A long time ago we set out to get two sets of textbook covers designed, one for Physical Science Gr 10-12 and one for Mathematics Gr 10-12. We used the opportunity to test crowdsourcing against traditional design. Here are the results of the two processes for you to compare.
On Wednesday and Thursday last week (9th and 10th June) we met with representatives of the North West Province to discuss what the next steps would be in our collaboration this year.
We have just finished helping the HOD Science at Bishops Diocesan College, Keith Warne, put all of his 200+ powerpoint presentations for the teaching of Grade 8-12 Science online. They are all freely available to view, use, download and modify!
We’re back in the groove with OpenPress right now, working on the information website and printing some sample books. Read about the site and aggregation process in this post.
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.
On the 24th of March we held the first FullMarks event at the University of Cape Town. You can read more about our first uploading sprint in this post.
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.
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.
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.