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.
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 :)
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