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 posts about the last 3 workshops (first post here) in the North West Province are long overdue and so I’ve decided to consolidate them into a single post.

For those only interested in the big picture it’s fair to say that all the workshops were very successful! All the workshops were intended to be two days long and were held at ATKV Buffelspoort which turned out to be a great venue for us.

All participants (approximately 60 per workshop) were engaged, enthusiastic and lively right until the end. The feedback we received was excellent with participants really enjoying both the community/group psychology side as well as the technical training. The level of engagement was so high that in all sessions participants were left asking for more but we had to cut things off as we just ran out of time or would have had to sacrifice our program which covered:

• challenges and needs in the North West province,
• workbook review,
• Siyavula and OERs introduction,
• Connexions introduction,
• communities of practice,
• group dynamics with introductions to edge, rank and containment,
• using Connexions to create accounts, workgroups and upload content from Word correctly, and
• brainstorming around needs, issues and ideas for taking things forward.

This left all advisors with a clear idea of how, in our work to support teachers and curriculum/subject advisors to be more effective, we adopt an approach that focuses on the use of Open Educational Resources, which immediately allows for the re-packaging, contextualisation and improvement of educational resources, by communities of practice, which supports load-sharing, professional development, empowerment and the development of a sense of belonging for the participants.

The advisors also identified practical ways that they could use the resources, tools and concepts in their work, identified potential challenges they could face, shared ideas about how to overcome those challenges and gave us great feedback on what challenges stand in the way of complete, province-wide adoption of the ideas.

We’ve had an opportunity to establish a superb relationship with the curriculum/subject advisors and give them enough information to get started as well as lay a solid foundation for any future work in the province.

Although each workshop began with the same plan they didn’t all turn out to be identical and so each one deserves some discussion.

Workshop 2 – 4 & 5^th March 2010

The Foundation Phase and Arts and Culture advisors were the primary attendees at the second workshop and made this our liveliest workshop with the most arts and culture in terms of singing and dancing at the workshop.

All the photos from the workshop, taken by Quinton Davis, are online – click here to see them.

Guests

• Dr. Johlene de Villiers, who is helping start a senior phase science club with teachers from the towns of Sutherland, Fraserburg, Williston and Carnarvon in the Northern Cape Province.
• Nico Sauer, Subject Advisor Senior Phase Physical Science Namakwa Region, Northern Cape Department of Education, who is working with Johlene in her efforts.
• Susie Crossman from the Royal Bafokeng Institute who is coordinating their efforts on the science education front.

We invite guests to attend and participate in our workshops because it allows them to experience the blend of communities of practice, technology and OERs we are providing and is much more effective than any explanation we can give them. The guests we invite are potential partners, practitioners or advisors. We didn’t have any guests at the first workshop as we were still finding our feet and the workshop details were finalised quite close to the actual workshop date.

Changes

In this workshop we were able to complete the Word uploading to our standalone server (this hadn’t been possible at the first workshop) and all participants went through the process of constructing a document, importing it into our stand-alone server, and publishing the content.

Some participants had the opportunity to import the content into workgroups that they had formed earlier in the day, demonstrating the technical solution for having a restricted, collaborative workspace online where discussions can happen and content can be imported/created before being released to the broader community.

Workshop 3 – 18 & 19^th March 2010

For this workshop the Life Orientation, Technology and Social Sciences advisor joined us at Buffelspoort. This workshop was the hardest one for our team as we were involved in a relatively serious car accident just outside OR Tambo late the night before on the way to Buffelspoort and so the team had very little sleep. Thankfully the participants provided the energy and the excitement for the team and the workshop went off well despite some very tired facilitators.

All the photos from the workshop, taken by Quinton Davis, are online – click here to see them.

Guests

• Patrick and Jo Dixon, Patrick is the founder of LearnAid Publishing in the United Kingdom.
• Elizabeth Meyer from the Centre for Education Development at the University of the Free State.
• Marlin van Heerden

The particularly exciting thing about having representatives of LearnAid at the event was the opportunity to allow the advisors to meet someone who really has leveraged the benefits of OERs that we preach to them. We were able to show professionally laid out derivatives works of the content we’ve made available. LearnAid publishing has used both Siyavula and FHSST content in their handbooks. This really drives home the power of open licensing.

Changes

For the third workshop we restructured the flow of sessions to better leverage the momentum from the community sessions, before we had inserted some technical training to ensure that people didn’t get too tired of working in one area, but the groups generated so much momentum and energy that we withheld the technical training till later in the day which worked really well. It is hard to know up front how engaged and focused a group will be after 2 hours focused on one topic and we try to go where the energy is in our workshops as much as possible because it is an indicator of the passion and needs of the participants.

We also modified the introductory process and swapped the speed dating for a individual introductions in the plenary session. We asked participants to tell us not only who they were and which district they were from but also what their expectation, if any, of the workshop was. This worked really well as everyone’s voice was heard and a wide range of issues were raised.

Workshop 4 – 25 & 26^th March 2010

Advisors for Natural Sciences and Economics and Management Studies were the participants at the final workshop as well as some Physical Science advisors wanting to learn more about the FHSST content.

All the photos from the workshop, taken by Quinton Davis, are online – click here to see them.

This workshop was the most intense group of participants and we spent a lot of time discussing very technical issues of both the site and group dynamics. Again participants requested more time for all aspects of the program.

I’ve included a complete list of the responses we received during the introductory exercise when we ask everyone to introduce themselves and tell us why they are here and what they expect to get out of the workshop. This exercise gives people a voluntary opportunity to put their cards on the table and we get some really honest responses. This is great because it means that our team really knows their expectations – you’ll see that there is a lot of honesty included in the responses and it is not just a case of everyone towing some party line. We get a chance to put some processes in place to address them where there are, for example, logistical concerns. This sets the tone for the workshop and gets us off to a great start.

“Sharpen my skills and bring better skills to other people.”
“Get some material to support our schools.”
“Be developed technologically.”
“Catch a mouse.”
“Learn a lot.”
“Access information easily from computer.”
“I’ve researched portfolio assessments, found a lot on the web and thought this was a good opportunity to go into “internet conferencing.”"
“What is the workshop all about?”
“99% don’t have internet. How to access those portal with a lot of information on science. Hope program can be extended into most syllabus areas.”
“Something’s going to be opened up – Siyavula.”
“I just wanted to get out of the office.”
“I’ve developed grade 4 material. I’m not going to type and distribute yet because I’ve heard of Siyavula and going to the workshop first.”
“Jors said I would meet Mark Shuttleworth. [Once this was found out not to be the case...] Perhaps Siyavula will open the door to Mark Shuttleworth.”
“Normally we have to work for a workshop. This time I want to take something away.”
“I never wanted to be a teacher, but my classmates told me to be a teacher. I didn’t want to come to this workshop, but my colleagues told me to be here. [When asked if the was a good teacher she said that she's been told that she is]”
“I’m here to visit the area. Be able to use information from the internet.”
“There are no physical science educators at some schools.”
“I heard about the workshop from someone else who attended the workshop – they said it was good”
“Given lack of support from the department, and lack of resources, I hope this can inspire educators to be creative.
“I’ve heard a lot of things about it [Siyavula] and am very interested.”
“A lot of good things were said about this workshop and I did some marketing for the workshop.”
“I’ve never heard of Siyavula in my life. [When all participants were asked this by Helene, a few others put up their hands to indicate that this was the case for them too].”
“I’m interested to see about the grass roots vs top down approach, and how Siyavula tackles this.”
“Reputation of Siyavula from colleagues.”
“Far, far behind technologically – I hope this is a catch up program, and hope to come out a better person.”
“Colleagues were here and I was told “This is one of the workshops you can’t miss!”"
“Here to meet Shuttleworth as well. Don’t know what the workshop is about. Hopefully sharpen skills, gain more.”
“Efficiently help the education system to be more.”
“Not very sure why I’m here. Was told they teach you how to open a document. I want to learn something that I don’t know – or something I know – waiting for that wow moment!”
“Some material seen from Jors – inspired.”
“Heard that facilitators are good. Like hardworking people – don’t like lazy people.”
“Explore new things I don’t know. Viva Siyavula!”
“Jors said if I don’t do it now, he will kill me.”
“Jors. Subject advisors must know more than teachers. Improve in a technological way.”
“Want to be more technologically advanced.”
“Inspired by Jors.”
“I was lost – that’s why I’m late. I hope the workshop can benefit me. Share info with educators”
“Here out of curiosity – develop.”
“Heard about Siyavula a lot – curious.

The final session is a discussion of how to take things forward, what people can commit to and what challenges there are. Some of the comments made were documented and here is a list:

Select educators that are computer literate and introduce Siyavula to them. Introduce a buddy system i.e. each of them will introduce one other person.

Cellphone, simulation. A lot of people are new to all this. Need to spend time playing with the website i.e. getting comfortable with the website ourselves [as curriculum advisors].

We need to set up meetings.

We feel empowered, excited and tired.

We need to get more comfortable with Siyavula.

Most educators are not computer literate.

Although one person may have access to a laptop, they don’t necessarily have exclusive use of it.

I see the potential, but there are big constraints.

We need to kept being reminded about Siyavula – we need to be prodded
[response: it is important to remember that this is a voluntary thing]

Most of felt we could use it ourselves.

We would show it to our children.
[A lot of people in the audience agreed]

Some websites are blocked [because of firewalls / proxy servers]. Can you please make sure that this is rectified for the Siyavula website?
[response: we'll sort that out]

We would feel more comfortable if the DoE gave us a mandate to be able to use Siyavula – and put time into it instead of other things.

Thanks to Mark, the Shuttleworth Foundation and Jors

Much has been spent on the psychological part – more time should be spent on the technical part.

I didn’t like the time spent on the technical part.

I really enjoyed the psychology part.

Different strokes for different folks – maybe you guys can find out the level of technical competence beforehand.
[response: it varies and we need to choose how to spread the time of the workshop]

Ultimately the participants always hung around until the end, were lively right up until the closing session and were all enthusiastic about the project and engaged in the process. I thought I’d close this post with a photo of, arguably, our most enthusiastic participant:

On the 24th of March we held the very first FullMarks event, an uploading sprint. The site was, and still is, in beta and the event was the first opportunity to let a random selection of participants have unrestricted access. All previous site demonstrations had been under quite controlled conditions and much smaller.

The event was held at the University of Cape Town‘s Chemical Engineering Department and ran for the whole day. You can see the invitation and agenda here. We had 30 participants supported by the actual software development team from Upfront Systems. The objective was to start to enter content into the assessment bank in preparation for an official launch later this year. We were able to use one of the computer laboratories in the department and were to use the university’s internet connection. The event was held during the university holiday which simplified logistics significantly.

All of the participants brought content with them either on laptop, CD or memory stick. We began the day with an introduction to Open Educational Resources and their benefits which was well received.

Then we began with the work. We allowed the participants to begin by creating questions directly on the site using the creation form so that they would understand the structure of what was being stored before moving on to uploading using the OpenOffice importer functionality. The bulk of the day was spent on uploading.

Being the first users they couldn’t yet take advantage of the test creation functionality as the bank was empty. The last session of the day was used to then demonstrate the test creation and analysis functionality.

The spectrum of teachers ensured that we had a variety of grades covered, many different subjects/learning areas and that we had a content in many different formats, digital and layout, that people wanted to import which gave us a great opportunity to stress test the question creation and importing functionality as well as test creation.

Upfront Systems were on hand to resolve a number of small issues identified as well as discuss educators’ needs with them directly. The long-term success of FullMarks will depend on ensuring the link between the development team and educators remains as direct, clear and effective as possible. Some more serious issues were also discovered which is great for developing a robust solution and having the users and developers in the room meant that the issues were quickly pinned down, without the long discussions around reproducibility that sometimes happen online.

The most exciting part of the day was the willingness of the teachers to share material and the opportunity to connect them with the Upfront team directly. It is important to get questions into the bank but strengthening the community around the project will really have long-term benefits for the project.

We had intended to run 6 workshops at the AMESA Congress the starting the Sunday after this sprint but one of the issues identified, involving non-standard styling comments from Word, was able to cripple the site by throwing the PDF generator into an infinite loop, and any user could do it set it off. This was discovered just before the workshop when someone did it and so the FullMarks workshops at the AMESA Congress became Siyavula workshops instead.

We’re working on an alternative plan to ramp up our content and user-base before the official launch of FullMarks, watch this space for more details.

The photographs are courtesy of René Toerien and can be found here.

Right click on image and select “view image” to see larger versions.

On the 22^nd and 23^rd February, the Siyavula team ran a workshop at the ATKV Buffelspoort for Mathematics and Languages Subject Advisors for the North West Province’s Department of Education. This workshop was a joint undertaking in partnership with the Department of Education. They are providing the venue and catering as well as coordinating attendance.

The workshop was well attended with 50 subject advisors (also often called curriculum advisors) participating. We were missing some of the Mathematics advisors, as there was a parallel mathematics workshop elsewhere, but are expecting them to attend our next workshop.

Technical / Content Training

From the team’s side the event was a resounding success. On the technical front the stand-alone server and wireless network worked extremely well and we were able to conduct our training with more fluidity and focus than in previous workshops where internet access challenges had proved a large distraction.

A particular highlight of the opening technical session, our hula-hoop activity in which we explain all the Connexions concepts with rope, books and hula-hoops, was when one of the advisors pointed out that this was the ideal technical approach for realising the objectives of the outcomes-based national curriculum.

Community Building

The community-related activities of this workshop were different from our previous Siyavula workshops in that we focused our discussion more on what it takes to support a community as well as giving the participants an opportunity to discuss and present their own strategies for taking things forward. Subject advisors support many teachers in a learning area so they are in a superb position to create an enabling environment for communities to form.

The formation of communities, and ultimately communities of practice, amongst the teachers they support will have many benefits beyond improved sharing of content, classroom-practice, and ideas. Communities of practice provide a powerful support structure for participants as well as being a powerful vehicle for professional development. Subject advisors that are able to support the formation of communities of practice will automatically be working towards their mandate for curriculum delivery in the classroom.

Many of the advisors asked for more information, material and training sessions on how communities work and how best to support them, another highlight of the workshop.

The Way Forward

The participant had many group discussions on various topics. In the final session where they were discussing the way forward the groups unanimously identified the following needs:

• department support,
• recognition for participants,
• resources, and
• senior managment team (SMT) support.

The particularly exciting part was that all groups committed to:

• distributing the workbooks using the provided DVDs,
• introducing their teachers to Connexions, and
• supporting their teachers to form communities.

The participants remained engaged and enthusiastic right up until the end and my favourite piece of feedback during the closing session was when one subject advisor said it was the first workshop he’d been to where everyone had stayed until the very end.

Special thanks to Quinton Davis for all the photographs, click on any of them to browse the full set on flickr

Over the last two weeks we’ve been working hard to plan the next large scale training exercise for Siyavula. We are going to be training the curriculum advisors of the North West Province in South Africa. This opportunity came after Mathusi Sebogwa and Jors de Ridder participated in the first Siyavula workshop held in September in Cape Town last year. We find that one of the most effective ways to convey the Siyavula message is to invite people to participate in one of our workshops.

The training will focus on:

• How to grow and facilitate groups of teachers working together as communities to support one another and share their material such as lessons plans, exercises and solutions.
• The free and openly licensed workbooks available to advisors and educators on-line and on CD.
• How to search, download, modify, print and share these resources for a specific grade, subject, language and learning outcome.

Originally we were going to run workshops in Mafikeng, Rustenburg, Vryburg and Potchefstroom, which would have been an interesting logistical exercise. Now we will be running all of our workshops in Rustenburg. There will be 4 workshops, 3 have final dates confirmed: 21^stand 22ⁿ February, 3^rd and 4^th March and one on the 17^th and 18^th.

The agenda for these workshops will be a little different and tailored to the audience we have. In our first Cape Town workshop we focused on the formation of new communities as we had a collection of teachers that hadn’t worked together before. In our Kwa-Zulu Natal workshop we focused on the managing a community and how to allow participants to get involved because the teachers were already part of a community. In this workshop we’ll be focusing on how communities can be supported and an enabling environment for their formation can be created because we will be working with curriculum advisors that support a group of teachers.

We have also adopted a new strategy for providing technical training and internet access. In the past we’ve tried using the internet provided by the venue and renting computers, we’ve tried bringing our own 3G wireless routers to provide our own access with rented laptops. We’ve also tried asking participants to bring their own laptops.

None of the internet solutions have worked effectively and reliably for us so far. We also found that participants bringing their own laptops actually increased the need for technical support rather than reducing it. Personal laptops are often unknown quantities to the owners when used away from home. It also increased the number of laptop/operating system/hardware permutations we had to deal with which also slowed things down further.

In the upcoming workshops all the laptops will be rented. This means they’ll all be the same model (or at most 2-3 different models) of laptop, running the same operating system. This will reduce any technical support complications. In addition, we have put together a server with a complete copy of the Connexions site running on it and purchased a number of wireless access points and a switch so that the server has its own wireless network. This means we can plug the server in and turn it on and all the laptops can connect to our wireless network. Our wireless network is configured to ensure that all siyavula.cnx.org (our local proxy server for the Connexions site) requests go to our local server.

Now we know the site will definitely be responsive and we can get the laptops working quickly while still using the proper site URL. This is so that we train everyone to use the correct URL from the beginning. The more responsive the site we use during the training the easier it is to maintain momentum and reduce distractions.

We are really looking forward to the training in the North West province and trying out our new approach.