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 of Basic Education (DBE) for all learners taking Physical Science and/or Mathematics in Grades 10-12 in the whole country for 2012! I don’t know of any country doing anything like this before.

The last file was delivered minutes before this post went live.

This has happened at a time when a new curriculum has been developed, commonly referred to as the Curriculum and Policy Statements (CAPS). CAPS replaces the National Curriculum Statements (NCS) curriculum that is currently in schools.
In 2012 Grade 10 learners will be taught according to CAPS while the higher grades remain with NCS. NCS will be phased out as the Grade 10 cohort of 2012 move up through the grades. As with the advent of NCS, CAPS is a significant departure from the curriculum that went before and requires that new textbooks be developed. One feature of CAPS is that a strict teaching schedule is imposed by the curriculum statement and textbooks must adhere to this in their design and implementation.

DBE has recently had success in internally authoring and distributing numeracy and literacy workbooks for all Grade 1 – 6 learners in South Africa. It was the same team that approached Siyavula requesting the strict alignment of the Grade 10 books to CAPS so that the books can be printed for all learners in the country. In addition, the existing NCS books for Grade 11 and 12 will also be distributed to all learners. DBE has committed to distribute the following titles to relevant learners in 2012:

• Mathematics Grade 10 (aligned with CAPS)
• Wiskunde Graad 10 (aligned with CAPS)
• Physical Science Grade 10 (aligned with CAPS)
• Fisiese Wetenskappe Graad 10 (aligned with CAPS)
• Mathematics Grade 11 (aligned with NCS)
• Physical Science Grade 11 (aligned with NCS)
• Mathematics Grade 12 (aligned with NCS)
• Physical Science Grade 12 (aligned with NCS)

This will require a total of 1.8M textbooks are printed and distributed.

This is a significant milestone for the OER movement in South Africa and will raise significant exposure of the issues around access to materials, awareness of open licensing and hopefully ensure that publishers and DBE review their current processes regarding learner and teacher support materials (LTSM) procurement and provisioning.

Ensuring that this was possible was the exclusive focus of the last 4 months and became an all-consuming exercise. We had to expand our team and work incredibly hard with each member of the book team clocking almost 2 man months per calendar month since mid-September. We had to revamp our pipeline, develop new layouts for the books, undergo multiple review iterations with DBE reviewers, edit, edit, edit and then turn everyone into a translator in some capacity. The details are available on request and over alcoholic beverages!

At the end of it all we’ve produced books that:

• are freely available online and via mobile (final versions will be live in a few days);
• feature tight integration of technology leveraging the huge pool of OERs that are available (video, simulations, presentations);
• are linked to support services;
• that allow educator to annotate the online versions with:
  • errata,
  • suggestions, and
  • teaching notes.
  You can see a short video demonstration of the annotation prototype in action here:
  
  This will be a key part of ensuring that we engage the broader community openly in improving the books and manage all feedback effectively using a ticketing system.

These books have been branded the Everything series and will be available, along with all services and enrichment, at:

• Everything Science
• Everything Maths

The content is available but we’re still putting the actual sites together and will have this ready for the start of the school year on the 9th January 2012.

However, the printing of the books by DBE precludes significant revenue for Siyavula being generated through the sale of the books as was our initial plan for this year. We do have another plan though, more about that later.

OER and Textbook Distribution

The distribution of our books is likely to be controversial. The original Grade 10 books that we submitted for approval to be on the national catalogue were rejected. This will certainly have the publishers up in arms but I’m not too fussed. The books that are being distributed by DBE and that were submitted are radically different.

The books on the national catalogue typically have the table of contents checked to ensure the curriculum is covered and then a random, small set of chapters reviewed in detail (usually by two reviewers).

In the case of the books that are being distributed we held a two-day workshop at the DBE office in which the curriculum specialists and reviewers went through the books page-by-page. After this process we edited the Grade 10 books extensively and they were reviewed again in their entirety. Further edits were made and then additional reviewers were brought in to read the books and comment.

To be honest, such extensive review is painful and stressful but in everyone’s best interests. We are happy to say that the books have the go ahead from a diverse set of reviewers who were able to review the entire book. With our annotation system in place, we will be able to very effectively handle feedback and make sure that there is complete transparency regarding issues, comments and suggestions raised during 2012 so that educators have access to the complete picture and that we can produce even better books for 2013. We believe that the value that this transparency adds will be immeasurable once the community of educators becomes familiar with it.

Life Sciences Grade 10

In all of our workshops, the most common request we get from educators is for a Life Sciences textbook. We’ve always said that as soon as we felt the demand from the community was large enough we’d have a go. The demand had been rising all year and just before we landed the DBE deal we put the wheels in motion to write a Life Sciences Grade 10 book. We decided to pursue it anyway and not cancel or postpone the process.

We ran three information evening events, modeled on our earlier ones this year, to provide educators an opportunity to come and learn about why we’re excited about the possibilities and also discuss any concerns they might have. We were also lucky to get some interest from other provinces. The plan was to bring a group together for a weekend and get the ball rolling.

The weekend alone would have been the highlight of my year if not for the printing of the books as we produced over 300 pages of content in a weekend. The content is very rough but we created a community that really threw themselves into the work over the weekend and has already been through a couple of editing and review cycles.

We need to spend a little time really assessing how much work is required and when the next weekend will be but I am more than confident that we’ll have a good book out by the middle of next year.

Hard Drives

We’ve been distributing PDF files of our books which contain links to rich-media. Many schools have asked if they could get offline copies of the material. We decided to try a lightweight exercise to strengthen the links between schools and solve the problem of making the rich-media available.

We bought 12 500GB hard drives, populated them with a lot of OER content (Khan Academy, PhET Simulations, CK12 books, etc.) and sent them to people all over South Africa which, at first glance, seems like a really dumb idea. However, we approached the strongest national community of practice that we’ve interacted with, the IEB physical science teachers and we asked them to nominate recipients via their mailing list. Nominees had to be seconded and prepared to help distribute the content.

The IEB schools aren’t those in need of the resources the most BUT they are the ones that are more likely to have the technical expertise and resources to help get the content to other schools and they often already partner with under-resourced schools. By asking for nominees we hoped to get people who bought into the sharing idea and by making a commitment on the mailing list we left the accountability to their own community.

The project has taken on a life of its own and we have no idea how many times the drives have actually been copied but we have some confirmed details of copies made:

• Eastern Cape – 8
• Western Cape – 18 (30 pending requests)
• Gauteng – 15
• KZN – 5
• Mpumalanga – 7

Anyone is welcome to come by our office and copy it but we’ll work our way through the list anyway. We didn’t want a heavily regulated process and I’m very happy with the results.

It would be nice to put up a google map with all the schools that have copied it and make that publicly available. We will definitely revisit this simple, yet effective exercise in the next year again as more resources become available.

St John’s College

We’ve been lucky enough to work with St John’s Physical Science department over the last few months. They’re keen to make content available and have hosted a couple of content uploading sprints at which we’ve learnt a lot. In collaboration with Kathi Fletcher and Colleen Henning (HOD Physical Science) we’ve hatched a plan that will make it relatively easy for St John’s to make their own textbook available during the course of 2012. The plan is that they’ll make the content available as they teach it so that by the end of the year everything is available. Kathi and the OERPub team will make a dedicated St John’s importing client available and Siyavula will support St John’s.

St John’s have also hosted a FullMarks uploading sprint at which they also supported people copying the hard drive with all the OER content on it. We also ran a Monassis test with the educators which was very informative and everyone jumped right into developing their own templates even though XML, SVG and Python knowledge needed to be acquired.

Inzalo Foundation

We have been working with the Inzalo Foundation over the last few weeks to plan the development of a set of openly licensed workbooks that cover Natural Science and Technology Grade 4-6 which will be CAPS-aligned and available for the start of the 2013 school year when those grades switch to CAPS.

Two very interesting planning workshops have been held with a lot of brainstorming about the perfect workbook. We’ve agreed to write one that can stand alone in print, has an accompanying DVD of material and has further enrichment online.

The authoring process will be a collaborative one and will build on everything we learnt during the Life Sciences Grade 10 process. We’re very excited about this opportunity to partner with Inzalo and make more content available for educators and learners.

Workshops / Conferences

Open Education: The Open Education Conference in Utah was the week before the deadline for the first set of books for DBE to review and I was responsible for the editing of the physics half of Physical Science so I, unfortunately, cancelled my trip. My feeling was that the impact of widespread distribution of the books outweighed the benefits of presenting at the conference. I was, however, able to convince Carl Scheffler to give a talk in my slot. Carl generously stuck with my abstract. A video of Carl’s talk is on Youtube:

Dinaledi Schools: I was also invited to present to the Dinaledi schools’ principals at their first meeting in preparation for 2012. The Dinaledi schools are schools that are charged with focusing on Mathematics and Physical Science. They have specific targets to meet and receive some additional support. There are 46 (soon to be 48) Dinaledi schools in the Western Cape and, as a group, are an ideal candidate for community building and technology integration.

Business Plans

Siyavula is now a registered Pty Ltd. in South Africa. Siyavula is Nguni for “we are opening” and effectively describes the influence that Siyavula’s products and role have in the education sector with respect to learning, technology, resources and teaching. Siyavula is driven by a team that is intrinsically passionate about education and believe that the most effective way to sustainably and positively lead innovation in the education space is to become a market force.

Vision

Learners the world over are given the opportunity to identify their passions, achieve their potential and pursue their dreams.

Mission

Siyavula is to be a social enterprise intent on sustainably driving an innovative education agenda to address the myriad challenges faced by educators around the world and restore a love for learning and teaching.

A key requirement to fulfilling this mission is to enable the provision of localised, relevant, up to date learning experiences when, where and how they are required. In this spirit the activities that Siyavula will conduct will be built on three pillars: community, technology and openness, with a view to improving education at all levels and in all areas.

Revenue Model

The large scale distribution of our books by DBE precludes Siyavula generating any significant revenue from the books themselves. In our original discussions we thought that the support services would be a good enough value-add to get DBE interested in a services contract of some sort but this was hampered by two things: it requires massive coherence between different DBE departments as it ties community, technology and ICT together; and it pushes the costs into tender range. This meant that this proposal was shelved (for now at least).

A quick video we made to try to articulate the idea to them was included with sample books:

We still think that the support services is the way to go with our business model and are busy developing a business plan based on this idea. The plan will be finished this week.

Fellowship

My 2011 Fellowship ends on the 29th February 2012 and I have not applied for another one. Siyavula has reached the point where we feel that it is pressing to stand on its own. It has been incredibly beneficial to be able to experiment through the Fellowship and have more flexibility than any other funding arrangement would have allowed.

The Shuttleworth name has also been very useful to help start conversations but we have been working hard to build a brand for Siyavula as well. The time has come to go for broke and we believe that Siyavula has developed enough value to add to the sector that it can and will be sustainable.

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) mainstream in South Africa.

Challenges

For a long time we’ve had a huge number of OERs available in South Africa but their impact has been limited. In fact, there are a huge number of OERs available globally which have had little impact. Considering the awesome benefits of OERs articulated, much more effectively than I ever will, in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration it is worth considering why this is the case.

Within the South African context (and this applies to the rest of this blog post), we find that there are few major factors at play that are not well addressed by the OER movement in South Africa.

Access Challenges: Very few educators have internet access (just over 10% of the population are internet users). This means that the digital, on-line nature of the vast majority of OERs excludes them from use by the majority of educators.

Official Credibility: Most schools are under-resourced and struggling, many considered dysfunctional. Schools that are struggling will have limited access to resources and when they are able to acquire resources, given that they typically serve poor areas, will only be able to purchase resources from the national catalogue of approved textbooks using their allocated textbook budget. There are no OER textbooks on the national catalogue so the resources that the majority of schools could get would not be open and so they would not benefit from the advantages of open resources.

Search: At this point we’re down to a very small set of educators from well resources schools that have internet access and some flexibility in what resources they might use. Do these educators use OERs? At this point I can’t point you at research but we’ll be posting a number of video interviews in the coming months to back up what I’m about to say. Most of the educators that do go online to search for resources:

• are not familiar with copyright licences at all so don’t know what they are actually allowed to use;
• are overwhelmed by the huge number of search results and don’t have the time to sift through them all;
• do not have the time to convert/adapt it to align with their curriculum; and
• give up because finding something you can use and adapting it to your class just takes too much effort!

Re-use and Remix: If they happen to push through to finding a resource they are confident they can use and they want to align it with their curriculum or integrate it into a lesson plan they find that the proprietary formats they encounter often mean they don’t have and can’t afford the tools to do this.

So the extremely small sample of educators that persevere all the way to the end often tell us that is just isn’t worth looking for resources on-line. For them it is faster and simpler to make their own resources from scratch!

We have found some educators all over South Africa using two sets of OERs:

1. The Free High School Science Texts (queue sigh of relief!) and
2. The PhET Simulations.

Fellowship Work

My Fellowship work in focused on Siyavula for 2011. There are some things that I do that are of a more general nature on the advocacy front but for the most part Siyavula is my Fellowship. I want to ensure that OERs become mainstream and that, that is done in a way that makes Siyavula sustainable.

A lot has been done on Siyavula this year:

• A mobile front-end was released for the Connexions platform. NOT an iPhone, Blackberry or Android application, but something relevant to the South African context. We used a theming proxy-server to give mobile users in South Africa the ability to consume all of the content on Connexions. All of the Siyavula content and FHSST textbooks are on Connexions so this is immediately available to any South African with access to a WAP-enabled phone – approximately 100% of South Africans.. There are multiple instances:
  1. a generic one hosted on Connexions hardware can be found at mobile.cnx.org for the rest of the world; and
  2. a Siyavula specific one hosted in Cape Town can be found at m.siyavula.cnx.org for the local market.

  One nice bonus to the mobile front-end is that it is actually used as a backend to the Connexions Android application.

• We ran a successful series of hackathons at the University of Cape Town (UCT). These allowed us to ensure that all exercises in our Grade 10 FHSST textbooks had model solutions on our open assessment bank, FullMarks.
• We ran three sets of evening events building on our success from last year. We ran events in:
  1. Durbanville for schools in the Northern suburbs of Cape Town;
  2. Pietermaritzburg and Durban; and
  3. Johannesburg.

  These events are subject-focused and cover tools/resources: for improved collaboration amongst educators; improved classroom engagement and extra-curricular engagement and learning. This is in addition to an introduction to openness in education and Siyavula as an organisation. We cover 5 subject areas in our series: Languages, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Information Technology/Computer Applications Technology (two subjects strictly speaking).

• We have used all our trips to run a number of FullMarks workshops for individual schools, groups of educators and computer centres all over South Africa. We are seeing a steady increase in the number of users of FullMarks and the number of assessment items. However, we are still far from the critical mass we require.
• We use each trip to engage with organisations that may be interested in our work or even partnering with Siyavula. We have had good meetings that have had meaningful follow-up discussions or activities with:
  • AdvTech who own the Crawford Schools and Abbotts Colleges in South Africa. We have been talking to their science coordinator specifically about extensions of our evening events into courses.
  • Mindset who are another OER producer in South Africa and have over 500 hours of video content. We have been discussing the remixing of their video content into our books, collaboration around FullMarks and the writing of further textbooks.
  • Tshikululu linked Mathematics educators from the 105 schools they support about strengthening their community of educators and the availability of resources.
  • OLE Rwanda about their use of FullMarks for supporting assessment. They have already remixed the Grade 4-6 English and Mathematics workbooks we’ve made available to be aligned with their curriculum.
• We have established a partnership with St Johns College in Johannesburg. Their Physical Science department has bought into the idea of openness and we have an uploading sprint scheduled for the 18^th and 19^th July during which we aim to help them put up a full set of Grade 10-12 Physical Science resources on Connexions. This is the first school that has bought into OERs at this level and it is a high-profile school with a very strong science department making this even more significant for the OER movement.
• We held an incredibly successful translation sprint at the Electrical Engineering Department at Stellenbosch University. The summary video of this event is in production right now and I will update this post as soon as it is available. We translated approximately 80% of Grade 10 Mathematics and 50% of Grade 10 Physical Science into Afrikaans. A follow-up sprint is scheduled for the 30^th of July.
• Siyavula is a registered member of the Publishers’ Association of South Africa and our paperwork to set up the Siyavula legal entity has been submitted and we are awaiting approval.
• We were able to submit Grade 10 Mathematics, Grade 10 Physical Science and, thanks to the incredible translation efforts of a number of volunteers, Graad 10 Wiskunde books for review for inclusion on the national catalogue of approved textbooks. This happened on the 21^st of June. Note that only Grade 1, 2, 3 and 10 were open for submissions at this time. The current submission date for Grade 11 and 12 is the 28^th February 2012.
• Not only did we submit books, we enriched them with OERs from a number of projects. In the process eating our own dogfood completely by developing them on Connexions, the platform we advocate teachers use. Our submitted books are a tour-guide to the highlights of world of online rich-media OERs, highlights in a very subjective, curriculum-aligned sense.
• We have also reworked the Siyavula brand and the new logo can be seen, as of today, on Siyavula.com. Our old logo made people think that we were more of a childrens’ literacy project than a technology-focused OER project. We’ve gone from:
  
  to:
  

Our Response to Challenges

Access Challenges: With our mobile front-end any educator or organisation can share resources on Connexions and ultimately make them available to 100% of South Africans. Our resources, developed on Connexions, are by default available to all. The print versions being on the approved list will also ensure that many more schools can actually acquire hard-copy OER textbooks that their educators can enhance on-line.

Official Credibility: Regardless of mobile accessibility, rich-media or open licensing, our books need to pass all the tests that publishers textbooks pass and so we have submitted them for approval. The ability to adapt them online, use them to point to rich-media and access them from almost anywhere in the country will make them the best option for educators once they are on the approved lists.

Search: Our textbooks and our evening events point to resources and tools that we have spent the time selecting from the multitude of options. This gives educators a simple, curriculum-aligned entry into the vast world of OERs.

Re-use and Remix: Our resources are available on Connexions, an open platform where educators can remix at will. In addition, we are working to get even more resources, like those from St Johns College, onto the platform to help educators nationally (and internationally).

Siyavula and Sustainability

We are in the process of setting Siyavula up as an OER “publisher”. We will add value to the work of our volunteers by providing the structure to ensure that their contributions add up to a coherent whole and by dealing with all the bureaucracy that needs to be navigated to ensure that their contributions have the maximum possible impact. Orders for books via the approved list would then carry a mark-up which would go to Siyavula’s running expenses but would still pass on the massive savings to the schools.

Each of our evening events is being developed into a course. All the resources and tools are freely available and we present them in the evening events but many educators have asked for a detailed course in which we help them use the tools. For these courses we will charge. Everything we use will be freely available but having us take the time to do the training will be a paid service.

Our books will always be available freely and openly on-line (web and mobile) and you will always be able to get a PDF file from Connexions but should you want us to deliver a printed copy or printed copies then we can do so and for that we will charge a mark-up. We will happily aggregate orders so that everyone benefits but Siyavula will take a percentage to cover our running expenses.

Conferences and Presentations

I also presented at the annual Connexions Conference and was invited to present on the OER panel at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative’s Education Think Tank earlier this year.

I was also included in the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans for the education work we have been doing.

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 was to spend a lot of time composing the perfect blog post about why sharing is a brilliant idea for everyone and why everyone benefits.

Circumstances haven’t played along so I’m putting some thoughts down and, in the spirit of openness, I hope there will be some discussion and even better arguments forthcoming from the broader community.

In this blog I would like to answer the question: why should the very best schools share their resources?

First, My Conclusion

For a school to continue to compete to be the best it is essential that they participate openly in the global education movement. In fact, the top private/public schools can benefit more from the open educational resources movement than the under-resourced schools because they have strong educators with excellent content and pedagogical knowledge who have the resources and technology around which to innovate.

How do I get to this conclusion?

A Little Context

I happen to have a background in science so I’m going to have a significant bias towards mathematics and science examples. I promise to spend some time looking for the Arts equivalents but they’re out there I just haven’t filtered them effectively yet.

Now to the schools, normally, in South Africa, our team is faced with schools struggling for resources. For them the benefits of the OER movement, primarily openly shared resources, are quite straightforward:

• increased content availability (Connexions,Mindset, CK12, Curriki etc.);
• a multitude of formats print, online, PDF, ePub, and mobile are all available for the same book;
• content can be adapted, contextualised and enhanced (yes because these aren’t the typical audience for which resources are created);
• massive cost savings (~ 1/5 price of publisher’s alternatives) ; and
• a massive reduction in workload for educators.

In our recent travels we’ve also encountered some schools that are the best resourced in South Africa (probably Africa) and would do pretty well by any global metric. Hence, the need to answer the question addressed in this blog. These schools aren’t particularly swayed by:

• the fact that they’ll have a textbook as they already have many;
• the increased content as they can buy rich-media supplements, assessment banks etc.;
• the variety of formats as they can deliver whichever format suits them without accessibility concerns;
• the adaptability of someone else’s content as they typically use their own notes anyway as their departments are strong in content knowledge and pedagogy;
• the cost saving as, let’s face it, they can afford the most expensive premium content; and
• the massive reduction in workload as they are well managed and their departments already collaborate quite well.

So why should these perfectly functioning institutions participate in the OER movement (I’m being serious not sarcastic). Let me be very clear that this isn’t about one school we encountered, there are a few and they’re in very much the same boat.

Consider the School’s Mission

Firstly, any reason I give should be aligned with the schools’ mission statement. For reference here are a number of schools linked to their mission statement. There are two sets of schools listed: those government schools chosen by the Sunday Times in a recent study to be the best in the country and those ranked in a Serve Africa 2011 ranking. I don’t give any particular weight to these metrics, I just needed some way of showing a list of schools where I could blame the bias on someone else!

I won’t analyse these in detail but I challenge you to randomly pick a few and read them. None of these mission statements states a primary objective of getting their learners to pass a matric exam with 50% (or even the minimum which is, sadly, lower). These mission statements talk about providing the best education, supporting the development of responsible, well-rounded, individuals who can participate meaningfully and effectively in society and striving to ensure they fulfil their potential.

The World is Changing (Fast!)

The world is a rapidly changing place, for any school to be providing the best possible education the educators must be up to date. The rate of change has been accelerating because of the internet and rapid advances in technology. This is the world for which learners need to be prepared.

There are some concrete examples that show that society will be different in future just look at the recent events(1, 2) in the Arab world, look at how transparency and open governance are taking hold, how the movement for open data is getting stronger, how governments aren’t able to keep secrets in the same way, how municipalities are being more effective by opening up their data (1, 2) and allowing the public to provide innovative solutions and uses of the data.

My only point here is that the world that educators need to be preparing learners for is changing so rapidly that it absolutely dictates education evolve so you can’t possibly rely on what you did 5 years ago, the world has changed too much.

Openness in Science

Thanks to Francois Grey for a nice sketch of this content.
The increase in connections amongst people provided by the internet has led to many opportunities, most importantly an increase in participatory culture and openness with incredible results.

Grid computing, as it is now called, can best be explained by a famous project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home). Volunteers download a simple computer program which analyses bits of radio data collected by a giant radio-telescope and sends back a short summary of the result to a central server in California. The biggest surprise of this project was not that they discovered a message from outer space. In fact, after over a decade of searching, no sign of extraterrestrial life has been found, although there are still vast regions of space that have not been looked at. The biggest surprise was the number of people willing to help such an endeavour. Over a million people have downloaded the software, making the total computing power of SETI@home rival that of even the biggest supercomputers in the world.

A software platform was built so that this model could be used to solve many other problems. You can read more about this platform, called BOINC, and the many different kinds of volunteer computing projects it supports today, at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ . There’s something for everyone, from searching for new prime numbers (PrimeGrid) to simulating the future of the Earth’s climate (ClimatePrediction.net). One of the projects, MalariaControl.net, involved researchers from University of Cape Town as well as from universities in Mali and Senegal.

But in recent years, a new trend has emerged in citizen cyberscience that is best described as volunteer thinking. Here the computers are replaced by brains, connected via the Web through an interface called eyes. Because for some complex problems – especially those that involve recognizing complex patterns or three-dimensional objects – the human brain is still a lot quicker and more accurate than a computer.
Volunteer thinking projects come in many shapes and sizes. For example, you can help to classify millions of images of distant galaxies (GalaxyZoo), or digitize hand-written information associated with museum archive data of various plant species (Herbaria@home). This is laborious work, which if left to experts would take years or decades to complete. But thanks to the Web, it’s possible to distribute images so that hundreds of thousands of people can contribute to the search.

Not only is there strength in numbers, there is accuracy, too. Because by using a technique called validation it is possible to practically eliminate the effects of human error. This is true even though each volunteer may make quite a few mistakes. So projects like Planet Hunters have already helped astronomers pinpoint new planets circling distant stars. The game FoldIt invites people to compete in folding protein molecules via a simple mouse-driven interface. By finding the most likely way a protein will fold, volunteers can help understand illnesses like Alzheimer’s disease that depend on how proteins fold.

Volunteer thinking is exciting. But perhaps even more ambitious is the emerging idea of volunteer sensing: using your laptop or even your mobile phone to collect data – sounds, images, text you type in – from any point on the planet, helping scientists to create global networks of sensors that can pick up the first signs of an outbreak of a new disease (EpiCollect), or the initial tremors associated with an earthquake (QuakeCatcher.net), or the noise levels around a new airport (NoiseTube).

Open science is really taking off, just watch the video in this article to really open your eyes.

My point here is that if you happen to be a science educator and you don’t know about these opportunities then are you not only not up to date but you are missing incredible opportunities to expose your learners to real science and you are missing the opportunity to let them actually PARTICIPATE in real science – I can’t stress this enough, as an educator you must be using these tools to give your learners a real world perspective of how science is changing if your goal is the best possible education.

Open Educational Resources

There is an ever increasing community of educators sharing content openly, not just freely, but under copyright licences (written by Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation etc.) that let you use it, change it, distribute it and remix it.

In South Africa, Mindset has created a lot of content and I don’t think most people appreciate that it is under an open copyright licence. Add to all their content the fact that our little team at Siyavula has managed to write and edit 6 textbooks (9-12 Mathematics and Physical Science), rally volunteers around translating them plus we’ve made workbooks for all learning areas in R-9 (K-9) available in English and Afrikaans. I think there may be a greater percentage of the curriculum covered by open content in South Africa than anywhere else in the world.

Globally we’re seeing huge repositories of content become available like Wikipedia, YouTube and Slideshare which are more general tools but also more school specific ones like the Khan Academy videos, TeacherTube, Veritasium Science Videos, the PhET Simulations, CK12 Flexbooks, Curriki and of course Connexions.

So far all I’ve done is make a case for getting connected to the internet and consuming what is available!

Finally, Benefits of Sharing

The quality of this content is increasing all the time as well, especially in the cases where communities are forming. Consider the huge amount of content for Mathematics teaching Dan Meyer (algebra and geometry) has made available. The best part is that Dan releases many of his lessons on his blog where people discuss, debate and even improve them. I find the comments on Dan’s blog one of the most interesting mathematics teaching resources around (for educators at least). Consider this lesson idea posted by Dan and look at comments like this, this or even this. Thats just a random sampling. No, I’m not on a retainer from Dan, the reason I like to point at his stuff is because he made a nice 88s video explaining what it is all about for him – take a look here.

Is there only one Dan? Well yes, but there is more than one educator participating in a vibrant virtual community, sharing their content and benefiting from peer-review and an ever expanding community of practice. Not convinced, try following the any of the Blogroll links on Dan’s blog, if you’re a science educator start with Rhett Allain for some physics ideas and discussion. Each of those blogs will link to more blogs, browse around till you find the people you think are worth following.

Why is this happening? The answer is simple, peer-review in a real community works incredibly well!

But, to really benefit from a community of practice, to really harness that community to innovate around the challenges and context in which you work, you have to put your best material out there for them to see, to review and to improve and innovate around. You can’t passively watch their discussions and benefit from the full power of a community of practice. The best thing to do is to play a leading role in the community by participating and sharing on a large scale. Then the content you’re producing and the challenges you’re facing will benefit from the innovative power of the community.

You really need to be participating in a community of practice that is large and diverse enough to keep up with the rapid developments in all spheres of life so that you can provide the relevant education to your learners.

Keeping Ahead – Teaching vs. Content

Will you lose your edge? Absolutely not! In fact, this is the only way to keep your edge. Schools not participating in this process will be overtaken, firstly by the quality content that is becoming available and secondly by the rapidly changing environment for which they need to prepare learners.

The strong communities of educators have a much better chance of making sense of all the opportunities and changing technology and are too effective, too open and too innovative for the isolated schools to keep pace. Even if the schools buy the latest products from commercial publishers they’ll fall behind because of the slower pace at which publishers develop resources and the length of time they have to spend selling the content to cover their costs. Large, effective, open communities will beat them hands down.

Furthermore, I think the education you receive at one of those top schools is not defined by the content on the desk and neither is the teacher who puts it there. Those teachers identify and empathize with their students, guide them to make sense of the vast world of content, not just by acting as filters but by harnessing critical thinking and discourse. Those teachers need to fine tune, adapt and contextualise the learning experience for the needs of their specific learners. That is what will make them great educators and no matter how much content and how many ideas their community comes up with, the person who needs to take it the “last mile” is still the in-classroom educator.

A Couple of Additional Benefits

Firstly, there are, in our context, many schools where better content would still make a remarkable difference. By sharing quality resources openly, learners at those schools have opportunities to access better resources. They will never have the experience of going to a top school but everyone in the world benefits when more people have a better schooling. Doing anything to raise the bar for everyone is a worthwhile exercise.

Secondly, sharing quality resources actually increases the profile of a school. It certainly didn’t undermine MIT‘s reputation when they put up hundreds of their lectures for free online in their OpenCourseWare project.

Conclusion (Again!)

If you want to be the best you need to be up to date on all fronts and I believe that it is impossible to remain at the forefront of education if you remain in a silo, you just won’t be able to keep up.

Maybe we should be doing things radically differently anyway, if you’re bored or not at all convinced then try watching Sir Ken Robinson’s two TED talks, Do Schools Kill Creativity and Bring on the Learning Revolution.

I just wanted to quickly dump a few thoughts about a big event we’re about to run. I’ve been slipping behind in my blogging and thought I’d inflict a quick core dump on you.

Tomorrow (7^th May 2011) we are holding a translation hackathon at the University of Stellenbosch. The objective is extremely ambitious, translate the Grade 10 Mathematics and Physical Science FHSST texts into Afrikaans in one day. We’ve been discussing this possibility for a long time and we finally thought we’d just have a crack at it.

The pressure had been mounting after we were given some airtime on an Afrikaans radio station, Radio Sonder Grense. We were contacted by a number of people wanting to help translate. We had 3 people start doing this virtually but we didn’t make much progress. Most were unfamiliar with the platform and the books and it wasn’t our focus so they got a little lost and gave up. It allowed to start thinking about the process and begin preparing some documentation and workgroups for translation on Connexions.

Then we finally had someone volunteer who was familiar with markup languages and felt comfortable translating the raw Connexions XML, Carl Scheffler. Carl translated 3 chapters into Afrikaans and gave us the first real estimates for how long a chapter should take someone who is comfortable looking at a markup language and confident to do the translation, our average chapter length should take one man day for a first pass translation.

This was the information we needed to proceed, we contact Thinus Booysen, a programming lecturer at Stellenbosch just to see if he’d be prepared to mention it to his class. Thinus jumped straight in and practically organised the participants, formal approval and a venue. So the die was cast!

Given our experiences with regular hackathons, the failed translation attempts and the fact that the translation hackathon is to be a completely new process we’ve tried to put some things into place to mitigate the risk of failure but also ensure that the event has the most meaning for the participants. It is a once-off event so we must get it right.

Event Structure

We know that we need to process people very effectively when they arrive. I’m sure this is obvious but still a challenge, everyone needs extremely clear, simple instructions; they need to be quickly and simply made aware of all the necessary processes, structures and they need to be made as comfortable as possible.

The layout of the room and other visual cues assist in this. They must be channeled to one person who makes sure they’re made to feel welcome, relevant and able to participate. The team must be either introduced to everyone (possibly impractical) or very easily identifiable.

We’re not going to begin with a presentation but actually create a sprint-like working atmosphere to get the ball rolling. The introductory presentation will actually be delay until 1.5 hours after start time by which time everyone should definitely have started working. It seems that if people have to wait until a critical mass has arrived and then sit through a presentation, the uncertainty about the actual process (regardless of the presentation info) builds up and people become frustrated. So our refined instructions should allow everyone to get started on actual translation work without a presentation or much background information.

Community Aspects

We want people, many of whom have never met, to feel as much part of a team and like they are achieving something. To help people get a sense of the team and its progress we’ve developed a small tool to produce a webpage that iterates through all chapters highlighting with a progress bar the state and showing a photograph and name of the translator.

This will be projected on the screen and is linked to a progress spreadsheet which will be continuously updated. Every time it is changed a small script will update the webpage. Anyone will be able to see at any given time how we are making progress as a team who is working on what chapter. This is useful because many chapters build on concepts etc. from previous chapters so there will need to be interaction between translators to answer questions like which word was used for this, how precisely was this defined etc.

The progress webpage will be live here from 9am (GMT+02:00) tomorrow.

Focus Groups

One thing we know is no matter how well prepared we think we are things can go wrong, so we tested our process with a small focus group. The focus group lasted an afternoon and had people who had never used the site before involved. It gave us a great perspective on how ready we were and how volunteers would behave.

One area we’ve had some problems is the performance of the site, this has led to us prototyping other editors etc. We tried to commission a lightweight editor that would allow translator to only edit the proper text and forbid changes to the markup. Unfortunately this hasn’t been completed in time. This is the one tool that could really streamline translation and we feel that it is worth building even after our event is complete.

Risk

There are two primary risks, both technical. There is a very real possibility we’ll have editing issues on the site (there seems to be a dodgy proxy-server between us and Connexions that regularly caches a corrupt javascript file and it doesn’t respect refresh requests). To mitigate this I will download all the modules from Connexions early tomorrow morning and people can just translate in any text editor.

The other risk has to do with technical aspects related to the language used. To mitigate this we do have a number of Mathematics and Science educators coming who teach in Afrikaans. It will be important to iterate rapidly in the first hour having them give each translator feedback on a section or two to get them into the right groove.

Anticipated Outcomes

In addition to translating a lot of content we hope to create a mini-documentary video that highlights both the process, the successes and the volunteers who made it possible. We’ll be doing a video interview with everyone who is willing and then try to put up a video in the next week.

If all goes well we’ll have two Afrikaans textbooks next week and a video of how it all came about.

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 talk from BIF was by Christopher Rush about the School of One – take a look:

Siyavula is a Shuttleworth Foundation seeded project that supports and encourages communities of teachers to work together, openly share their teaching resources and benefit from the use of technology. We believe that it is through collaboration and the freedom to adapt and contextualise teaching material to suit their specific needs, that a higher standard of education can be achieved. We are looking for a dynamic and enthusiastic person to join our small team.

Interested candidates should send a curriculum vitae and motivation letter to Mark Horner at mark.horner@shuttleworthfoundation.org. We would like to fill this position as soon as possible and will begin interviewing candidates from 15^th March 2011.

The successful candidate will be required to work in four primary areas (the relative weighting of these activities is negotiable, based on the candidate’s qualifications and experience).

1. FHSST / FullMarks content authoring and editing
   Working on our core products will require the candidate to:
   • be proficient in mathematics, science and information technologies;
   • be able to assess and review resources / tools and integrate them, as appropriate, into:
     1. FHSST books,
     2. FullMarks,
     3. Training courses, and
     4. Workshops; and
   • support the improvement and refining of the PDF generation process for texts from the Connexions platform. [Familiarity with LaTeX will be an advantage.]
2. Event support
   Our events are run by our team as a whole, with national demand, and this requires that the candidate be:
   • comfortable managing a group (10-15 people);
   • comfortable managing and training diverse groups (culture, socio-economic background etc.);
   • comfortable presenting to a large audience (~100 people); and
   • willing to travel within South Africa for periods of a few days.
3. Training workshops
   We conduct training on various platforms and tools that support both educators and learners to achieve improved collaboration and educational outcomes. This requires that the candidate:
   • will have to run technical training workshops with:
     1. educators,
     2. learners, and
     3. management staff;
   • be comfortable acting as the primary trainer;
   • be comfortable supporting a primary trainer; and
   • facilitate group discussions.
4. Technical support of all activities
   The candidate will be required to provide technical support at events and workshops showcasing the various tools and products.

In addition, the candidate needs to fit into the Siyavula team and the general working environment. This requires the candidate to:

1. be comfortable working in teams;
2. demonstrate a willingness to participate in group work, including:
   1. strategy discussions,
   2. brainstorming,
   3. workshop and course design, and
   4. product analysis;
3. be passionate about
   1. improving education both locally and globally, and
   2. the use of technology; and
4. embrace transparency and openness as a general operating procedure.

Basic day-to-day tasks require that the candidate have:

1. excellent writing skills;
2. a high-level of IT literacy;
3. excellent communication skills;
4. a high-level of independence and initiative; and
5. abundant enthusiasm.

Minimal formal requirements are a BSc. (Hons), BSc. Eng. (Hons) or higher degree. An education diploma would be significantly advantageous.

It would also be to the candidate’s advantage to:

1. be familiar with open-source software;
2. be familiar with Creative Commons licences;
3. have knowledge of or familiarity with openly licensed educational resources; and
4. be familiar with social media tools.

Today, I’m excited to say, we had our 1000th user sign up for FullMarks. There are still about 340 000 to go in South Africa but I’m still very excited about this milestone. We’re edging slowly towards that critical mass of users that start to interact with each other. I can’t say I know what the magical number will be but 1000 is closer to it than 500 :)

We also want to get our users much more involved in the project as a whole. It was built for them, not for us, so we need to know what they love, like, hate and want so that we can ensure the project evolves to meet their needs as efficiently and effectively as possible.

To make them, and everyone for that matter, more aware of what is happening with FullMarks we’ve launched a blog specifically for the project – please take a look at http://fullmarks.siyavula.org.za. We’re specifically looking for input on our roadmap for the next 6 months.

I’ll still post personal thoughts about the project here but news, events and roadmaps will be posted on the project blog.

Dear Helen

With reference to your State of the Province speech in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature in Cape Town on 18 Feb 2011:

“Our goal, in the coming years, is to ensure that every learner has a text book for every subject in every grade. And we are watching technological innovations with great interest. We look forward to the day when learners will be able to download all the necessary textbooks and study material onto affordable mobile devices.”
(Helen Zille, SA Today – Special Edition 21/02/2011)

We’d like to let you know that we’re already on it.

We have a huge amount of free content for Grade R – 9 learners, covering all subjects and learning areas in both English and Afrikaans (see http://cnx.org/lenses/siyavula), as well as our Free High School Science Texts (FHSST – see http://cnx.org/lenses/fhsst) which covers Grades 10 – 12 Mathematics and Physical Science. We are adding rich-media to these books to present them with a selection of locally relevant and curriculum-aligned resources, but also position these resources – video clips, presentations, simulations – within the appropriate grade and section. See Electric Circuits – Grade 10 for an example of a single chapter enriched with Khan Academy videos, PhET Simulations, links to FullMarks (our opensource, openly licensed, community driven assessment bank) and embedded powerpoint presentations which have been made available by educators.

Connexions is an open source platform (http://www.rhaptos.org) that houses educational content under an open copyright licence, enabling anyone to make new versions of our (or anyone else’s) modules, and edit and adapt them on-line to better suit their needs. You can make your own versions of our content, copy, edit, adapt, change, download and share it, as well as form workgroups to collaborate on new content.

But, we realise that the internet is not the only way to get educational material to the public, especially in South Africa where not everyone has access to a computer. Which is why we have launched the mobile front-end for the Connexions website – see http://m.siyavula.cnx.org/! Any content on Connexions (including the rich-media) can be accessed for via a WAP enabled mobile phone, thus increasing the number of people that can benefit from and use it. The better your phone, the richer the experience but now, at least, most people in our country will be able to access the text, images and equations with their current phone.

However, the greatest need in South Africa is still for a printed book on a desk – we also have this covered! In response to this need and the expressions of interest from educators currently using the FHSST books, we will partner with OpenPress to make the books available in print format. By aggregating print orders from schools and individuals and negotiating a collective bulk printing price, the cost of the books can drop to below R80 per unit for orders of a few thousand or more (this is because of open copyright license and the absence of editors’, authors’ and publishers’ royalties – you only pay for the cost of printing). This means we can offer them at the lowest possible price per unit to interested learners and educators. And in keeping with the technology trend, links to these on-line resources will in turn be recorded in the print or PDF versions of the books which will make them into a tour-guide to the world of on-line rich media available.

We’re excited to be at the forefront of a global movement towards open educational resources (OERs). The spirit of this movement is captured in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

If you’d like to talk further, give us a call, drop us an email – we’d love to chat!

Sincerely,
The Siyavula Team

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.

The first resource is a video where I work through my various projects and present the highlights of the year.

MarkHorner, Fellow: Open and Collaborative Resources, 2010 Summary from Shuttleworth Foundation on Vimeo.

I’ve also created a Dipity timeline that shows the activities in chronological order.

I intend to catch up on blogging about some of the activities from the last few months in more detail but the year is coming to an end and it is appropriate to present a picture of everything that has happened this year.

Today the FullMarks website achieved a significant milestone. The numbers may appear modest in the context of huge sites like Facebook and Flickr but in the South African context I think they are significant. Within a 12 hour period we passed both 500 users and 5000 items on FullMarks and I’m excluding demo users and content in that count so it represents real usage.

In South Africa approximately 12% of people have internet access and we are targeting educators (a pool of about 400 000 people in total). The total pool means that there is massive potential for FullMarks if we can tap into a the 40 000 that currently have internet access. There are many initiatives to give more educators access so this number should grow relatively rapidly, especially with the costs of bandwidth coming down and the low price of entry-level laptops and netbooks. Content consumption isn’t really the interesting part and I think that many will look and use but even if only 1% can be convinced to contribute back the site will do well. 400 active contributors would be significant.

We don’t know at what point the community will really take off and content production will not require any further work on our part. We are still running workshops and training new people on how the site works. However, we do not run workshops every day and we do get new users every day. We are still supporting some content uploading so content is not entirely from the community yet.

Here is an animation made from our Google Analytics for the site that shows where in South Africa traffic is coming from:

I think that this is the first indication of some viral spread. The key for us now is to create an environment where this distributed group feel that participation is worthwhile and that they spread the word.