I was invited to participate on a panel at the AMESA Congress this year on a panel on professional development. 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.
Some feedback and news from our first workshop for North West Province Subject/Curriculum Advisors. The next workshop is scheduled for the 4th and 5th of March.
Siyavula intends to create a framework that supports the education system. The framework needs to accept the curriculum, allow swap-and-share groups the ability to share resources and have the discussions they need, allow users like Curriculum Advisors to vet resources and ensure that the isolated teachers can get access to the resources.
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.
I have a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation to work in the area of Open and Collaborative Resources. My Fellowship enables me to work on a number of projects in this area. I believe in the liberation of information and supporting education in South Africa.
I manage the Siyavula project, where I co-ordinate the development of a comprehensive set of Open Educational Resources (OER) supporting the South African National Curriculum.
Along with Sam Halliday, I co-founded the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project which launched in 2002 and has collaboratively produced a set of openly licenced science and mathematics textbooks
In collaboration with Steve Song, Interconnectedness Fellow, I founded OpenPress, a project to deploy a print aggregation service to support teachers.
I also run FullMarks, an open assessment bank, to help teachers rapidly generate tests, capture results and access reports based on those results.
I have a PhD in physics from the University of Cape Town and conducted my research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on the results from the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
My blog highlights the progress on my various projects and contains thoughts on the OER space as well as life in general.
Twitter: marknewlyn
- Can't recommend Fugu at Wembley Square - kitchen very slow and inefficient. Food ok.
- RT @whatedsaid: Latest post: 10 ways my thinking has changed. http://bit.ly/9h3gRW #edchat #edreform #lrnchat
- http://sortvis.org/index.html - I think these visualisations of different sorting algorithms are really nifty :)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
When re-using this content please provide a clear and prominent link to this blog.