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 [...]

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.

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.

We’ve decided to run our own internal competition. The prize will be bragging rights as the optimal process for future covers for OpenPress / FHSST texts. We are going to allocate the same budget sourcing sets of covers for the Maths and Physical Science books, but we are going to have the Maths set commissioned by a regular design firm and we’ll get the Physical Science ones created on 99Designs.

EVEN THE NUMBER 1 science school in South Africa will benefit from having access to FHSST, Siyavula and OpenPress.

We are going to run a full manual aggregation process to test and demonstrate the process we envisage for the OpenPress web-service.

The experience of crowdsourcing the logo on 99Designs was interesting, fun and ultimately quite exhausting. For the record, we are happy with the logo that we have and, as we’re moving forward with the project, are finally starting to show it to people.