Curriki (to name a few) all taking off. In this context, I think this is completely laughable!

Lets think about this for half a second:

• to the extent practicable: an opt-out clause of note!
• in whole or in part: so if I make a page or two available am I done?
• January 1, 2020: and you’ve got geological rather than digital timelines to do …… nothing!?

Perhaps I should dig deeper into it but even if the majority of the content needs to be available, the deadline alone makes this a joke. Collaborative technology and its use will leapfrog this little piece of legislation in the next 18 months. Any publisher clinging to this as a timeline to get their act together regarding the digital distribution of content has just committed suicide.

Even in South Africa we already have almost the entire curriculum available online, just combine the scope of content covered on Connexions by Siyavula, the material that can be downloaded from the Mindset Network and fill in some gaps with what you can find on Thutong. This is all just my opinion of course.

Today I received the good news that the assessment bank I mentioned previously has been approved and we will begin building it as soon as possible, hopefully on Monday.

We are not going to re-invent the wheel and will be extending (NOT forking) an already existing assessment bank that has been developed by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) which they are calling TARMii. The HSRC has indicated that they have no objection to us creating an open bank as they’ve released their source code under the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). The HSRC implementation locks down the authoring side of the bank to a few specific users at the HSRC. Their bank is populated with Grade 4-6 (Intermediate phase) items for English and Mathematics and will allow teachers to:

• create class-lists,
• generate a test extremely rapidly, providing a question paper and memorandum,
• capture learners results for the tests, and
• generate reports on a learner-by-assessment standard basis.

We will keep all this functionality, which they have already tested, as it is really useful to teachers but we want to allow them to benefit from such a tool for all subjects and grades as quickly as possible. The HSRC will spend some time trialing the site with teachers and the items they have created before extending to other learning areas/subjects and grades.

To make this available to everyone we need to open up the authoring side and provide some means for community vetting. Our extension to the assessment bank software will cover:

• community feedback:
  • ratings
  • comments
  • verify as correct
• authoring:
  • simplify UI
  • allow question cloning for minor modifications
  • add version control
• test generation:
  • allow test to be tweaked (not currently available)
  • browsing for additional/replacement questions.

This compliments Siyavula as it will bring more people into a the OER space but channel time and energy that Siyavula is not trying to channel as teachers spend a lot of time sharing, adapting and creating assessment items. The possibility of integrating the two exists as TARMii has made use of a number of tools/standards used or developed by Connexions, for example the WYSIWYG MathML editor, and the same development team, Upfront Systems, that has helped us extend the Rhaptos platform, on which Connexions is built, built TARMii and will do the extensions for us.

The community of teachers in SA is chomping at the bit for an assessment bank. We have had multiple requests for bank software that communities are already prepared to populate themselves. Providing the different groups with a single tool will allow them to feed off each others energy and allow us to begin with a bang. Working with existing communities also makes the tool much more sustainable.

It is great to be building a tool in response to a real demand as a lot less energy needs to go into advocacy and messaging.