I have uploaded a bunch of the South African National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (Mathematics (All phases), Maths Literacy, Life Sciences and Physical Science) to a.nnotate.com for the education community to comment on. I definitely feel that this is open, collaborative and focused on school, and I am the Open and Collaborative Resources Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation after all and it should be quite a lot of fun if people get involved.

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 [...]

Why do our pay TV providers provide so little real choice in their bouquets of channels. I’d like to see them take advantage of the fact that its all digital and that they could easily offer customers real options and I’m sure still make profit! Here is my suggestion for how they should structure the bouquets to be more dynamic and accommodating.

Siyavula intends to create a framework that supports the education system. The framework needs to accept the curriculum, allow swap-and-share groups the ability to share resources and have the discussions they need, allow users like Curriculum Advisors to vet resources and ensure that the isolated teachers can get access to the resources.

Turns out Mbilwi Secondary School has been doing a great job for many years.

I’m charging on ahead with development of the open assessment bank. We will be calling it FullMarks and the most important feature will be that teachers can actively participate.

Quite frankly, my sympathy goes to the learners who have to share one book between four and cannot do their homework properly, while publishing house executives sit in plush offices dreaming up misleading copyright messages to intimidate teachers and learners.

I will get the chance to build an open assessment bank. The community of teachers in SA is chomping at the bit for such a tool and I have had multiple requests for bank software that communities are already prepared to populate themselves. Providing the different groups with a single tool will allow them to feed off each others energy and allow us to begin with a bang. Working with existing communities also makes the tool much more sustainable.

As part of my Fellowship at the Shuttleworth Foundation I have the opportunity to try things. I’ve got Siyavula, OpenPress and now I’m toying with adding an open assessment bank to the mix.