The week of the FHSST proof-reading was the most unbelievable whirlwind of top science minds coming together with amazing generosity. This all began at lunchtime on Wednesday 25 August, when Mark and Neels received notification from the DoE, that if we were able to edit our six FHSST books in their entirety, they would distribute them to every school in the country, in order to make the effects of the teacher’s strike less severe. We immediately sprung to action as this is huge for Siyavula and the FHSST project, and an opportunity that could not be passed up.
But first we had lunch. One needs time for information to sink in and be processed, before one takes action! Fun as it can be to shoot from the hip and deal with the consequences later, in this case, we needed a well thought out plan. This came in the form of big white sheets of paper, a red pen, and mind maps of who we each knew and what their area of expertise may be. Once we had established this, and Neels created our “Call to Action” flier, Mark and the team hit Twitter, Facebook and our email accounts, and we sent out countless emails to anyone and everyone that could possibly help, or who may know other people who could assist in this great project.
The response was unreal. My email account was just about flooded with responses from scientists and mathematicians all over the world. I was almost overcome with emotion at one stage, due to the generosity of these complete strangers who had heard about our urgent need via a friend, or through social networking sites or blogs (including Mark Shuttleworth‘s!). I just couldn’t believe that I was getting emails from someone saying something as simple, but as moving as: “Hi Bridget, I have a PhD in Applied Maths from [insert university here], how can I help?”.
Mark discovered that A.nnotate.com was a great website to use for editing the textbooks online. It is really simple to use, and meant that the chapters could be proofed from anywhere in the world.
I spent that week frantically assigning chapters, sending chapters to volunteer proof-readers; checking on progress, reassigning chapters if volunteers were not able to get through their chapter assignments, and generally playing task-master and maintaining order in this otherwise chaotic event.
Amongst all these goings on we had the launch of the FullMarks website [see blog post here], and on our return to the Open Innovation Studio (OIS), we were immersed in to the madness of the proof-reading and allocations once again. By 18h30 that Friday evening, I had assigned a large number of the chapters, which was no mean feat as every chapter had to have two proof-readers covering it, in order to ensure we caught every error in the books. This gave us a total of 97 chapters in 6 books, but with the chapters being doubled up for proofing, it came to 194 chapters!
Saturday saw the arrival of volunteers at the OIS, who diligently read through and noted errors on hard copies of the textbooks, while other volunteers began the process of correcting the mistakes in LaTeX. Monday and Tuesday were late nights at the OIS, with more volunteers arriving to apply their knowledge and training to the task at hand. Despite the hard work going on, it was quite a jovial atmosphere, with dinner ordered in to provide sustenance and keep everyone’s spirits up. While all this was going on, we were receiving countless notifications from A.nnotate, informing us of changes being made by our volunteers. Due to differences in time zones, this meant that our chapters were being corrected around the clock.
By Wednesday afternoon, every chapter had been proof-read at least twice (some more than this due to some volunteers carrying on beyond their assigned chapters – lovely!), and the majority of the LaTeX corrections had been made. And come Thursday – just when I was thinking that it was smooth sailing from this point on – Mark explained that compiling the books was the next tricky part, as this is where errors in the LaTeX code get picked up and have to be fixed!
It wasn’t long before the frustration of this became apparent, as the Grade 10 Maths code started causing trouble. Luckily for us though, Mark is a LaTeX whizz (and I quote from him “LaTeX is easy if you know what you’re doing!”), and it didn’t take too long to figure out what had gone wrong!
We had aimed to have all the books completed by the afternoon of Thursday 2 September, but due to the mammoth task that this turned out to be, it just wasn’t possible. All nighters had been pulled (takes us all right back to our wild varsity days, doesn’t it!), but due to the sheer volume we just could not meet this deadline. But, come Friday afternoon at 14h30, a call was put through to the DoE to announce that the textbooks were uploaded to www.fhsst.org, and were ready for distribution! A proud moment indeed.
In addition to the FHSST website, all six of our books are available for download from Thutong, the South African National Education Portal. It’s easy: Thutong > Curriculum Learning Spaces > and select from Basic Education FET Subjects, under Mathematics or Physical Sciences. Alternatively, click here for the Maths textbooks and here for the Physical science textbooks.
The Siyavula team would like to thank every volunteer that made contact with us to offer their assistance on this huge task. We really appreciate the time and effort that went into proofing every book, and because most of the volunteers have full time jobs, it meant proofing after hours and on the weekend – thank you so much.
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