Blogs

For the Siyavula project we partnered with Connexions as our online content platform (some of the reasons can be found here). As part of this partnership we try to do more than use Connexions as a repository but also support the continuous development of the repository through sourcing more content and helping enhance technical offering as much as possible. There are always many potential avenues for development in any software project and we’ve been trying to help on those that make life easier for teachers in South Africa to be more effective and efficient when using the site.

Vlogging from Mark Horner on Vimeo.

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.

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.

Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute introduced me to some representatives from UNESCO who wanted to discuss Open Educational Resources and specifically some the issues relating to the choice of platform. Previously I had met a number of UNESCO people working in the OER space – advocating OERs in teaching etc. at the e-Learning Africa conference in Accra, Ghana in 2008, but this was more to do with an internal UNESCO strategy.

AMESA is the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa, making mathematics the only school subject for which there is a national association in South Africa. I think that educators in all subject areas should have a national body that organises an annual conference to help drive their subject area as well as the professional development of educators.

We were met by a lively, jocular and excited group of 45 educators, including the primary school principal, Mr Milton-Greene, at Christel House for their third training session on Monday 29 March. The group represented nearly the entire teaching staff across all grades R-12.
We were able to skill educators in creating a CNX account, as most had lost their original passwords, using MS Word correctly in creating a module, uploading their work to Connexions, creating work groups, participating in discussion forums and finally publishing their work. Their learning created a buzz of excitement we’ve rarely experienced in training sessions before as teachers commented positively on how Siyavula would advantage them in areas such as planning and workload reduction.
We wish the educators of Christel House much success in their future experiences with Siyavula.

With the focus on the uploading of content to CNX, our workshop venue was abuzz with excitement yesterday. Our delegates were delighted at their new learning in using MS Word correctly and most attendees experienced success with the uploading process, albeit that nothing significant was published. Due to time constraints, we were unable to cover all the content we had originally intended to but delegates felt confident about uploading content around their particular learning area on their own.

FullMarks, a free, open, online assessment bank is now ready! But we really need your help to get the ball rolling. We need questions and model solutions to enter into the bank!

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.

I have made a quick slideshow tour of some of the functionality of the alpha version of the FullMarks site. The site is extremely simple yet offers powerful reports to help support learners effectively, especially in the current environment in South Africa where classes are large and teachers don’t have enough time to consider individual needs.

I have finally upgraded the FHSST website to Drupal 6.15. This took me a lot longer than expected because the year got off to a completely rampant start and “spare” time just didn’t exist. I also had fallen very far behind on Drupal upgrades so I had to start with an upgrade to Drupal 5.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of work on the FullMarks front, much more than has been reported here. An alpha version of the site has been available for a while now and I’ve been using it to gather support for the FullMarks project launch. The official launch will take place after an uploading sprint.

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.

Our workshop for high school educators at Vuyiseka Secondary proved somewhat of a sobering experience!
Firstly, only fifty percent of the delegates were present as others were forced to re-prioritize their lives due to other commitments. Of the five educators who attended, two were new to Siyavula.
The session had just gotten underway when we discovered a failure in the Internet connection. The school had run out of caps! Fortunately the facilitator had brought along his mobile unit so we were at least able to demonstrate some of the functionality on the site. But educators soon became aware that they needed more of a hands-on experience and suggested that we abort our efforts to enlighten them and reschedule the workshop for another date.
In view of some of the comments that were voiced by the participants, it became apparent that none had become actively involved with the site since our workshop in October last year. Some remarked that they hadn’t even used any of the resources available. The lack of technology at schools and the difficulties experienced in accessing such technology elsewhere were once again raised as reasons for not being active on Connexions.
Educators’ apathy was also revealed in statements such as “we do not have time for yet another hi-tech tool” and “we are still sticking to the old way of doing things”. One individual even remarked that there was “no time to plan” after I showed them how collaborating on Siyavula would save them time!
No date has yet been set for a follow-up session but would most likely happen during March.

Makhanyiseli Primary School hosted our second support workshop for primary school educators yesterday 16 February.
Present were ten educators of whom six previously received Siyavula training. The four new members from Mzamomhle Primarywere all invited by their colleague who had already experienced the Siyavula message.
Having Connexions accounts prepared beforehand for the attendees helped much to maintain a smoothly flowing session allowing us to cover most of the content we had prepared. Although much of the session was a reinforcement of prior learning, educators were excited when shared the brand new component, the uploading of resources to Connexions.
Collaborating via online work groups was a hit, once again, although half of the participants continue to lament the shortage of technological resources at their schools and once again appealed to the team for help in this regard.
With four new members added to the Siyavula family we cannot but tag our experience yesterday as being very successful.

Nine foundation phase educators from Christel House were added to the Siyavula family as a result of a training workshop conducted at the school computer lab. Although only fifty percent of the invitees were able to attend, the group we worked with were a sheer pleasure to work with. We were also very excited by the attendance of a Swiss educator, Sandra, volunteering at CHSA until May this year.

Thirty-odd spirited educators gathered at Sibaya for the year-end conference on Friday 4 December 2009. The format of the gathering mimicked that of the Cape Town one.
Educators were happy to engage in the activity focussed on re-connecting and shared their experiences regarding Siyavula with enthusiasm. Of note was the fact that, even though they had encountered their fair share of challenges, solutions to many difficulties were tabled there and then, making the KZN group an unmistakable cut-above. One such challenge mentioned was the lack of computer literacy among educators. To this, a proposal that the KZN trainers fill this crucial gap was immediately accepted by the ward superintendant, Mr Selvan Chetty.
The announcement of Connexions developments in the pipe-line, was met with resounding approval once again, Full Marks again given 2 thumbs-up.

The development of the FullMarks open assessment bank is well underway. We’re on track for a launch early next year. Without a beta version of the site up it is hard to show you the progress at this time but we’re about 20 man-days away from the website being ready to show you.

22 November 2009 marked the Siyavula year-end conference in Cape Town.
The Shuttleworth foundation was a hive of activity before the start of the event. The focus of the morning event was to re-connect with the delegates of the Cape Town Siyavula conference, to share success stories and challenges as well discuss the way forward.
The delegates enthusiastically shared their positive experiences with regard to the use of Siyavula and other online resources. However, they bemoaned the high internet costs. In an interesting group activity the delegates discussed internet penetration in the education sector and conservative estimates place internet penetration around 10% of an educator force of 340 000.
In conclusion Mark Horner shared his vision and goals for 2010. Among the delegates the planned role out of an assessment bank, “FullMarks” generated a lot of discussion and interest.
The CPT year-end conference was also attended by two senior team members of Connexions based in Texas, USA. Kathy Fletcher and Joel Thierstein shared new developments in the pipe-line with delegates and requested suggestions from educators to help improve the Connexions platform to make Siyavula an even better resource for teachers.
To those who joined us on the Siyavula journey, thank you for your support and we hope that the platform will provide you with a lot more meaningful encounters in the future.

We’ve chosen the covers for the science textbooks as part of our experiment of using crowdsourcing versus traditional design. We’re still waiting for the traditional design covers to come in for the maths books but I thought I’d share the science ones so long.

Saturday 28 November saw yet another Siyavula workshop successfully executed, but this time, distinctly different from what we’ve done before.
The principle focus for this session with 50 mathematics educators, all members of the Association for Mathematics Educators of South Africa (AMESA), was the uploading of content in Word format, which delegates were requested to bring along prior to the workshop.
After about 3 hours into the session, a very enthusiastic and chirpy group, assisted by six facilitators, fired away with zest to add at least 25 pieces of content within about 3 hours.
As was the case in previous workshops, the Siyavula team created a buzz of excitement among delegates as the other functionality of CNX was unveiled. In the CNX update and forthcoming improvements session, Full Marks was again approved with resounding applaud with Wordpress following hot on it’s heels.
A big thank you to all educators who attended.

At the risk of adding to the world of “list-of” blog posts, I wanted to share some of the things that have come up in conversations with many people lately around choosing an OER platform. More important than things like allegiance to a programming languages, wikis, content management systems, or some particular software framework, a platform choice has to be sensitive to the context in which you wish achieve the OER-related impact.

The goal of Siyavula is to ensure that teachers in South Africa have access to a comprehensive set of free and open educational resources that are curriculum-aligned and sustainable. Key to the effective roll-out of such a project is ensuring that the project aligns with the needs and realities on the ground.

My blog post about Mbilwi Secondary School triggered an unexpected blast from the past, I was contacted by Dr. Azwinndini Muronga. I used to be a member of the UCT-CERN Research Centre at the University of Cape Town while working on my PhD and have had very little contact with the unit since beginning at the Foundation. Azwinndini joined the unit while I was there and is now a senior lecturer at UCT.

I talk a lot about communities of practice (CoP) in my work around Siyavula and the concept is key to the strategy and sustainability. Before talking about why we chose Connexions, our community strategy or the impact of the recent announcement by the Minister of Basic Education I need to make sure we’ve got a definition of CoPs handy. I would like to emphasise what CoPs are, their benefits and what they are not.

I’ve just launched another competition on 99Designs to develop a cartoon character that I’ll use to brand this blog. I just can’t bring myself to post a photo in the heading and I felt that a cartoon would be reasonable given that I’m already mixing work and personal stories in one place. The distinction is rather vague anyway.

We need much better management of the feedback we receive for the Free High School Science Texts project. It needs to be simple and fast and allow us to manage it easily. To help with this we’re looking to have a small feedback module written for the site. We’ll use it once we’ve upgraded the site to Drupal 6.x.

One of the most common pieces of feedback that we receive is that users find it difficult to get from browsing content, where they find something they want to build on, to actually editing their own version of that resource.

I’ve mentioned wanting to develop an open assessment bank to complement my other projects and that it was recently approved. I’m happy to report that development is well underway. We are calling this project FullMarks.

During the training sessions that have been taking place over the last 2 months we’ve been putting together a training manual. Our ideas, as well as the Connexions site, keep evolving so expect a steady set of revisions of the manual as time goes by. That said, if you’re interested in Siyavula and getting involved, or even just seeing what it is all about start off with the manual.

On Wednesday 18 October we enthused 17 more educators, 3 of whom had previously been trained, from the Philippi and Nyanga areas about Siyavula OER. The workshop, which lasted for 2 hours, was attended by mathematics, science, business studies and technology high school educators who left the session thrilled at the possibilities of OER accessibility. Many commented that the timing of the workshop was brilliant since they could now utilize the materials in their planning for next year.

As part of the launch of OpenPress, the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book is getting printed. We felt that we needed a fresh set of covers for the books. They will be printed with a colour cover and we felt that the all the Maths covers should have a theme; similarly for the Physical Science books.

We regularly receive feedback on module or collections we’ve uploaded onto Connexions and this morning I received the message below, which was a great way to start my day so I thought I’d share it:

I believe that sustainable solutions to the challenges facing South Africa, HIV/AIDS, unemployment, rampant violent crime, corruption and the like, cannot be found without ensuring that all South Africans have access to a proper education. Imagine poorly educated policemen trying to solve crimes, insufficient or poorly trained doctors dealing with TB outbreaks, young entrepreneurs who can’t do basic numeracy trying to start new businesses, etc. What am I on about you might ask? Well, I see helping education as the key to a peaceful and happy future in South Africa for myself, my family and other South Africans; our collective future depends on it. I think that organisations or individuals who conduct themselves in an underhanded way to take advantage of the education system are reprehensible. They are jeopardising our future!

To help teachers get the most out of the Siyavula and the Free High School Science Texts projects (http://www.siyavula.org.za and http://www.fhsst.org), 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. Therefore we are setting up an online service called OpenPress to help educators pool their printing orders.

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:

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.

A follow-up support session was held at John Pama Primary School for the Philippi/Nyanga group yesterday 15 October. Nine educators from 7 schools were delighted to reignite the excitement they had garnered at the kick-off weekend and plans have been put in place to ensure further support and the growth of communities of practice among teachers of this area.
Educators enthusiastically expressed their preference for a learning-area-centered approach to growing these collaborative groups as this would enhance their already existing swap-and share approach within respective learning areas.
The online work-group approach was also well accepted by teachers and many expressed the desire to belong to a group collaborating around ther specific learning area(s).
All-in-all, a very successful outcome was achieved.

Siyavula is excited to let you know that we have created complete learner workbooks from the modules available on Connexions. These workbooks cover four terms worth of theory, examples and exercises an are ready to download, print and hand-out to your learners. There are workbooks for most of the subjects in both English and Afrikaans. I attached two pictures of what the Grade 4 maths workbook looks like on the Connexions site and downloaded as a .pdf.

I wrote a blog post a little while ago about crowdsourcing the OpenPress logo. That was before we’d actually finished the process and I just wanted to take a quick moment to reflect. This post is long overdue so I’ll keep it short and just hit the highlights. For the record, you’ll find a ton of people for and a ton of people against crowdsourcing, if you want a logo, its an option and the better you manage the process the better your result will be (paying more also helps).

September was a month of steady progress for Siyavula. A lot of work has been going on in the background finishing off the training manual and developing new functionality for Connexions. That will all be launched in October so look out for the next update.

I was quite excited to see a press release from the Office of the Governor for the state of California: Governor Schwarzenegger Signs Legislation Furthering Digital Textbook Initiative. But then I noticed one of the components signed off:

Today I received the good news that the assessment bank I mentioned previously has been approved and we will begin building it as soon as possible, hopefully on Monday.

All teachers in South Africa need to have the time, focus, support and resources necessary to deliver the curriculum effectively. I would like to ensure that they have access to an online assessment bank tool plus toolkit to generate tests, capture and analyse learners’ results and provide detailed reporting on a learner-by-learner, class or national basis as to learning outcomes achieved. The assessment bank would be built according to Open Education philosophy encapsulated in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

On the 16th September, Quinton Davis and I traveled to Gauteng Province to visit a Landulwazi Comprehensive School in Tokoza township where we had the opportunity to train the Teach South Africa Ambassadors. From the Teach South Africa website:

The vision of TEACH South Africa is two-fold. In the short-term, our goal is to recruit, train and support the most talented recent university graduates to commit to teaching for a minimum of two years in some of South Africa’s most disadvantaged schools. In the long-term, TEACH Ambassadors will form an alumni movement, informed by their experience in the classroom, which will fight for educational equality for learners all over South Africa by using their influence in whatever sector they decide work in.

We hosted the Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) Teachers’ Workshop at the Protea Hotel Karridene on the 4th and 5th of September. The meeting was attended by 58 participants and we had a team of 10 running the workshop.

We cracked a few news stories related to our Teachers’ weekends:

The objectives of the teachers’ weekends are to:

The Siyavula training team had a follow-up meeting the Wednesday following our first workshop in Cape Town in which we ran through the details of the weekend and tried to determine what worked and what we could do better.

We held our first teachers’ workshop on the 21^st and 22^nd of August at the Shuttleworth Foundation. Although more preparation could have happened, we felt that it was necessary to get the ball rolling on the Siyavula project. The objective of the Siyavula project is to ensure that teachers in South Africa have access to a comprehensive set of free and open educational resources that are curriculum-aligned and sustainable.We have partnered with the Connexions project to provide an online platform that can support our objective and we are in the process of populating it with a lot of seed content.

At this year’s OpenEd Conference in Vancouver, Canada, considerations around user engagement, community building, and communicating the benefits of open to teachers and learners drove much of the discussions. Siyavula’s own panel presentation addressed Siyavula’s accomplishments to date and interventions going forward from a strategy perspective (discussed by Mark Horner), technology perspective (discussed by Kathi Fletcher and Joel Thierstein from Connexions), and research perspective (discussed by me, Cynthia Jimes from ISKME). The panel presentation created a good amount of buzz, specifically around Siyavula’s community-building work with teachers, as well the research ISKME has conducted to date to inform the implementation of the Siyavula model.

On August 12-14, members of the global open educational resources (OER) community will meet to discuss new directions in the movement at the Open Education Conference 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mark Horner, Kathi Fletcher, Joel Thierstein and Cynthia Jimes will lead a panel discussion of Siyavula on Friday, August 14^th, from 11:15 a.m. to 12.00 p.m.

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).

This blog has been too quiet for too long. We stalled a little bit a couple of months ago but are now busy with preparation for our teacher workshops in August.

On Tuesday this week, Karien Bezuidenhout and myself had the pleasure of meeting Mpho Letlape, Managing Director of the SASOL Inzalo Foundation.

For over a year now a new project has been brewing, OpenPress. It isn’t a secret but nobody took the bait and built it so we are going to do it, something that I am over the moon about. The ‘we’ that I am talking about is Roché Compaan, Steve Song, and myself. We’ve just started out on this journey and there will be a lot more written about this in coming months.

Day 5

Today Lisa, Cynthia and Karien left to head off to Estonia, California, and Cape Town respectively. It has been great having the ISKME team here and they’ve added a lot to our team strategy and approach.

Day 3 - The Stall
Today Karien arrived to experience SciFest09 and help out at the stall and workshops. Our team has settled in nicely at the stall and we’re in a great groove. Every member of the team has grown into their own style and angle of presenting the project and different combinations at the stall keeps things fresh and dynamic.

YES! From no teacher audience to being startled by a group of fifteen excited learners on day two, to two sessions filled to capacity by teachers on day 5 , man oh man, what can I say?! We’re happening and we’re going places. Gripped by delight to utter amazement , those introduced to the project are talking to others, appealing for assistance (including challenges a little beyond our scope of influence at this stage!) and generally leaving us with a sense of hope, excitement and determination, returning to our workshops with the uninitiated solidly recruited to the cause!

Over the past two weeks, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org) has visited schools, districts, educators and administrators in both resourced and under-resourced schools in the Western Cape, and has attended the SciFest 2009 in the Eastern Cape, as part of its research and evaluation work on the Siyavula project.

Day 2 - The Stall

Day 2 was a much busier day up at the 1820 Settlers Monument where the stall is situated. Many more school groups were around than on Day 1 and there were more workshops in the main venue.

Preparation

Photos will be added to this post tomorrow - once they’re up on Flickr!

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org) looks forward to continuing its research on open content initiatives globally, including South Africa’s own Free High School Science Texts, and specifically, to the upcoming opportunity to partner with the Siyavula project. The goal of our research for Siyavula is to increase understanding of the factors that contribute to the creation, use and localization of open educational content across various teaching and learning needs and contexts. ISKME is in the early stages of data collection for this work, which will kick off at the SciFest in Grahamstown. ISKME will attend the SciFest March 25-28 to conduct a baseline survey and talk directly with teachers about their curriculum and curriculum development needs. Also while in South Africa, ISKME will meet with Siyavula project stakeholders, including rural and urban teachers at their local school sites and education experts, and will observe the Siyavula workshops that will support teachers in accessing and modifying Siyavula content on Connexions. For more information about ISKME’s research on the Siyavula project, please contact Lisa Petrides, , or Cynthia Jimes, .

Our graphic designer, Eugene Badenhorst, brought round the first items we’re getting made for Science Festival Africa 2009. There was much excitement in the office and I thought I’d post a couple of pics so you can see some of the excitement.

For a while now the Upfront Systems team has been developing additional functionality for the Rhaptos platform on our behalf. As we need this functionality deployed on the main Connexions site we have been working closely with the Rhaptos development team.

On Wednesday of last week (11^th Feb 2009) I participated in a meeting to discuss adding an assessment bank to Connexions. The idea isn’t new and has been floated in a variety of guises on numerous occasions over the last year. In fact, we’ve already moved well beyond discussing it as a possibility and all discussion was focused on what the assessment bank would need to do.

I probably should have blogged about the release of the zeroth version of the FHSST books immediately but it seems that blogging isn't really in my blood.

One of the first things that I took on in my Shuttleworth open philanthropy gig was to help the team develop a 'theory of change'. The aim was two-fold: create a simple compass to guide internal decisions and develop a tool to help the rest of the world understand what we’re up to. Basically, we wanted a snapshot of how our collective brain works as a team.

I love meeting practical people working hard to implement big dreams. Noy Shoung is one of those people. He’s trying to infuse open source into how Cambodians enter the computing age. And he’s making some headway.

Good — but different — Open Everything in Singapore yesterday. We had about half local NGOs, half local social entrepreneurs and a very small smattering of the usual software / open content / open edu crowd.

Hanging with Samoeun Sothyro last week left me inspired and hopeful. Sothyro is is the communications manager at a small environmental NGO in Phnom Penh. He’s also the guy charged with building an online knowledge sharing network amongst IDRC-backed research organizations in Cambodia. These are groups working on everything from natural resource management to human rights law to community internet access.

Almost in Phnom Penh, and Open Everything Hollyhock is world away. But a wonderful world it was. Thirty five passionate, generous and smart people gathered amidst the trees and mountains of British Columbia to rap about the art, science and spirit of ‘open’. It was a great week of sparks and insights, building enough momentum that the Open Everything snowball may now be slowly rolling downhill.

I've been meaning to move this blow to Wordpress for a while now. Labour Day weekends being good for such things, I have finally done it. For future postings, you should go to:

On Saturday, 30th September, I was invited to attend the Brightest Young Minds conference held at Spier wine estate. The primary purpose of the event was for BYM to unveil their new vision and strategy going forward.

As he wrapped up, Aslam Raffee reflected: "We've done very well in terms of setting policy, but very poorly at implementation. We've got to fix that." Aslam is one of three people leading to roll out of South Africa's government-wide commitment to open source. And he's willing to admit: making it work ain't easy.

The vibe and ideas at Friday's Open Everything Cape Town were super sparky. A nice mix of well known open source projects (South African gov't open source policy) and novel new projects (Free Culture House). A good balance of techie and non-techie, with a bias of creative media and open education types. And amazing food, service and atmosphere from Bird's Cafe. Fun and learning all around.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Indigo Youth Book Fair 2008 in Pusan, South Korea. I am going to run through the events of the last few days just to get some ideas down. It deserves a much more detailed blog than this one but I want just to get the overall trip details down and mention some of the things that interested me. This is not a fair review of the whole event.

If you've been following this blog, you'll know that one of my Shuttleworth open philanthropy experiments was the 'How We Work' club. This is basically a quarterly pizza lunch where the whole organization reflects on an important aspect of how we function as a foundation (e.g. making sure everything is under an open license). The conversations focus on what's working, what's not and how things could be better. I then write up a blog posting and an article so that the rest of the world can learn from the discussion.

It's official: I will be joining the Mozilla Foundation in late September to take on the role of executive director.

I met with The Amazing Philipp Schmidt over the weekend to prep for Open Everything Cape Town. The event is happening this Friday at Bird's Boutique Cafe. It's an amazing venue. High ceilings and tons of light. And scrumptious homemade everything. 

Yesterday we had the pleasure of Titilayo Seriki's company for a lunch-time discussion. She runs a consulting firm, along with Peter Heinecke, called Cielarko. The reason I invited her to come and chat to us was that I wanted to hear more about her PhD thesis results and how they might affect Siyavula.

As mentioned in a previous post, I want to start posting some in-depth blogs about the various aspects of the Siyavula project plan. The most pressing issue that external stakeholders seem to be interested in is the reasoning for our platform choice.

This blog has been very quiet, as I am constantly reminded ;), but much has been going on in the background. The important news is that we've finalised a plan for the implementation of Siyavula with a public launch scheduled for the 2009 school year.

As the old saying goes: 'There's nothing like getting stuck behind a rockslide with 400 of your closest friends.' Okay, maybe it's not an old saying yet ... but it will be as people mythologize and remember the 2008 Firefox Plus Summit -- float planes, candles and all.

Frank Hecker has a series of posts
up today on 'Mozilla and the Future of Education'. It's a bit of a
thought experiment to imagine what Mozilla might do if it dipped it's
toe further into the education pond. The line I like most is:

Looking back over dozens of online and over-beer conversations, it's clear the Mozilla Foundation can play an important role in the world. This role is not to oversee or second guess the people producing Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, XUL and other technologies that fulfill Mozilla's mission of keeping the internet open. Meddling with this work doesn't help anyone. However, the foundation can and should build on this excellent work. It can fill gaps (accessibility). It can connect dots (amongst Mozilla communities). And it can reach out to new groups of people with something to contribute (the next million Mozillians). These are basically things that make Mozilla stronger, but are beyond and between what's already going on.

Over the past few months, I've been musing a fair bit about Mozilla. The main reason for this is now widely known: I'm hoping to take on the role of Executive Director at the Mozilla Foundation. On Wednesday, Mitchell, Asa and I will be on Air Mozilla to meet the community and get advice on what a successful future for the Foundation would look like.

Danese Cooper has organized what promises to be an excellent conversation about open education at OSCON in Portland. Mark Shuttleworth will be part of the mix. Karien and I prepared some quick background notes for Mark re: what think is exciting in this space and the specific work we're doing. I figured it would be useful to share here:

One of the highlights of this week's PCF5 conference in London was Richard Heller's presentation on the emerging Peoples Uni.project.

During our PCF5 workshop on the Cape Town Declaration, Paul West and I got into a collegial debate about the definition of an 'open educational resource'. He held up a book he's working on and said: "This contains legal advice that I've had vetted, so I want to release it under a no-derivatives Creative Commons license. I think this is an open educational resource. Do you?"

Mitchell and others recently posted about the Mozilla community as a series of concentric circles. These posts make it clear that being a part of a community like Mozilla (or not) isn't a binary switch. Rather, people have varying degrees of involvement and connection. There are different kinds of community members. And, one person might be multiple places in the community at once.

Just before leaving for Italy, I spent a day in London talking with friends about the open education policy agenda. The friends in question were Darius Cuplinskas and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute, James Dalziel from Macquarie University in Australia and Polish activist Jaroslaw Lipszyc. The conversation focused on how to understand and act on opportunities for government policy that supports the principles outlined in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

The Next Million Mozillians post has sparked some interesting ideas: browser plug-ins that make the whole of the web equally about consumption and contribution; simpler community-powered translation for open content and collaboration; helping people like educators who can weave open knowledge into the core of their work. It has also generated some good questions. What do we mean by the open web? And which bits of it is Mozilla Foundation best situated to drive? I'll loop back with an in-depth synthesis of all the comments and posts (keep 'em coming) in a couple of weeks when I am back from Italy.

Yesterday, Melissa Hagemann, Eve Gray and I led a workshop called Opening Scholarship at Elpub 2008. Our aim was to dig into a very specific question: what lessons can those of us working on open education learn from the open access to research movement. As the room was filled with experienced open access folks (that's the theme of the conference), it seemed like a good place to ask this.

A few months back, I posted a draft How We Work article on the Shuttleworth Foundation's open licensing strategy. The basic idea is that we want everything we do and fund to be under an open license. As my article says, this hasn't always worked as we haven't had a clear policy on the matter. Good news: now we do.

Last month, we sat down to have another How We Work conversation at Shuttleworth Foundation. Under the microscope this time: our Fellowships Program. We're all pretty happy with this program. So, the aim was to reflect on why it seems to be working ... and to find ways to tweak and improve it.

Last week, David Eaves blogged about the potential for Mozilla
to energize -- and maybe even lead -- a mass movement for the open web.
My response: hear! hear! More thinking, experimenting, conversing,
inventing, definitionizing, evangelizing, politicking, standard-making
and party-throwing in the name of the open web is very much needed. And
Mozilla is certainly well situated to stir this pot.

Today I attended the Information for Change II workshop held at the Cape Town Book Fair. It is still a little unclear exactly how I came to be there, apart from driving I mean. Bill Carman and Steve Song arranged it so that I got to present a poster on our latest pet idea, the print aggregator.

Writing up Open Everything Toronto debrief notes, I realized that striking the right yin-yang between impressive and surprising examples of 'open' will be one of the most critical factors for future events.

With Open Everything Toronto a week behind us, blog reflections, notes and photos are starting to trickle online. One of the highlights so far: Amanda Yilmaz's write up of the Seneca Open Source Course session.

Today, Toronto kicks off Open Everything: a global series of six (or more?) events about the art, science and spirit of open. We've got 60 amazing people registered who come from computer programming, community development and everywhere in between. It's gonna rock.

Ok, the title is probably not worded very precisely but it's in the right ballpark. During the meeting today, one of the people from the University of Michigan mentioned that there are only 128 symptoms (is this the right word) a patient can present, it was a talk about health faculties sharing OERs. This had never occurred to me, but, in my defence, I had never ever even thought about it.

I just wanted to capture a concern and some thoughts around it. Today I heard it said in a meeting that available OERs are of low quality, irrespective of their cost. This was used to justify the statement that we should not expect OERs to be cheap, we should focus on their quality even if that means that they are expensive. This certainly doesn't sound like something I should be concerned about but it is. It can be used to justify spending vast sums of money to have a few experts write material which is released under an open licence.

During my recent trip to Cape Town, the Foundation held a 'messaging meeting'. This is basically a communications group therapy session. Everyone has two or three minutes to deliver a pitch on their work and projects. After watching a video playback of each pitch, the group offers constructive criticism.

Last week, I had a rare 45 mins with
Mark Shuttleworth. He asked: what do you think the Foundation has
achieved in the last year? I answered that it had 'stabilized and
grown strong'. Which is true. After a few rocky years, the Foundation
is now in a position to actually pursue big ideas like free textbooks
and learning analytical skills p2p-style in a serious way. Yet, I
knew my answer wasn't quite right. The Foundation hasn't just stabilized, its, well, this sounds silly, but ...

Today I got to have breakfast at the Mount Nelson. It was quite disappointing from a food perspective but we, Steve Vosloo and myself, were there for the Breakfast Club as Naledi Pandor, Minister of Education, was the guest speaker.

Siyavula is a project focused on the development of educational materials. These materials will ultimately be hosted on a website with the primary authors being teachers. The question needs to be asked (and answered) as to who will (or should) own the copyright to the material on the website? Some initial thoughts relating to this question are below although every time I discuss it I want to explain it completely differently so expect many follow-up postings!

Today, Diane Grayson gave a talk at UCT on the new Physical Science curriculum being delivered in South African schools. Diane discussed the curriculum, its structure, features, teacher's complaints and gave some of her views on the various topics and issues.

Today was CopyCamp2 in Toronto: a conversation about art, copyright and the Internet. Lots of fun examples of remix art. More Linux stickers and Internet savvy artists than last year. And a few boring culture bureaucrats playing broken records. Not a bad cocktail, all told.

I love watching snowballs roll downhill. The whole unconference meme is certainly one such snowball. In many ways, geeks have taken open space meetings further and wider in the last three years than mainstream facilitators have in the last 20. Which, as someone who has tented in both camps, has been amazing to watch.

Being Canadian, I've spent a great deal of time recently explaining what's at stake with net neutrality. Everyone gets the huge importance of keeping the Internet open, but many find it hard to believe that there really is a threat.

Salad makes a perfect open source project. While most people think it's a drag to produce a whole salad, it's not so hard to get them to cough up one or two ingredients. The ingredients people contribute automagically turn out to be complimentary, most of the time. And, as more people contribute ingredients, the salad gets better and better. Yum.

I spent the weekend mulling over Mike Edwards' essay Philanthrocapitalism: After the gold rush.
The basic argument is this: there is a movement afoot to harness the
power of business for social change. This includes newly-minted
foundations like Gates, corporate social responsibility programs and
social entrepreneurs. These philanthrocapitalists are undermining the
independence and social mission of civil society. As a result, we are
missing out on real social transformation, and maybe even risking our
democracy.

Normally when I tell someone about my personal project, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), or my day job, Siyavula, the average response includes the following elements:

Mark Horner launched his Siyavula blog this week! Yay! It'll be a great way for people to track this ambitious and important open education project. For those of you who don't know:

I recently (Oct 2007) changed jobs and am now working for the Shuttleworth Foundation managing an initiative called Siyavula. Siyavula is the Nguni word meaning we are opening.

The Open Everything  idea I've been talking about for a while has started to pick up steam. There is now a tiny web site up. And, there are events planned for London, Cape Town, Toronto, Singapore and a small, wonderful island off the coast of British Columbia.

As I blogged previously, I'm doing a series of short pieces that look under the hood at the day to day work of the Shuttleworth Foundation. As the opening blurb to my first article says:

Whatever it is that I do for a living today, it all started with community video. Five years as a portapak toting video activist in the early 90s gave me deep roots. It sparked DIY entrepreneurship and hacking. It taught me that media is conversation. It fascinated me with the power of fluid, open, participatory ways of working. In so many ways, community video made me me.

Over the past week, I've been reflecting on the ideas of two people: Jonathan Zittrain (a professor) and Matt Mason (a pirate, or at least a fan of pirates). This has got me thinking about the 'political compass question' again, which goes something like this ...

Social innovation (or any kind of innovation for that matter) can be a lonely gig. There you are, focused intensely on an issue or problem that you are passionate about, trying to invent / evolve / evangelize an approach that will really make a difference. Poverty. Hunger. Education.  Democracy. Knowledge. Whatever the issue, that's all that matters. One day, you'll have time to connect to other innovators to share what you know ... and learn about what they're working on. But not now. One day. 

John Moravec of Education Futures posted today on the Cape Town Declaration, worrying that open course materials will do little to change education. He asks:

A number of people have been asking me lately: what happened with the open philanthropy work that you posted about last September?

As I posted way back when, I have been reflecting a great deal on the question: why are so many people attracted to the word 'open'?

I was just reading on the Doors of Perception blog that Collaborative Innovation is this year's theme at the World Economic Forum. Maybe this is a good thing (Jimmy Wales got to talk), and maybe it's not (Don Tapscott got to talk). In either case, the really sad thing is the continued trend events about mass collaboration that are as uncollaborative as possible. Davos is just one long-lecture-fest, with most people zoned out in the audience in passive listening mode. It's not collaboration, it's television.

David Wiley came back with a Cape Town Declaration Spoof Both Funny and Depressing retort last night. Making the Linux / open content comparison, he writes:

While imitation is truly the form of flattery, mockery is also right up there. So, it was with a huge smile that I read the Swansea Declaration on Open Edutainment on the iCommons list. This spoof of the Cape Town Declaration press release includes humdingers like:

The conversation about open education picked up some steam yesterday with the official launch of the Cape Town Declaration yesterday. There was lots of good coverage including a nice piece on ZDNet UK and an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Jimmy and Rich. I just posted the following to Slashdot:

Today the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education is formally launched.

You can read the Declaration and sign it at capetowndeclaration.org.