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.

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.

It came to pass recently that we (and by we I mean just short of 100 volunteers from all over the world!) edited the Free High Schools Science Texts (FHSST) textbooks in the space of 9 days. The situation arose suddenly and unexpectedly. FHSST had been completely idle since mid-2007 when version 0 was released. Our original intention was to ramp up activities during September 2010 to “leisurely” improve the books so that we could announce a much better, version 1, late this year or very early next year. I have included a few quotes from volunteers telling us why they got involved.

I got involved because you asked me ;) But in all seriousness, I love projects like this – I like what they stand for and I am always willing to give of my time and energy for a worthy cause. I can only reach so many children in the classroom, but to be able to reach more in this indirect way is very powerful.

How it came about

I am have a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation but was originally hired as a project manager to extend FHSST to all grades and subjects, a project we called Siyavula. As part of Siyavula we acquired a full set of workbooks (with teachers guides etc.) for all learning areas for Grades R-9 in English and Afrikaans (about 30 000 pages) which we released under an open copyright licence. We’ve had a DVD with it all on in Word format that we have been giving to people to try to drive uptake etc. and raise awareness of the benefits of open educational resources. We included a copy of the FHSST PDF files just because there was room on the DVD.

There are two reasons: Firstly I firmly believe that knowledge belongs to all human kind, and that everyone has the right to get the best education available. Secondly I learned about the project from the post of Tom Leinster on the n-category café, which is reason enough for me to take a closer look.

At some point we gave a copy to Beeld, hoping that it would be useful to them as a supplement for their Leer en Presteer section. To the best of our knowledge, they passed it on to someone at Die Burger who passed it on to someone at the Department of Basic Education (DBE). The end result being a series of phone calls to us, completely out of the blue, about the resources and specifically the FHSST books. The DBE representatives were thinking of distributing the material because of the strike but could we check it quickly.

Given that we’ve released it under an open licence and we can’t stop people distributing it, we felt compelled to do our best to improve what went out.

What we did

Figuratively speaking we were caught with our pants down! We were in the middle of reworking the FHSST website and hadn’t actually done any work on FHSST in ages. In fact, up until a few days before the call the book compilation hadn’t actually worked on the site. Despite this we set out to edit all of the FHSST textbooks in the space of 9 days.

I believe in people helping each other, sharing knowledge for the greater good.

Our goal was simple, have at least two people read every chapter looking for factual errors and small style and grammar corrections and then fix them. Large edits or the rewriting of entire sections would have to wait until we had more time.

At first we planned on running hackathons continuously at the Open Innovation Studio (OIS). This would mean getting as many volunteers into one space where people could edit paper copies of the FHSST books and then hand their edits in to a number of ‘LaTeX gatekeepers’ who would edit the book source. (This isn’t because we don’t trust people but rather that we have very few volunteers that are comfortable with LaTeX.)

We identified a list of possible editors and started sending out emails. We had many positive responses but many people couldn’t drop their day-to-day activities to come and sit with us at the OIS. We also received a number of expressions of interest from further afield.

Previously we had discussed a.nnotate.com amongst the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellows (see Steve Song’s blog on annotate-ipedia) as it could be a super tool for educational purposes. We’ve never had any time to explore that possibility fully.

The distributed enthusiasm and capacity needed to be harnessed to achieve our goal and we felt that a.nnotate.com would provide a platform to capture edits very effectively. We uploaded all the books onto a.nnotate.com and made a more general call for help. We called for help from scientists and mathematicians for editing capacity. We were fortunate enough to have the call echoed by Mark Shuttleworth himself. We did ask people to help out by coordinating their reading through us to make sure that every chapter got read twice by independent editors. a.nnotate.com would allow a complete free-for-all which we wouldn’t mind if not for our deadline.

I’m a supporter of open source software and interested in carrying this over into the academic sphere.

Volunteers

The response to the call was impressive and we were very excited about the amount of enthusiasm and the qualifications of those that stepped up to help. The breakdown of contributor qualifications, those that responded to our information request, is (counting PhD candidates as having an MS):

Our average contributor is a PhD candidate in one of Physics, Mathematics or Chemistry. A number of Professors contributed which was also very exciting.

The ability to manage hundreds of potential contributors continuously using a.nnotate.com meant that, with a little coordination, we could hopefully edit everything. The process began at 14:00 on Wednesday 25^th August. The editors posted comments at a phenomenal rate and we eventually had to turn some people away because everything had been read multiple times.

One of the biggest costs for schools is up-to-date and accurate textbooks. I believe that having open, freely available textbooks can help avoid these costs.

The total number of annotations in the books as a function of the day was:

This includes responses to comments from those capturing changes in the LaTeX. The huge number of responses would have been completely unmanageable on paper given the time that we had available to us.

Outcome

Thanks to a phenomenal response we were able to email new versions (version 0.5) of the books to the DBE on the 3^rd September. In writing this blog I realised that it was an incredibly stupid thing to even attempt and I’m still amazed that we were able to successfully complete the task, all due to the generosity of volunteers. These books have been featured prominently on the official DBE portal Thutong. This is quite a coup for us, not only did we improve the books significantly as well as capture a large number of suggestions about further improvements and the enthusiastic response from volunteers has raised our enthusiasm levels significantly.

I’ve benefitted a lot from open-source software and similar community-driven projects. I feel the FHSST project is an ideal way for me to make a contribution.

What comes next?

We’ve learnt that using a.nnotate.com provides a lot of flexibility and enables discussion around errata in the precise context in the book. The future method of capturing errata for the FHSST books will be to use a.nnotate.com:

• people can see if an errata has already been submitted – without trying to search a forum or database in some obscure way and worrying about using the right keywords etc.
• people can highlight the error visually and add any comment
• annotations accept replies – which is the only requirement for people to have a discussion

We know that the books are not perfect, even after such a massive editing effort but we’ve got a good few leads on areas where they can be improved. Apart from a more methodical review of the suggestions and comments submitted during the editing marathon we would like to improve the books significantly. There are a few ways we can do this:

1. Add more worked examples where the books are light on them – we have received a lot of positive feedback regarding the inclusion of worked examples.
2. Develop model solutions for all the non-worked example exercises included in the books.
3. Develop teachers’ guides so that the books are more teacher- and curriculum-friendly.
4. Integrate multi-media online OERs into the online versions of the books. A chapter/section might:
   1. begin with a Khan Academy conceptual explanation
   2. have a set of powerpoint slides developed into a slidecast by a South African teacher
   3. provide the PhET Simulation allowing learners to experiment and play with the concepts before embarking on the worked examples for a particular concept helping develop their intuition
   4. each exercise will include a shortened url to allow the learner to navigate to the full model solution on FullMarks where learners could find many more problems to practice on

The first step is to complete the model solutions for all the questions in the books. We have revived the hackathons at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and this is where volunteers have started. After ironing out the kinks with volunteers in the same room we’ve refined the process in such a way that hackathons and remote contributions to this proces can be accommodated. You can read about the first hackathon here and the second one here, or see more photos on our Facebook page.

Ideal Process:

1. Access books on a.nnotate.com (links available on http://www.markhorner.net):
   Mathematics Grade 10: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=SHkkygd2

   Mathematics Grade 11: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=dHbcYbbw

   Mathematics Grade 12: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=M4p01euS

   Physical Science Grade 10: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=3sCc82qY

   Physical Science Grade 11: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=hW2hgnQP

   Physical Science Grade 12: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=enzaEmdn

2. Select an exercise in any book that has no solution and no annotation about a solution on FullMarks
3. Highlight the question and an annotation window pops up – annotate the question saying that you are working on a solution
4. Create a question on FullMarks with the full step-by-step model solution and finalise it (see details a bit later for some guidance on this)
5. View your finalised question and answer on FullMarks – copy the url
6. Return to a.nnotate.com and add the url you copied to the annotation in the book that you created in step 3
7. Log in to www.fhsst.org (this is at the very bottom of the FHSST page)
8. Create a short url by going to www.fhsst.org/shorten selecting “Shorten url” option from the menu and pasting the full question url into the box and submitting
9. Copy the resulting code from the short url (i.e. just copy XYZ when the short url is www.fhsst.org/answers/XYZ) and add this to the annotation in the book as well
10. Return to step 1. and repeat for another question

This will ensure that we have a short code to redirect learners to a full model solution for every question in the book. They will also then be able to see similar questions on FullMarks as well. We have adapted this slightly for the hackathons but always ensuring that the files on a.nnotate.com have the latest information regarding what has been and is being worked on.

This will ensure that we have a short code to redirect learners to a full model solution for every question in the book. They will also then be able to see similar questions on FullMarks as well.

I’m very passionate about the problem of affordable textbooks (and academic publishing more generally), especially in maths. I came from an underprivileged background and I know there are many brilliant people out there who have no opportunity to flourish due to lack of materials. I also have a friend in a third-world country (PNG) who is a teacher, and I could imagine the benefit he would derive from a textbook scheme as you have organised in South Africa.

Once this is complete we will turn to suggestions and improvements related to the conceptual explanations incorporation, where appropriate, links to the Khan Academy videos and the PHET Simulations. From there we can develop the teachers’ guides and submit the books to the formal review process at the DBE for inclusion on the approved books list. Should they be included schools will be able to purchase FHSST textbooks as part of the official procurement process but at approximately 1/5 of the cost of publishers alternatives.

Our schools are struggling due to the nation wide strike. Learning needs to continue at the schools, many of whom are running on skeleton crews. A group of volunteers have authored a set of open source textbooks and resources that can to support learners and educators in this time. The open copyright license allows the government to distribute it openly at the cost of printing it.

These Grade 10 – 12 Mathematics and Science books need a final review before it will be accepted and distributed by the Department of Education. We have 10 days to complete the review and would like to call on all mathematicians and scientists for help.

Which mathematician and scientists?

The subject matter is Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry at high school level. We need volunteers who have post-graduate degrees in Maths, Physics, Chemistry or related fields and are willing to serve their country.

What do we have to do?

It is quite simple, we need to proof-read the books and correct any errors. The curriculum is covered, there are enough worked examples but there are a few errors which we need to find and fix. If time permits we can also simplify language and add more worked examples but this is secondary.

How we plan on doing it.

Volunteers can join us for one or many of the following slots at the Open Innovation Studio (27 Buitenkant Street in Cape Town) where we will be working through the books. Alternatively volunteers can receive material and provide feedback by e-mail. Volunteers will read a section, correct it and submit it for capturing. We want every section read by two independent people to reduce the possibility of errors slipping through.

We will provide copies of the material to be edited, food (lunch or dinner), drinks and a superb atmosphere.

We have 1800 pages to read and we estimate that we need at least 6 people for each of Maths, Chemistry and Physics to complete the process. A final editor will be used for each of the books as a third and final check.

Update – We were doing a lot manually which required people be in Cape Town if they wanted to help out but we’ve since uploaded the books to a.nnotate.com where anyone in the world can browse and annotate errors etc. so you can help from anywhere you have an internet connection.

We’d still like to coordinate efforts to make sure we cover all chapters well. Volunteer editors should email Bridget Nash [ bridget AT siyavula DOT org DOT za ] to find out where we’re still a bit thin.

Here are the links to take a look – but please coordinate with Bridget if you’re going to contribute:

Physical Science Grade 12 on Annotate.com

Physical Science Grade 11 on Annotate.com

Physical Science Grade 10 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 12 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 11 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 10 on Annotate.com

Time slots

Contact us

Mark Horner: mark.horner@shuttleworthfoundation.org / 083 564 6272
or
Neels van der Westhuizen: neels@siyavula.org.za / 082 334 3259

More Details:

www.fhsst.org
www.siyavula.org.za
www.fullmarks.org.za
www.markhorner.net
qa.openpress.co.za
www.shuttleworthfoundation.org

The Free High School Science Texts (FHSST)

In 2002 we started a volunteer project to write right free high school science textbooks (www.fhsst.org). This took 5 years and we which took 5 years. We finished the first versions of the books in 2007 and haven’t touched them much since then. The books are released under an open copyright licence which allows for the legal adaptation, enhancement and distribution of the books.

We were planning on beginning to work through the books correcting errata and developing full model solutions so that we could release a new version in January. Model solutions would be put on another project we have developed FullMarks (www.fullmarks.org.za) which is to be launched this coming Friday 27th August.

The Siyavula Workbooks

We bought out a small curriculum development company that had developed a set of workbooks with teachers’ guides, lesson plans and work schedules covering all of Grades R-9 in both English and Afrikaans. We now own the copyright to the material which is released under an open copyright licence which makes it legal for people to copy, adapt, distribute and enhance the books.

The idea of testing crowdsourcing against a more traditional design process came up last year (you can read about it here) and we decided to do an experiment as we needed new covers for the two sets of Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) textbooks.

The crowdsourced covers from 99Designs came in first (featured in this blog post):

Here are the full sets of covers for you to compare (you can leave your opinions about which win in the comments if you like):

Grade 10

Grade 11

Grade 12

Results

To be honest, I prefer the crowdsourced Physical Science covers but, in the interests of full disclosure, I managed that process. I am quite happy with the Mathematics covers. If we had had different designers as part of either process the results could have been different so this is certainly not a definite test with a control group but a little subjectivity makes for better coffee-time debate.

Obviously, the key thing to an end product you can live with is how you manage the process no matter which route you go. I have discovered I am very bad at working with an individual designer on a single project. I find it difficult to articulate what I want and what it is that I like and don’t like. These things make me a difficult client, although I feel this is mitigated slightly by the fact that I’m aware of it.

99Designs competitions are more tolerant of my choices and I feel that some designers seem to be able to figure wear I’m going based on what I rate designs and what designs I eliminate. I’ve started to standardise my own process for running competitions on 99Designs.

Competition

• The competition benefits from designers competing and feeding off each other – if you run a blind contest (where designers cannot see each others entries) you’ll lose out on the complex feedback between different design ideas and will basically be running about 30 individual design processes, requiring a lot more feedback and time. If you’re a bad client (like myself) that struggles to give good feedback this will really be difficult.
• For the first 3 days don’t give a rating higher than 3 stars – no matter how much you like the design. Immediately after launching the competition make a comment to this effect otherwise designers will get unhappy. They’ll grumble but live with it if they know it is your policy. If you don’t comment and do it they’ll just think you’re being difficult. You may well find something you really think you like in the first 48 hours but those strong, early contenders have always faded out as the feedback starts to take place.
• Provide feedback often – everyday – the competition only lasts 7 days but will take a couple of hours a day. If you don’t put effort into getting a design you like why should the designers – they don’t have to live with it.
• Prepay the contest – then 99Designs holds the money – you can still get it back but many designers won’t even consider participating if the competition isn’t prepaid. If you are serious about getting a design and have a budget then prove it.
• Once there are a couple of days left AND some designs you could live with – guarantee the contest – this way you can’t get the money back and must choose a winner – but its an added incentive to the designers to get involved. Many of the best seem to wait until the last 48 hours before entering.
• If designs conflict with the brief – eliminate them – and comment to that effect. Don’t let them hang around. If you hate it – eliminate! The competition feeds on what doesn’t get eliminated and on what gets rated highly.
• Give designers you rate individual feedback on their design – not in the general comments section. Don’t pick an individual designers idea and ask everyone to work on something like that.
• Put general feed back or changes to brief in general comments section.
• Don’t be put out if they moan a bit about your poor design choices, it is your design content after all. If they mail you privately just say that you are following the rules and they should go through the competition page – do NOT argue with them about design, especially not privately. Keep it on the competition page.

Brief (this is for a logo design competition)

Give yourself reasons to eliminate the rubbish easily by including things like:

• no drop shadows
• no gradients
• no 3D effects
• no stock images
• no proprietary fonts (otherwise you have to purchase)
• at most 2 colours (maybe 3 ;)
• logo must scale down
• logo must work in B&W
• should be balanced
• colour logo must be presented on white background (if they start
  using textured backgrounds to make the logo look good it is hard to
  compare etc.)

Thats all before you even say anything about what you are looking for. You can easily find much more comprehensive lists for rules for logo design competitions with a quick search online.

Then tell them what you want and include:

• project elevator pitch and link to site or descriptive material if
  you have.

• icon and/or word together
• ideas of colours if you have any
• whether icon should stand on its own
• ideas of fonts

Make sure you ask for:

• Colour version
• B&W version
• Vector files (I’d ask for .ai and .svg files)

I think that crowdsourcing is also a lot more fun than dealing with a single designer and you really do see a lot of different concepts in a very short space of time. I’m sure there is an argument to be made that a longer process might lead a more mature result but I’m sure a counter-argument exists built on intensity and focus for the person running the competition. Ultimately, as with everything in life, you have to make your own decisions and live with them. Luckily taking a chance on a logo for $500 isn’t very risky and worth a shot. The more you pay the more attention you get but for $500 for a logo design I am barely able to keep up with my day job and the competition.

Neels van der Westhuizen and I met with Mothusi Sebogwa and Jors de Ridder from the North West Education Department On Wednesday and Thursday last week (9th and 10th June) to discuss what the next steps would be in our collaboration this year would be.

We spent time just brainstorming and discussing ideas, challenges and opportunities with some of the main topics being:

• FullMarks – Siyavula’s open on-line assessment bank for exam questions and answers
• Gathering and reporting on exam performance in the North West Province
• Additional subject English for mother tongue Foundation Phase learners
• Translation of Siyavula resources in to Tswana for Foundation Phase learnersPresentation to the principals and distribution of the DVDs with Siyavula workbooks
• Pilot with the workbooks in Grade 5

In the end we are going to help them prepare a plan for a Grade 5 pilot of the openly licensed workbooks made available through Siyavula and prepare a plan for the use of FullMarks to assist with their systemic assessment activities. I captured some thoughts on the pilot in this vlog:

North West Province Pilot Ideas from Mark Horner on Vimeo.

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! Here I have embedded his most popular one (over 120 views in 2 weeks) as an example:

Why do this, well ….

We find that many educators are willing to share content. I think that a willingness to share is a fundamental part of being a good teacher, isn’t that what teaching is actually all about. At the risk of getting somewhat distracted, I would even say that being a good teacher is about much more than just sharing knowledge/information but also in sharing in the identification, development and achievement of potential and dreams (Woah – it’s early!).

However, when faced with the prospect of sharing online they feel a little overwhelmed. There are a few obvious contributing factors some of which we can address and which I’ll list here:

• they don’t find a critical mass of content they can use online so their expectations about what is good enough to share haven’t been normalised;
• they don’t know the “best” place to share because they’ve not found much useful stuff and the internet is big;
• they seem to feel obliged to share everything, especially when they don’t see a critical mass of content in their subject area online; and
• they have too much stuff to share and its not well organised.

These are all legitimate concerns but the very size and nature of the internet and how people can collaborate online addresses them all:

• they don’t find a critical mass of content they can use online so their expectations about what is good enough to share haven’t been normalised; Nobody is forced to consume your content, allow them to decide if it is good enough or useful for them
• they don’t know the “best” place to share because they’ve not found much useful stuff and the internet is big; There is no best place to share it, so long as it is open, discoverable and has reasonable meta-data the internet search tools will find it and people will be able to use it
• they seem to feel obliged to share everything, especially when they don’t see a critical mass of content in their subject area online; The internet and many sites are some one of the best demonstrations of the “whole being greater than the sum of the parts”, look at Wikipeda and watch Clay Shirky’s Web2.0 Expo talk (transcript here if you don’t want to download a video) – I highly recommend it! and
• they have too much stuff to share and its not well organised. Start small because sharing content online will help get it organised, backed up and reviewed!

For Siyavula we really want to help get active participation going, not just consumption of content we’ve uploaded, and we’ve discovered a few things already:

• the content we’ve uploaded to Connexions does get viewed a lot;
• we really do receive feedback, testimonials and questions; and
• if content is uploaded in the authors’ name they will maintain it.

So, with the help of Upfront Systems, we decided to support some teachers sharing their content under the condition that:

• the content is uploaded to whichever of the following is most appropriate:
• FullMarks,
• Connexions, or
• Slideshare which now supports slides and videos,
• the content is licensed openly, and
• the content is uploaded under an account in their name.

This ensures that we slowly move towards critical mass in a few places, the content can be remixed and that feedback, questions and testimonials goes to the original author who is best equipped to respond. The last point is very important to me, if we want teachers to start connecting online then we must ensure that they can do so without going through any intermediaries. This point is driven home every time I receive feedback or a question on one of the Siyavula modules uploaded to Connexions because I am not the person best equipped to respond to a content/curriculum query and we have missed an opportunity to connect two educators.

A very quick note, there is no review process or special selection regarding who we work with, we started with Keith Warne because he gave up a day of his time to come to a workshop we ran and happened to have all his content with him on a memory stick and gave it to us. We seized the opportunity. There is more content from other teachers and other schools on the way and if you want would like some help getting your content online just let me know.

I’m really happy to report that we’re moving on OpenPress again. The design competition for the information site was held on 99designs recently and we’ve selected the winner.

The info website design will be based on this entry from the competition:

The site design.

The site will be available in the next week or two. For those of you who aren’t sure what the site is all about you can run through this slide show (best in full screen mode so you can read the speech bubbles):

For the Siyavula project we partnered with Connexions as our online content platform (some of the reasons can be found here). As part of this partnership we try to do more than use Connexions as a repository but also support the continuous development of the repository through sourcing more content and helping enhance technical offering as much as possible. There are always many potential avenues for development in any software project and we’ve been trying to help on those that make life easier for teachers in South Africa to be more effective and efficient when using the site.

One area that has been flagged by a number of people, not just our teachers at workshops, is that the authoring side of the site can be very slow at times. Some people just say that it is because the site is built on Plone but that isn’t fair so, to support our teachers, the broader Connexions community and the Connexions Consortium, I commissioned Upfront Systems to do a performance analysis of the authoring side of the site.

Before we get into details, the bottom-line is that Upfront Systems have shown that there are massive potential performance improvements (in some cases 5 times faster) for Connexions on the authoring side and analysed what it will take to implement them. I estimate that the total cost of implementing the specification is $7500.

This should make it a lot easier to raise the money needed to implement the fixes as we know where the problem lies, we have a detailed specification on how to fix it and have a proper analysis of the expected improvements so funders know what their return on investment will be.

The Gory Details As Reported on the Rhaptos Mailing List