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.

In December last year I was lucky enough to be invited to the Big Ideas Festival, hosted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), as a rapid-fire speaker. The talks have been made available on YouTube so I thought that I’d point you to it from my blog:

My favourite talk from BIF was by Christopher Rush about the School of One – take a look:

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 education can be achieved. We are looking for a dynamic and enthusiastic person to join our small team.

Interested candidates should send a curriculum vitae and motivation letter to Mark Horner at mark.horner@shuttleworthfoundation.org. We would like to fill this position as soon as possible and will begin interviewing candidates from 15^th March 2011.

The successful candidate will be required to work in four primary areas (the relative weighting of these activities is negotiable, based on the candidate’s qualifications and experience).

1. FHSST / FullMarks content authoring and editing
   Working on our core products will require the candidate to:
   • be proficient in mathematics, science and information technologies;
   • be able to assess and review resources / tools and integrate them, as appropriate, into:
     1. FHSST books,
     2. FullMarks,
     3. Training courses, and
     4. Workshops; and
   • support the improvement and refining of the PDF generation process for texts from the Connexions platform. [Familiarity with LaTeX will be an advantage.]
2. Event support
   Our events are run by our team as a whole, with national demand, and this requires that the candidate be:
   • comfortable managing a group (10-15 people);
   • comfortable managing and training diverse groups (culture, socio-economic background etc.);
   • comfortable presenting to a large audience (~100 people); and
   • willing to travel within South Africa for periods of a few days.
3. Training workshops
   We conduct training on various platforms and tools that support both educators and learners to achieve improved collaboration and educational outcomes. This requires that the candidate:
   • will have to run technical training workshops with:
     1. educators,
     2. learners, and
     3. management staff;
   • be comfortable acting as the primary trainer;
   • be comfortable supporting a primary trainer; and
   • facilitate group discussions.
4. Technical support of all activities
   The candidate will be required to provide technical support at events and workshops showcasing the various tools and products.

In addition, the candidate needs to fit into the Siyavula team and the general working environment. This requires the candidate to:

1. be comfortable working in teams;
2. demonstrate a willingness to participate in group work, including:
   1. strategy discussions,
   2. brainstorming,
   3. workshop and course design, and
   4. product analysis;
3. be passionate about
   1. improving education both locally and globally, and
   2. the use of technology; and
4. embrace transparency and openness as a general operating procedure.

Basic day-to-day tasks require that the candidate have:

1. excellent writing skills;
2. a high-level of IT literacy;
3. excellent communication skills;
4. a high-level of independence and initiative; and
5. abundant enthusiasm.

Minimal formal requirements are a BSc. (Hons), BSc. Eng. (Hons) or higher degree. An education diploma would be significantly advantageous.

It would also be to the candidate’s advantage to:

1. be familiar with open-source software;
2. be familiar with Creative Commons licences;
3. have knowledge of or familiarity with openly licensed educational resources; and
4. be familiar with social media tools.

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.

The Cape Town Siyavula team was met with wintry weather in Durban as we touched down early on Friday morning. This did not dampen our spirits as we made our way to the Southern Sun North Beach Hotel to set up for the workshop. With a turnout of 21 AMESA teachers, we were A-for away and the workshop began.

As often happens when one has a set agenda, we veered off course straight away and got stuck into building topic trees, for assigned school Grades. Amidst much discussion the topic trees emerged, and it was then felt that a break for tea was well deserved. This was followed by an interesting talk by Prof Michael de Villiers of UKZN, who spoke about maths and symmetry in everyday life. As early evening approached, Mark initiated the introduction to uploading questions to the FullMarks website (agenda item 1!). He also demonstrated how to create equations using MathML, and how to take screenshots to upload diagrams.

This brought us to 19h10 which meant we had to hot foot it to uShaka for our dinner reservation at the Cargo Hold. There we spent an enjoyable evening getting to know one another and watching the fish and sharks swimming peacefully past us in the aquarium, as our 3 course meal was served. Despite our previous threats that the slow uploaders or those who misbehaved may end up being shark food, I am pleased to announce that everyone behaved themselves and so were spared this terrifying fate.

We were greeted by a beautiful summer’s day on Day Two, which began with a lovely breakfast buffet in the dining room of the hotel. The workshop then kicked off just after 09h00, with the goal for the day being to upload as many questions as possible.This had also been the goal from Day One which unfortunately was not realised, but we were determined to see success by the end of the afternoon. With a quick revision to start with, and internet voucher numbers entered, the teachers were ready to go.

The Siyavula team were on hand to provide tech support to the uploaders, especially as they attempted to use the maths editor on the FullMarks website. The maths editor is not particularly difficult to work with, it just takes a bit of practice to understand how to enter the data. It didn’t take long before everyone was getting the hang of things, and so the team agreed it was time to throw a spanner in the works and show the AMESA teachers a new system for uploading questions and answers!This was presented to them in the form of an OpenOffice template, which Mark promised was a very simple and far more efficient system to use. A fairly quick demonstration was given, which was greeted with exclamations of “why didn’t you show us this from the start?” and “this is so much easier than the other way!”. So much for being worried about confusing everyone further!

We had a very productive afternoon as the teachers’ confidence increased as they practiced using the OpenOffice template, and uploaded multiple questions and answers to the FullMarks website. As the sounds of success echoed around the room, another tea break was due and the chance to discuss our learnings amongst ourselves. It’s amazing what milktart and tea can do for conversation!

That was to be the final feeding and watering of the troops, and so once that was over Mark began the wrap up of the workshop weekend. Tasks were assigned to different teachers, and a discussion took place over what the next step would be. With tentative plans in place for the next workshop, everyone went their separate ways amidst smiles and hugs, and the Siyavula team was left feeling satisfied at the knowledge that was imparted and the progress that was made.

The Southern Sun North Beach Hotel provided a great venue for the workshop, despite the issues with holding an online workshop using internet vouchers. The vouchers had to be purchased in denominations of minutes to spend online, as opposed to MB or GB usage. It didn’t take long before vouchers were expiring and thus logging the users out of the FullMarks page, usually mid-upload; or if the page was left idle for too long, the same thing would happen. This hindered progress somewhat and caused frustration, especially as the uploading process is relatively painless and straightforward. However, the teachers were very patient, and understood that when they upload from a stable line, they will not have this problem.

Overall the Siyavula team had a great weekend of meeting new people, imparting knowledge, eating far too much delicious food, and most likely not getting enough sleep! Well done to everyone that attended and to the Siyavula team for organising this great event.

The Sunday Times newspaper commissioned a study of South African schools which they released this last weekend. There is a lot of information in the report and one could spend a lot of time unpacking it. The Sunday Times chose to highlight some things that would definitely lead to a fair amount of debate, some of the classic ones being:

• same-sex versus co-ed schools, and
• girls being smarter than boys.

I’m not really very interested in venturing down either of those paths at this time, or at any time for that matter.

The report is worth a couple of blog posts but I’d like to start by just focusing on one school that was mentioned. Mbilwi Secondary School was ranked in the survey as the top science school in the country. It is a school that I have never heard and, I am quite sure, many other people had never heard of. I haven’t done any additional research on Mbilwi … yet, but there are somethings that jump out at me from the report:

• Mbilwi has large classes, and
• students have to share study guides.

Why do those fact jump out? Large classes and a lack of resources are often cited reasons for poor preformance at schools. Reading a little further they point out just how large the classes are (pupil:teacher ratio of 56:1) and that the school attributes their success to:

• identifying weak learners at the beginning of matric and providing extra support 4 days a week right up until the final exams,
• extra tuition on Saturdays, and
• focusing on more than Grade 12 but working to help learners from Grade 8.

These are the reported statistics that allowed them to achieve the top spot (Matric 2008 numbers):

• 201 Matrics cadidates
• Pass rate 100%
• Univeristy entrance 93%
• 309 A symbols
• 80% passed Maths with more than 50%
• 75% passed Science with more 50%

My take-away from this is that a lot can be done with the right attitude. If the learners didn’t want to learn the extra tuition wouldn’t mean anything, if the teachers didn’t care but were forced to provide the extra tuition they’d not do a very good job. The fact that they do it, do it well and that it is well received tells me that everyone involved with Mbilwi has reaslised that the problem is not insurmountable and that hard work can pay off, if everyone does their best working together.

Another point I can’t help but mention,  EVEN THE NUMBER 1 science school in South Africa will benefit from having access to FHSST, Siyavula and OpenPress to solve their resources problems.

To help teachers get the most out of the the full library of Siyavula, Connexions, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) and many other open textbooks, we want to see these resources printed as cost effectively as possible while still ensuring high print quality. We believe that by aggregating print orders we can do just that. We will facilitate this through an online print aggregation service that we are calling OpenPress.

Our vision for OpenPress is to provide a web-service for the aggregation of print orders, offering users the benefit of economies of scale achieved through collaborative purchasing. Our primary aim will be the dissemination of open educational resources (OERs). A cost-effective printing solution will add significant momentum to the adoption of OERs as well as incentivise the creation or release of further OERs and allow real classroom use which is a necessity for the iterative, collaborative development cycle of quality OERs.

OpenPress is beginning to take some real shape and we’ll start spreading the word about our first phase in the next 48 hours. Before we roll out the online service we will do a pilot run. This will be a full manual implementation of the process as a proof-of-concept. The second phase will be the development of the web-service that implements the process, informed by our learning from the manual process.

For the manual process we have selected the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book. The FHSST books and other open education resources have no authors’, editors’ or publishers’ royalties so we only need to worry about the cost of printing. Everybody knows the more of something you produce the cheaper it gets per unit and the same holds for printing. If we all put our individual orders together, everybody benefits from a better price. Our goal is to help everybody get the cheapest possible price by finding as many orders as possible and aggregating them together. To make it even more attractive we’ll place an order for the first 1000 books (R50,000) which we’ll donate to severely disadvantaged schools. This will guarantee a maximum price of R50 per book and every additional order will makes the price cheaper for everyone.

Details for the first pilot print run:

The process:

• We place the first order for 1000 Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics books with OpenPress
• All interested schools, organisations and individuals submit the number of books they are interested in to OpenPress at openpress@siyavula.org.za
• Submissions must reach us before the 15^th of November 2009 (Please note that this is merely an expression of interest and not binding. We will not hold you to it in any way)
• OpenPress finds the best possible price for the total order
• OpenPress contacts everyone who expressed an interest with an offer at their best price
• Parties wanting to commit to this print run completes a contract for the number of books they require
• OpenPress prints the books, followed by payment and collection.

Other titles:

We are accepting expressions of interest for any of the 6 FHSST Books, Mathematics Grade 10,11 and 12 as well as Physical Science Grade 10,11 and 12 as part of the manual process. However, we can only guarantee a maximum price of R50 on the Mathematics Grade 10 book to start.

As soon as the OpenPress site goes live we will make available the full list of open titles available for order. To date we have located literally 100s of titles that have been released under an OpenPress-friendly copyright license.

I’m writing this from the SAA lounge in Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on my way to Kigali, Rwanda. It was worth the $20 to get into the lounge to watch the final 10 minutes of the Bloemfontein test match between the All Blacks and the, victorious, Springboks. I called it, Heinrich
Brussow was man of the match.  But before I get side-tracked, this post is actually about Rwanda (map).

I’m visiting Kigali for all of 48 hours to participate in a meeting involving, primarily, the Open Learning Exchange (OLE), OLE Rwanda, and
the Rwandan Ministry of Education. From my perspective, the meeting is about how they can most effectively use the content that Siyavula
has made available as part of their One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiatives. Truth be told, I knew very little about Rwanda, apart from
the horrific events that transpired 15 years ago, and wasn’t every excited about the trip.

Then I did a little research which has made me very very excited about the prospects for Rwanda. First I’d like to set the scene with
some of Rwanda’s vital statistics. The country has a population of just over 10 million people but is quite small (26 000 km²), making it the
most densely populated country in Africa. The perimeter of the country is 893km – for the South Africans that is less than a drive from Cape
Town to Kimberley. That’s the perimeter – the country is approximately 150km across at its widest point. So it’s a small country. 70% of the
country is literate, despite 60% living under the breadline ($1 per day).

So what is there to be excited about? Rwanda has committed itself to moving from a subsistence- to knowledge-based economy. So has South
Africa (at least moving from resource- to knowledge-based) but the thing that is exciting is they’re actually doing something about it
other than just making pronouncements.

Rwanda is committed to deploying fibre-optic infrastructure so that schools, universities, government offices and institutions have
direct access to fibre. Not only that, they’ve already laid more than 2000km (~2300km) of fibre! Now go back to my earlier comments
and think about what that really means given the size of Rwanda. If Rwanda put down a star-network of fibre emanating from Kigali then it would have 24 spokes with about 400km of fibre to spare, and each spoke would arrive at the border of the country less than 40km away from the adjacent spokes. You’d need to lay at most 20km of fibre to connect to a comprehensive backbone. I have no idea what their network actually looks like but no matter how you slice it, 2300km of fibre in a country that is 150km across is incredible.

The government intends to connect to the Seacom cable before the end of this year. If you have broadband in Rwanda in December this year, you may
have the best broadband in Africa! I’ll ask Steve Song to correct me on this one but you’d be MUCH better off than having broadband in South
Africa.

Just laying fibre doesn’t solve any of the countries problems but it opens up amazing opportunities for innovative solutions to solve those
problems. Fibre is the ultimate foundation for communications infrastructure. The Rwandan government teamed up with one of the most
wired countries in the world to roll out their fibre, Korea. Korean Telecom (KT) is doing a lot of the implementation.

Now all of sudden my meeting to discuss putting content on laptops in a Rwandan school is a lot more exciting. I’m starting to imagine all the things
I wish we could try in SA:

• a class of African school children that can actually stream video from open courseware sites or teacher tube
• run simulations online
• communicate with learners elsewhere in Rwanda and the world
• teachers video conferencing across the country forming lots of niche communities of practice
• extensive, rapid development and deployment of OERs ensuring content used in Rwanda is as up to date as possible
• effective use of national databases for learners and their assessments
• on-demand one-on-one tutoring for learners online
• learners really embracing content creation and their own creativity
• and so much more!

Thats a far from comprehensive list and each item requires a little more than just fibre but none of them works well without fibre, something else that Rwanda probably tops the density list for.

Just browse the projects they’ve got listed on the Rwanda Information Technology Authority – they’re embracing e-government, e-health (OpenMRS for example), etc. and I think that they will leap frog many other developing countries. The full benefits will still take years to appear, as the benefits of education for example always do, but I am convinced that if the Rwandan government sees this through, and embraces openness and innovation, then the sky is the limit not only for education but for the country as a whole!

Despite always being a proud South African, I’ll be forever jealous that SA has spent years suppressing our telecoms industry and hasn’t adopted a comprehensive broadband strategy like Rwanda. The silver lining is that at least we’ll have a shining example in a year or two of what is actually possible. Lets just hope Rwanda manage to pull it off.