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 [...]
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.
I forecast a much more responsive authoring experience on Connexions in the near future, the results of a detailed performance analysis are in and some massive potential improvements have been identified. Now to turn my attention to getting them implemented!
We have just completed a series of workshops for subject advisors in the North West Province. We ran 4 two-day workshops. Read about workshops 2, 3 and 4 here.
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.
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.
We are running a series of workshops in the North West province to train curriculum advisors. We’ve adapted our approach for these workshops and are really looking forward to putting it to the test.
One key part of the overall sustainability of Siyavula is the platform used for the project. Platform decisions are quite tricky to navigate. I’ve made some notes about the things that I think are important considerations when choosing an OER platform, although I’m sure I’ll get some pretty strong opinions from the rest of the community about the most important considerations.
We are going to run a full manual aggregation process to test and demonstrate the process we envisage for the OpenPress web-service.
The good news is that it turns out that the FHSST content has already proven quite useful to a number of people, now we just need to harness that to add even more momentum to the OER-movement. It is easier to find the time to work on the project knowing that we’ve already been successful in helping other organisations, projects and people.
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.
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