Recent blog entries

I am still frankly gobstopped by Facebook’s announcement.  I vaguely caught the news of Facebook Zero but assumed it was just another mobile interface to Facebook.  It was only when I read Erik Hersman’s post about it that I got the whole story.  Not only have they launched a very lightweight mobile interface to Facebook but they have done something only a company the size of Facebook could… they’ve made it free.

Dick Ngambi invited me to speak with Masters students at University of Cape Town as part of his course on “Educational ICTs for Developing Contexts”. I am chuffed to be invited back - last year we had a very lively discussion on creating an African version of Michael Wesch’s youtube sensation. This year I will be speaking about “OER beyond content” and especially Peer 2 Peer University and its relevance and opportunities for developing countries.

Today I want to push back a little (just a little) against the conventional wisdom that mobiles are the only communications infrastructure future for Africa. There is an implicit understanding in ICT4D work in Africa that mobiles are the future and fixed lines are an archaic hangover from an inefficient, monopolistic, state-run, colonial past. Perhaps I exaggerate for the sake of effect but it is hard to argue with when development agencies are racing to jump on the “mobile for development” train.

Siyavula Presentation and Uploading session on the 29^th of May

We are excited to announce that we are presenting another Siyavula session for the AMESA educators in KZN. At the previous Siyavula AMESA workshop we managed to upload a number of worksheets, lesson plans, notes and exams into the AMESA KZN workgroup on the Connexions site. At this workshop we would like to deliver an exciting presentation, provide an opportunity for connecting with AMESA colleagues and friends and upload more of the AMESA member’s content onto the Connexions platform.

Ethan Zuckerman recently wondered if it was “love or money” that drives amazing volunteer communities like the one over at global voices. Now, we are small fry compared to GV at the moment, but it’s a question that is becoming relevant to P2PU too as we continue to grow and expand globally. As I am sure you know it’s all one love at P2PU, but some of us also need to eat (and one or two people - including me - even sleep occasionally).

As part of my new do-it-right-away-if-it-takes-only-a-minute-or-five strategy, here is a short quote from Glyn Moody’s article on how to become Linus Torvalds. It’s a concise description of the kind of leadership I would love to see engrained in the way P2PU grows up. Especially the highlighted (my highlight, not Glyn’s) sentence is worth repeating repeating repeating repeating … a few hundred times as part of the morning chant. Ronald Heifetz, whose book on Leadership I am (still) reading speaks of the same spirit of leadership that is grounded in authority conferred by the community.

We are pleased to announce that the Kontax series is now also available on the MYMsta mobisite. MYMsta, short for Make Your Move, is the world’s first HIV/AIDS related mobile social network. It’s a project of LoveLife, based in South Africa.

I was happy to see Brandon Muramatsu at the OCWC Vietnam meeting and get some time to hang out, check out the latest gadges (geek!) and go to his presentation. He asked the audience - “what would you like to be able to do with MIT OCW?” Turns out he and Vijay Kumar (who is on the P2PU advisory group) are plotting something called Greenfield that would bolt a few useful services onto a copy of the MIT OCW archive. Very exciting for P2PU and I tracked him down after his presentation for a short chat about the project.

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.

This is the first of a monthly series of short video blog (vlog) updates on some of the things I’m working on.  This one is about where we are with the Mesh Potato.

Today is designated “Intellectual Property Day” although its not clear who did the designating or what they hoped to achieve by the exercise.

My analysis of the takedown of fair use parodies using clips from Hitler movie Downfall is now live on memeburn.

Vlogging from Mark Horner on Vimeo.

I recorded a short video with a few excerpts from “Disrupting Class” and “Leadership without easy answers” and my thoughts how these excellent books relate to our work at the Peer 2 Peer University.

The Intellectual Property Laws Amendment Bill, known informally as the TK Bill is was introduced into Parliament in February and will be before Parliament in May.

At the World Bank’s Innovation Fair “Moving Beyond Conflict” event in Cape Town, Parvathi Menon, the CEO of Innovation Alchemy gave a short but very insightful presentation on innovation. A key question she asked was: What are the series of innovative ideas that together make an innovative proposition? People often stop at the first idea and think that’s the innovation. Don’t do that! The iPod was the platform not the key innovation. The killer “app” was being able to buy a song at a time for 99c and easily drop it onto a player.

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.

Philip Auerswald recently took advantage of arch-villain Syndrome (from the Pixar movie The Incredibles) to paint a tongue-in-cheek picture of his relationship with Bill Easterly. Entertained and emboldened by this, I was reminded of my own insight from watching (more than once I’m afraid) The Incredibles with my sons. Mine was not a Buddy Pine moment but it did share a moment of sympathy with Syndrome. In the clip below Syndrome explains how, having invented technology that gives him the equivalent of super power, he plans to sell that technology so that “when everyone’s super, no one will be“.

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.

The South American research network, DIRSI, have just published a report entitled “Tariffs and affordability gap of mobile telephony services in Latin America and the Caribbean” which profiles mobile affordability in Latin America and the Caribbean.   In this post I contrast their approach with my own fledgling work on a Fair Mobile index for Africa.

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.

Geolocation is all the buzz, at least in early adopter geek circles. Most smart phones now have global positioning system capability, so that the phone can determine your geographic position. Geolocation apps such as Foursquare use gps capability to enable users to signal a user’s location.CIO explains in the detail in Geolocation 101.

Coverage of Kontax continues as follows:

At this point, I find the work on open accreditation to be the most innovative part of the open education space. It’s not just exiting because it cuts at the heart of how the education system supposedly validates learning, but also because it prompts us to ask big questions about the reasons for studying and learning, the performance of institutional structures that are in charge of measuring quality, and the possibilities of competition from both the private and non-profit sectors. In the context of P2PU, I am specifically hoping that there are opportunities to generate income from open accreditation services in ways that would help us achieve long term sustainability, but not jeopardize our full commitment to be free and open.

Last week Kontax 2: The Big Win was published on a mobisite and on MXit, unfortunately with spelling and grammatical errors in the text. This was embarrassing for the author, proofreader and myself, especially as m4Lit is about mobiles for literacy! We’ve since fixed the issues and will implement more rigorous proofreading next time.

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.

The pilot phase of the m4Lit project (August to December 2009) has concluded, with the release of the reports.

We live in a world where we readily accept that we and other people can act and communicate across contents. We rely on others seeing, hearing and reading our communications when all we have in front of us is a screen. We’ve developed  commons sense about when to believe what machines tell us and when not to. We disregard the email from “Mary Smith” telling us that we won the” UK Lottery” but accord some trust to the email purporting to come from someone we’ve met once.

Anyone living in Africa and  interested in the future of affordable access will have spent some time trying to make sense of the complex evolving web of technology, regulatory policy, cultural issues, literacy, affordability etc that make up the ecology of communication infrastructure.  Fortunately the market has sorted out a big chunk of that out for us.  The future is mobile.  Even your mother knows that the future is mobile.  And mobile phones are evolving at a pace that no one dreamt of.

It would be unwise for South Africa to undertake international legal obligations to prohibit circumvention technologies.

Below are some of the comments left by readers of Kontax 2: The Big Win on MXit on the first day that the story launched. Most comments were complimentary, but there were also a few criticisms of the story, something that we didn’t get in Kontax 1. Perhaps because we’re not offering prize money for comments in this round?

After 3 months of hacking Jetpacks, debugging code, refining user experiences, and having a good ol’ time with teams from all over the world, the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge is sadly coming to an end. In the same spirit of sharing and collaboration that has made this project so much fun, we couldn’t decide on just one overall winner, and decided three projects should get a special prize.

My article on why South Africa shouldn’t ratify the WIPO Performers and Phongrams Treaty has been published by TechCentral.

Great quote by Arthur Attwell of Electric Book Works in Applying publishing tech in Southern Africa:

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.

At O’Reilly Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York was the session Digital Storytelling: The Evolution of Publishing Fiction on a Mobile Device by Geoffrey Young (StopWatch Media).

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.

At O’Reilly Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference: Consumers in the Cloud: Google and Digital Books presented by , Product Manager at Google Books.

Day one at O’Reilly’s Publishing Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York kicked off with a few great keynotes. Some snippets and thoughts:

Readers of this blog will recall how I asked for comments and then recounted progress on the pilot for the course on p2pu which ran last year.

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.

I’ve blogged about p2pu before, the online volunteer driven learning community that serves as a social wrapper for open educational resources.

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.

The winners of the Kontax Sequel Ideas Competition have been announced. Of the 6 winners (3 for the English category  and 3 for isiXhosa):

The winners of the Kontax Sequel Ideas Competition have been announced. We asked readers for ideas for what should happen in future Kontax stories. These are the three best entries for English as well as isiXhosa.

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.

For the past two months participants in Mozilla’s Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge have worked on Jetpack prototypes to turn the open web into a rich social learning environment and explore new possibilities for learning online. Today 10 teams were selected to participate in a hands-on Design Camp. The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge is sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Erik Hersman recently tweeted “I’d like to hear more on whether we should build SMS or internet services in Africa?”  This had the serendipitous effect of breaking a bit of a blogger’s block for me.

A recent decision by the United Kingdom Information Tribunal is the trigger point for renewed claims that universities are commercial entities.

Derek is great at framing messages that sum up the problem (and often hint at the solution). His “imagine if …” statement became the slogan for the new Freedom To Innovate South Africa poster. FTISA has been a crucial organization in support of access to knowledge in South Africa. They played an important role advising the South African Bureau of Standards against giving in to corporate power in the OOXML ISO vote and they have been doing a tremendous job raising awareness of the registration of software patents (something the law does not support) in South Africa.

Mark Surman, my friend and colleague, who heads up Mozilla.org is beating the drum for openess with a project called Drumbeat. Most people know Mozilla as the host for the community that co-produced the open browser Firefox. Firefox currently accounts for approximately 25% of the web browsers in use. More importantly Firefox is free software, free for anyone to copy, modify, improve and share. While there are other free browers such as Opera and Google’s Chrome for many years it was Firefox which provided the standards complaint alternative to various non standards compliant versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. With Firefox use on the rise Drumbeat is intended to ensure support an open Internet in other areas, the projects long term vision is “make sure the internet is still open, participatory, decentralized and public 100 years from now”. Focus in the first year of Drumbeat is on concrete projects to bootstrap the creation of a community: visualising the Web and assembling an Open Webskills course at P2PU. As fascinating as these are what is more intriguing is the way in which Mark, and Mozilla are using the social processes which helped create great free and open source projects like Firefox as a way of generating not just more open projects but ideas about openness.

Yesterday, the 1st of January 2010, was the day on which new works entered the public domain, at least in South Africa.

Tweeting from a conference, workshop or other process, e.g. the WIPO Copyright Committee can be a useful way of informing a wider network what is happening in the event. But it can be more, it can involve a conversation between those who are physically present and those who are not. I have some ideas how to make these conversations more engaging for those not physically present.

3 … 2 … 1 … and the Jetpacks are on their way. The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge enters phase II. We were excited to receive 36 amazing submissions from teams around the world and accepted 26 into the next stage. Congratulations to our participants! Ideas that we liked ranged from annotating the Web with other students, building assessment into the browsing experience, or linking the browser to a backend learning management system.

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.

In a few months I’ll be completing a three year fellowship at the Shuttleworth Foundation. What has it all been about?

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.

So much has happened, that it made sense to jot down a few notes on my thinking on alternative accreditation (I should really say “our” as most of the thinking has been done in collaboration with others, including Christine Geith and Stian Haklev, but I can’t speak on their behalf). I am interested in this topic as a researcher, but also as an entrepreneur who wants to enable self-learners to attain real (economic) benefit from informal learning in places like Peer 2 Peer University. For me this is the ultimate hacking education challenge.

So much has happened, that it made sense to jot down a few notes on my thinking on alternative accreditation (I should really say “our” as most of the thinking has been done in collaboration with others, including Christine Geith and Stian Haklev, but I can’t speak on their behalf). I am interested in this topic as a researcher, but also as an entrepreneur who wants to enable self-learners to attain real (economic) benefit from informal learning in places like Peer 2 Peer University. For me this is the ultimate hacking education challenge.

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.

This is part II in an open ended series on useful lessons that P2PU can learn from open source software communities. I am looking specifically at issues around governance, and culture.

Governance

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.

When the World Intellectual Property Organisation Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights will from 14 to 18 December 2009 a possible treaty on exceptions and limitations to copyright for visually impaired persons will be on the agenda.

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.

An interesting offshoot of my investigation in to Fair Mobile statistics was the discovery that some African operators charge an interconnect fee for SMS messages. Now interconnect fees are a topic of hot debate at the moment here in South Africa.  Interconnection Fees are the charges that operators levy to terminate calls from other operators on their network.  Regulators typically intervene on interconnect fees when they appear to be out of step with the actual costs of interconnection.  Of course the “actual” cost of interconnection is a subject of much debate because it represents both a cost and a source of revenue for operators, the details of which are rarely revealed to anyone by the operators.  Thus they are the subject of much speculation.

On Monday Berlin celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years ago.
Since Tuesday I’ve been participating (there is no way one just attends something like this) in a p2pu workshop in Berlin.

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.

Here is a first stab at putting together an index that relates the cost of mobile services to income at the bottom of the pyramid in Africa. I found some ILO data on minimum wage that covers 24 African countries and a I found a couple more by googling. Here are the assumptions that I’ve made so far.

Since 26 October, Kontax has also been available on MXit. The MXit offering is quite different to the mobisite: no registration, comments or Kontax social network; and all 21 chapters are published at once (as opposed to serially over 21 days). Readers can still enter the Kontax Sequel competition from there.

The Bookmarks Awards celebrates digital media in all its guises, and is coordinated by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) as a means to promote digital media in South Africa. It is the Loerie Awards for digital.

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.

Kontax was featured on the BBC this week! (Well done to the m4Lit team.) Steve Vosloo was interviewed by Gareth Mitchell on the World Service radio programme Digital Planet (listen live or download the mp3 of the interview).

Andile, Marion and Nkululeko waiting for the teens to run our basic user testing – or technology observation – of the Kontax mobisite with them. Andile’s garage in Guguletu was the perfect impromptu usability lab!

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.

A participants feedback on the Copyright for Educators Course:

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 have been working with the Mozilla Education crew to think up the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. It’s launching today with support from the MacArthur Foundation! The idea is to spur innovation in browser extensions for social learning.

Katrin Verclas and I and a few others have been kicking around the notion of Fair Mobile for some time now.  The essence of Fair Mobile is the idea of developing some metrics for equitable, competitive mobile markets that deliver optimal value for money to mobile users, particularly in developing countries.  It has taken me far too long to get going with this but I am finally finding some steam.  So why bother with this?

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.

The mobiReady testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices and standards. We ran kontax.mobi through the test and came out looking good! We got 18 passes, 5 warnings, 3 fails and 2 comments — so there is some tweaking that could be done. But the overall score was 5 out of 5. See the full report.

Its commonplace for South Africans who visit San Francisco to be told that it resembles Cape Town. Since I lived in San Francisco first and now live in Cape Town I can confirm that Cape Town resembles San Francisco. At least it resembles San Francisco in some respects; both have locations of incredible natural beauty, both are favoured tourist destinations with storied histories, and both are magnets for a wide variety of artists, techies and unusual and colourful characters. There are certainly just as many differences, Cape Town has embarrassingly poor bandwidth, breathtakingly poor road planning, a paucity of public transport and a surfeit of crime.

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.

Ovid speaks of the Roman games as a place were people go to see, and be seen. There seems to be a very human tendency to want to know about others, and also to present a public presence.

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.

There was a time when Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) were considered a mark of the cognoscenti but now their popularity is waning as the perception of their utility plummets.

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.

The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act 2008 has caused some confusion amongst educators. Some people have suggested that this Act applies to all intellectual property which could be regarded as publicly financed. Some go even further and claim that any creation by someone employed at a government supported school or university is covered by the Act.

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.

Some time ago I asked for suggestions for an on-line course on the practicalities of the Knowledge Commons. Due in part to the feedback that has become a course on Copyright for Educators.

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.

The final Report of the South African Open Copyright Review is online.

I’ll be posting an update on P2PU next week (stay tuned!), but as part of preparing the pilot phase we have been thinking a lot about what we can learn from open source software projects in order to design effective learning communities. The similarities are striking and useful. I’ll write about interaction and communication today, but posts about reputation and accreditation and incentives are forthcoming.

The Australian Productivity Commission recommends abolishing the prohibition on parallel import .

I see in the press yesterday that Safaricom have won an innovation award for their MPesa service from a UN agency.

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).

A Harvard Professor of Law and Economics, Prof Stephen Shavell argues that proponents of open access leave copyright law essentially unchanged.
Instead he argues that it would be more efficient to simply abolish copyright in academic work altogether since academics do not benefit from copyright. Instead academics will continue to benefit as they already do, from gains in status as a result of their work.

There is further critical discussion of the scheme at Wits Knowledge and Information Management.

What is rent seeking? Using the non market processes such as the political process to obtain a monopoly. Rent seeking is a term of art in economics. The Economist explains the term

Ok, I did twist the title of Jeff Young’s latest piece for reasons of pure sensationalism (and recursive puns). I also wouldn’t mind a more diverse readership and ranking higher in a google search for “naked” should help with that.  Anyways, Jeff’s article for College 2.0 suggests that less technology in the class-room might lead to better teaching (teaching naked = without technology). At least that’s the experience of Jose Bowen, a Professor at the Meadows School of the Arts.

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.

Recent news reports point to an instance in which piracy has delayed the access of  Africans to the global knowledge economy. ITNews Africa reports:

“Levels of piracy are cripplingly high across the continent…” (Policy Network.net)

Implementing the World Intellectual Property Agendais now available at IDRC’s Open Books.

This third  “What Google Should Do In Africa” post could be subtitled “Grow some balls”.  Why, oh why, is it that Google, so unafraid to tackle telco and broadcast market behemoths in the United States, behaves like a timid NGO in Africa?

Creative Commons South Africa (CC Za) is now hosted at Intellectual Property Law Research, at the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town Law School. Tobias Schonwetter, a post doctoral fellow at Intellectual Property Law Research, has taken over as legal lead from yours truly. Tobias will join public lead Dave Duarte, in steering the project.

Expect exciting developments soon, a new website (already in beta) and a new version (CC Za 3.0) of the licences. Its a great experience for me to watch something which I have helped create grow as new people take it on. Since this is my blog I am going to indulge in a little retrospective on the history of CC Za up to this point.

This the second installment in a series of posts in which I have the hubris to reflect upon What Google Should Do In Africa (#WGSDIA). There is some context for this post in the preface to the series.

This the first installment of a series of posts in which I have the hubris to reflect upon What Google Should Do In Africa (#WGSDIA).  There is some context for this post in the preface to the series.

This is an introduction to a series of posts on what I think Google ought to be doing in Africa,  that is to say what I think they ought to be doing outside of their core business of selling advertising.  Why pick on Google?  For a few reasons:

Steve Egan has set himself the task of blogging about some of the core issues in open education. This week he writes about assessment. Assessment is a huge issue in open education for (at least) three reasons:

1. The open model questions the role of the traditional “expert”, but it is that “expert” who is typically responsible for assessment in education. For informal learning communities to work peers must be able to assess each others’ work.
2. Secondly, while assessment and accreditation are two distinct issues, you need good assessment to enable reliable accreditation.
3. And finally, online social networking communities are pioneering new ways of assessing information, even though they don’t call it that, and it’s exciting to think about their application to education. Things like aggregating group opinions (digg.com, slashdot.org), peer review and discussion (amazon.com reviews), reputation networks that automatically filter content (topsy.com) are perfectly suitable for assessment purposes in learning. 

Steve asks for literature suggestions. Some of the things I have been reading recently, or return to regularly include:

• Philip Greenspun’s recent rant about the state of higher education in the US is enjoyable and raises some important questions. For one, he suggests cutting the link between teaching and assessment, and argues they should be done by separate people/institutions. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth
  
• Sir John Daniels (and co-authors) explore possibilities to increase access without jeopardising quality and argues that this separation would increase innovation and drives down cost. He writes in Change Magazine:
  

  “If the trend to delink testing from teaching continues, it will lead to more flexible and less expensive models of higher education, with the result that the aspiration of giving people access to high-quality higher education worldwide may not be an illusion.”

  
  

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.

When I first started a map of planned African undersea cable initiatives in early 2008, I never dreamt that I might start running out of space to put cables on the map.  Yet, there it is.   Over 11 terabits/s of capacity coming to the continent if they all manifest themselves.

Last week, Friday and Saturday (29-30 May) I had a chance to participate in a conference on Philosophy and Intellectual Property.

At mLearning Africa I blogged about the results of the fifth annual Sunday Times Generation Next Study. The study, conducted by HDI Youth Marketeers in conjunction with Monash University (South Africa), polled 5,272 South African youth about their brand preferences and consumer behaviour.

I find myself wondering if I am the only one dismayed by the “mudwrestling” going on among Dambisa Moyo, Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly… and others. In case you haven’t heard, Dambisa Moyo has written a provocative book on the merits of development assistance. Her book, Dead Aid, challenges some of the accepted wisdom about how to help poor countries out of poverty. I love provocative books. I love people who can stand the world on its head and say maybe the world isn’t flat after all.  We all need shaking up on a fairly regular basis, especially in the times we live in now.

We’ve been busy lately here at WordPress.com — we’ve had an announcement of a new or updated feature for you every day this week. Today, you’re getting a two-fer!

Arthur Goldstuck has written a thoughtful piece on the newly appointed South African Minister of Communications, Siphiwe Nyanda, and his new deputy Dina Pule.  He does a good job of highlighting their key strengths and weaknesses.

bioethics.net reports that Merck publishes a phony journal that allows Big Pharma to make claims about their products which appear to be peer reviewed science, but aren’t.

Scott Nelson has written an insightful article ‘Attribution Lacking‘ on plagiarism, more especially his experience of plagiarism.

Yesterday I listed 12 topics that could/should be covered in an open course on copyright, licences and OER’s for education. Please add the issues you’d like to see addressed by commenting on that post.

I am currently putting together a course (all the resources will be open) intended to enable open educators, formal, informal, university and school, to navigate the complexities of copyright law and licensing on educational resources.

In a couple of recent posts, I have mentioned the percentage of disposable income spent by Africans on mobile communication.  While I have  posted links to the research, I think it is worth singling out the work of Research ICT Africa.

At the end of the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen says,

The African Commons Project has launched a campaign to stop and the regulations proposed control research under the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act.

A number of organisations have received communication from the Department of Science and Technology advising that the period for comment on the draft regulations to be made in terms of section 17 of the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act has been briefly extended to 29 May 2009. A government notice is expected to be published shortly.

Legal Brief has a brief on the unconstitutionality of the proposed regulations to be made ito of the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act, linking back to my post made on Monday.

Yesterday I explained how the proposed regulations for the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research are unconstitutional. This post examines the confusion between two distinct concepts, ‘the public domain’ and ‘open source’ aka ‘the commons’.

Draft Regulations intended to be approved by the Minister of Science and Technology have been published for comment. The proposed regulations are available at Parliamentary Monitoring Group site.
(PMG does a great job of making important government documents available to the public via the Internet).

A coalition alliance of organisations have launched a call for a comprehensive national broadband strategy which will ensure that ‘all South Africans have affordable broadband access to the Internet’.

In a previous post I linked to the 2nd round of “noncommercial” study questionnaire from Creative Commons.

Creative Commons has announced today that it is ‘launching the second and final round of a survey intended to collect information on how people understand the term “noncommercial use”.’

Claims that the NPA statement on the decision to withdraw the prosecution against Mr Jacob Zuma shows why it is important for democracy for the judgements of courts to be freely available to all on the Internet.

La Quadrature du Net reports that the French National Assembly has rejected a draconian draft law sought by corporations whose business models are threatened by the Internet. La Quadrature explains:

Courtesy of the ITU’s Measuring the Information Society Report, here is a list of SMS charges in thirty-eight African countries.  The costs are listed in U.S. dollars and in Purchasing Power Parity dollars.  Interesting to note in the below that there is an order of magnitude difference between the cheapest and most expensive SMS in the listed countries.  Also interesting to note that the cheapest SMS is still more than twice as expensive as the cost of an SMS in the Philippines.

It’s looks as though the West African Cable System (WACS) has passed from the realm of the press release into something more concrete.  A consortium of telcos signed a construction and maintenance agreement yesterday (8 April 2009) in Johannesburg.

There’s an interesting AFP article on the city of Johannesburg’s 1 billion Rand (~105 million USD) contract with Ericsson to deliver municipal broadband infrastructure.  In it they quote an anonymous “telecoms expert” who says:

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.

Problem solved. You’ll be happy to know that the cost of an SMS has come down to 1 US cent….. if you live in the Philippines.  But the news is even better.  According to this article, the price of SMSes in the Philippines is likely to drop to a tenth of a cent!

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!

Protest in New Zealand including the internet blackout forces scrapping of draconian law, for the meantime. A few weeks ago I blogged about the internet blackout, a protest at a proposed ammendment to New Zealand law: “Thousands of websites in New Zealand have blacked themselves out today to protest the imposition of a law which requires Internet Services Providers to disconnect subscribers who are accused of copyright infringement, regardless of proof.”

Imagine an alternate reality.  You’re an innovative start-up like Twitter or perhaps one of the many “adjacent possible” enterprises that Twitter has spawned.  You’ve designed your new service and are ready to take over the world.   All you need to do now is negotiate access with each and every ISP in all of the geographic regions where you would like your application to be available.  What?  Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it but in fact this is what Nathan Eagle has had to do to launch his txteagle service in Eastern Africa.

If you haven’t already go and watch Nathan’s Etech talk.  It is both inspiring in terms of the potential that txteagle represents for leveraging the cognitive resources (not surplus) of developing countries and in terms of being packed with interesting information about mobile developments in Eastern Africa.

I am getting quite excited about the upcoming South African Broadband Forum next week.  Inspired by the coalition that emerged in the United States to get broadband infrastructure investment on the political agenda in the run-up to the U.S. election, the Association for Progressive Communications, the Shuttleworth Foundation, Sangonet, and the South Africa Connect project are co-convening a forum on the 24th of March in Johannesburg to launch a campaign to make broadband a national priority for South Africa.

Its unfortunate that the phrase sounds like an oxymoron; “intellectual property for development”. Although intellectual property statutes have their ancestry in the privileges and letters patent granted to royal favourites in the middle ages, legislatures have tried to re-purpose the monopolies to create incentives for innovation.
That the intellectual property system has failed the developing world is attested by every person who dies for want of patented drugs, every child who cannot afford books for her education, every dollar that is paid from the poorest countries in the world to information intermediaries in the richest.

A story with a happy ending, reading the update at the end.

The winds of change are blowing for mobile operators.  The comfortable oligopolies enjoyed by most mobile operators around the are being challenged by the very thing that enabled them in the first place, technology.  The growth of availability and drop in price of mobile broadband mean that there is less and less reason to have anything but a “bits-in” and “bits-out” charge for mobile services.  That includes voice, messaging, and the host of new services being developed for mobiles from locative social networking to streaming TV.  To get a flavour of just how much money mobile operators are making out of voice and messaging services,  see the BillShrink website which has an interesting blog post comparing mobile charges to equivalent data charges from an Internet Service Provider.

During September 2008 Aslam Rafjee, as chair of the South African government OSS and Open Standards Working Group , started a campaign against digital apartheid, discrimination by government websites based on the type of browsers which people use. Now the campaign has caught on in Brazil.

Science fiction stories often ask their readers to willingly suspend disbelief and imagine a parallel universe, one just like the one which readers inhabit, except for one or two minor details. Imagine, the story goes that a human develops an ability to know what others are thinking.

This week’s Economist has an excellent special report on waste, entitled Talking Rubbish.  It contains the usual Economist savaging of government decision-making and bureaucracy but more importantly some very interesting news on waste management around the world.  Worth the read (or the listen if you are, like me, a guilty addict of the measured tones of the Economist audio edition).

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, .

In the wake of the Facebook terms of use episode many people are aware, or reawakened to the importance of on-line smarts when it comes to legal issues of social networking sites.

Old and a new media have been enjoying the gefuffle over the last few weeks as Facebook imposed new terms of use and then reverted to its previous conditions while it tries to respond to outcry by users. Paul Jacobson followed developments closely at WebtehLaw

Thousands of websites in New Zealand have blacked themselves out today to protest the imposition of a law which requires Internet Services Providers to disconnect subscribers who are accused of copyright infringement, regardless of proof. The protest is being organised by Creative Freedom Foundation NZ to protest an new law in New Zealand:

Steve Song had a great week blogging last week, with a great suggestion how to make communications more affordable for the the poorest across Africa. But sadly that story will have to wait, because Steve also posted on how:

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.

So, I’ve moved on from righteous indignation yesterday to outright disbelief today.  News this week that the South African communications regulator (ICASA) have sent their enforcers  in to confiscate Dabba’s WiFi equipment in Orange Farm makes me angry enough to spit.

I am filled today, as is often enough the case these days, with a sense of righteous indignation.  In a meeting earlier today, Dominic Cull (firebrand lawyer for the forces of telecommunications good in South Africa) pointed out the obvious.  He said that one of the single most important things mobile operators could do to make a difference for the poor  would be to drop the price of SMS charges.  The funny thing about the obvious is that we often don’t see what is staring us in the face.

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.

It has been a busy year in the world of African undersea cables as the timeline below of cable maps over the last year will attest. A lot has happened or more accurately plans and announcements for a lot have happened.

This post is a little off-piste for me but what is blogging for, if not to occasionally skate on or over the edges of one’s knowledge.  This month is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the web is awash in articles about Darwin and the theory of evolution.  Having read many of these articles, I have now come to agree with the New Scientist’s introduction to 24 Myths About Evolution when they say If you think you understand it, you don’t know nearly enough about it.

What do we mean by open?

I use the term all the time; open licence, open access, open education, and open standard. In each of these contexts its considered to be a good thing. But is open always good?

In Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, he describes a fascinating software experiment modeling the prisoner’s dilemma but not between two decision-makers (as in the classical scenario) but rather in a multi-actor evolutionary landscape in which anyone can make a transaction with anyone. The software was used to seed open and closed transaction strategies into an evolutionary landscape. The interesting result is that “open” strategies succeed very well in a very closed ecology and “closed” strategies succeed very well in a very in a very open environment. In this perspective, the whole current movement in favour of “open” might be seen simply as a rebalancing of a very closed economic ecosystem.

In a previous post Eyes on the Prize I said that I would elaborate on some of the reasons why innovation prizes are better than patents for African universities.

I admit to being a little gobstopped by Nicholas Negroponte’s announcment in the Guardian that the next generation OLPC will be Open Hardware is a pretty big deal.  I picked up the announcement this morning from Make Magazine editor, Phil Torrone’s twitter feed in which he says “This is pretty much the biggest news of 2009″.  For the maker, tinkerer, hardware hacker world, this might just be true.

It is remarkable how polarised the discussion of the OLPC has become.  You either love it or hate it.  I have already said my own say about the value of the OLPC but there is one point that I don’t think has been emphasised enough.

Prizes not patents are best way for African universities to innovate, get money and demonstrate excellence.

An invitation from Creative Commons to take part in an online focus group on NonCommercial.
Please consider participating especially if you are an African creator.

There are already two intellectual property associations in Africa, the Anglophone ARIPO, and Francophone OAPI, but there is talk of allocating resources to a third organisation, to be titled the Pan-African Intellectual Property Organisation.

Have you ever purchased a book in a second hand book store and found when you got home that the margins of the pages were crammed with annotations? A bit like the page from James Joyce’s Ulysses at the right. Some may be irritated by the spoiling of a pristine printed page but I  confess to a minor voyeuristic thrill at the prospect of looking at the book through someone else’s eyes. Looking at the text through someone else’s eyes actually makes your relationship to the book more complex.  There are two stories now, the one you created by reading the story and the one that the mysterious annotater created.

ICASA has published a draft code of conduct for broadcasters. The primary focus of the code is on limiting sexual and violent content which children might be exposed to through broadcasts (radio and television). The code tends to use the similar language and phrases to the Film and Publications Act.

Harvard professor of psychology Dan Gilbert gave an inspired talk at Pop!Tech this year in which he asks the question “Why haven’t we rallied our collective power to solve global warning?” In it, he argues that global warming is not the kind of threat that humans are programmed to respond to. Like the boiling frog parable, we simply aren’t designed to recognise global warming as life threatening in the way that we do with “fight or flight” threats. This made sense and was a bit of a revelation to me.

Cory Doctorow is one of my heroes.  A great writer, an outspoken champion of the commons, and someone who is not afraid to be himself in public.  I have relied on his ideas countless times in my own work.  It is therefore a bit of a surprise to see him drop a clanger in the Guardian a couple of days ago.  In his article, Laptops, not mobile phones, are the means to liberate the developing world, he emphasises the difference between mobiles and laptops when we ought to be focusing on their convergence.  He laments the recent downsizing of the OLPC project and defends its aims.  Further he predicts its ultimate success or at least the ultimate success of “laptops for Africa” when he says “I believe that laptop computers will eventually find their way into the hands of practically every child in the developing world.”

South Africa, which recently made a great leap forward in the opening up of competition in the telecommunications is in danger of making an even bigger leap backwards thanks to the license fees being proposed by ICASA. ICASA has proposed that operators possessing an I-ECNS license pay 3% of gross income as a fee. The I-ECNS license is what is required to be a national infrastructure operator e.g. Telkom, MTN, Vodacom, et al and hopefully soon some new entrants. ICASA has further proposed that holders of an I-ECS also pay 3% of gross revenue. I-ECS licenses apply to anyone delivering electronic services e.g ISPs nationally in South Africa. Thus, companies providing both infrastructure and services nationally will be obliged to pay 6% of their gross revenue as a license fee.

The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed into law yesterday.

Tagged by the fearless and gregarious Mark Surman, I semi-reluctantly allow myself to become  a vector for the 7 things meme/social virus.  I suspect Patient Zero to be a Mozillian.  So here are…. 7 things about me:

My best read of 2008 was Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, sci-fi writer, co-editor of Boing Boing and general good guy.

The judgement handed down by the Supreme Court of Appeal today in the appeal of National Director of Public Prosecutions v Zuma is up on the Southern African Legal Information Institute site.

Despite massively expensive bandwidth costs, and uncompetitive Internet penetration, new media are changing the way that news is communicated in South Africa.

Imagine an alternative history. Imagine that in 1995, when Microsoft launched their walled-garden MSN service, which they fully expected would, for all intents and purposes, put the Internet out of business, imagine that they succeeded.

I blogged about two unfortunate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the appropriation of their efforts to help people in the developing world. How would a similar scenario play out in South Africa.

The New York Times has a story entitled “Who owns your great idea”. The article contains a glaring error and an bizarre omission.

I’ve discovered an article warning about the patent bubble back in 2005. The article quotes an even earlier question raised by Alan Greenspan, at the time chairman of the Federal Reserve raised the question in a speech at Stanford University in February 2004: “Are [patent] protections so vague that they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and the cost of capital?”

Back in September 2008 Brian Kahin wrote on The Patent Bubble in the Huffington Post.

Richard Heeks has written an interesting post entitled Mobiles for Impoverishment in which he says that recent m4d research “suggests mobiles are doing more economic harm than good, and sometimes making poor people poorer”.  He points to quantitative and qualitative research that suggest that economic benefits are not being realised by the users of mobile phones in poor countries.   The full post is well worth reading.  In the end, he draws two conclusions:  1) that if significant value is being spent by the poor on phones, then they must be deriving significant value; and 2) that financial gain is not the only benefit that the poor derive from mobile phones.

I think there is a compelling reason why everyone ought to blog/tweet/social network or leave some sort of digital trail. As Seth Godin puts it,

Reprising a role in a previous life at Bellanet.org, I gave a presentation last wee in Maputo to the Knowledge Sharing (KS) community within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).  Actually it started out that way but because the CGIAR’s Annual General Meeting is such a confluence of actors and agendas, the KM workshop was combined with another workshop organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) and the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) focused on agricultural education and farmer to farmer learning through collaboration.

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.

Ethan Zuckerman has been writing about  Innovating from Constraint in which he offers seven rules that “appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds”.   This post was riffed on beautifully by Design in Africa prompting Ethan to produce an extended dance mix version of his post.  All of the above are well worth the read.

The last two posts on the recent Altech rulings referred to “network” licences. I used the phrase to avoid the cumbersome Electronic Communications Network Service licence of the Electronic Communications Act, the legislation which governs telecommunications (and broadcasting), which has another category of licence, an Electronic Communication Service licence.

The judgement deals with leave to appeal.

After two days of hearings the Pretoria High Court has rejected the application by the Minister of Communications to delay the effect of its previous ruling; that holders of VANS licences are entitled to network licences. The news has been greated with great excitement at MyBroadband.

How should telemarketing be regulated? Should telemarketing be banned?
Should telemarketers be allowed to cold call strangers or should people have had to opt in to receive calls.

The Fundação Getulio Vargas and the Yale Internet and Society Project have just released a remarkable first, the publication of Access to Knowledge in Brazil an open licensed book on access to knowledge in Brazil. The book examines open business, exceptions and limitations to copyright in Brazil, how to promote innovation in biotechnology in Brazil, and access to medicines.

As I am getting my head around spectrum issues, I have found Michael Marcus’s blog, Spectrum Talk, tremendously useful. On the weekend he posted a link to a consultation that Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) have launched consultation on the possibility of of making license-exempt the bandwidth between 275GHz and 3000GH.

It’s time to get down to business and start developing a civil society position on spectrum management in South Africa.  The key purpose of spectrum management is to maximise the value that society gains from the radio spectrum.  That has traditionally been done in a command-and-control manner treating spectrum as a completely finite, scarce resource.  But things are changing.

The undersea cable environment around the African continent continues to evolve.  Proposed cables appear, disappear, merge.  A testament to the competitive environment.  In this latest update, I have added the MaIN OnE cable which appears to be making progress.  Thanks to Abi Jagun for finding their real website.

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.

At the A2K3 conference Dr Leslie Chan of U Toronto has reminded us all that “impact factors” assessed in dollars are a bizarre way to think about the value of research, whereas both truth and development might be regarded as better ways of valuing research.

We all know its a big problem in South Africa. Hijacking, theft, even murder by book gangs who make millions re-selling blood novels. That is why South African authorities have added “books” to the list of second hand goods subject to stringent regulation intended to prevent the sale of stolen goods.

I am at the A2K3 conference in Geneva, Switzerland not far from CERN where earlier today the LHC, the large Hadron collider, was scheduled for start up.

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.

Inspired by Rudoph Van Den Burg’s riff on Jeremy Clarkson’s TopGear Cool Wall I thought a Cool Wall for the South African telecommunications and Internet community might be fun to do. For those who haven’t seen it, the TopGear Cool Wall ranks automobile coolness on a scale ranging from SubZero to Cool to UnCool to Seriously UnCool. Rudolph Van Den Berg has taken the idea and applied it to European and North American telcos. I think a little local application might be in order.  As with TopGear the rating is somewhat subjective and the list non-exhaustive and possibly downright erratic.

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.

In a landmark decision today, the High Court of South Africa ruled that everyone in possession of a Value Added Network Service (VANS) license was entitled to “self-provide”.  What this means is that every Internet Service Provider (ISP) in South Africa is entitled to compete with the likes of Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, and Neotel.  In one fell swoop, the market has gone from 4 players to conceivably over 600 players.

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.

At the Shuttleworth Foundation we have a now reasonably well-established tradition of gathering together every Tuesday at lunch to watch a Ted Talk.  I borrowed this idea from Vera Franz of the Open Society Institute and with only a few damp squibs we have seen some great presentations and had some great discussions as a result.

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. 

The latest version of the Film and Publications Ammendment Bill which was revised by the Home Affairs Portfolio Committee still contains unconstitutional provisions.

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.

Strategy Safari, a Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel

In my last post I wrote a bit about what kinds of information and communication technologies are needed by the poor.  I have also written about the importance of tinkering and tinkerable technologies as a catalyst for innovation.

Last week, the Open Education Track (or Tribe) at the iCommons iSummit, held in Sapporo, Japan, came up with the idea of a logo or mark to indicate open educational resources. The term we used in that discussion was “certification mark” but we might equally well refer to a “device”, a term used in heraldry to refer to a multi coloured emblem or logo , but which can also refer to the software which can produce and accompany a logo. In this post I’ll record our discussion at the iSummit, then I’ll share some of my thoughts in a subsequent post.

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.

he One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project comes in for a lot of criticism for being, among other things, “centralised and top-down”. Critics also argue that academia and philanthropy should not be interfering in areas where the market is clearly in a better place both to innovate and to sustain new technologies in the marketplace.

I had a great conversation with David Carman yesterday who runs a community mesh network in Scarborough (south of Cape Town). We discussed mesh technologies, topologies, and Open Source medical applications but towards the end, the conversation strayed to digital video and security. He told me about a remarkable project in Palestine, called Shooting Back, in which a human rights NGO distributed 100 cameras to palestinian citizens to record human rights abuses.  The results are pretty disturbing as this Guardian article testifies but also pretty remarkable.  As David put it, often the power of the criminal lies in anonymity.  Letting people know that they don’t have the luxury of anonymity can be a powerful incentive for behavioural change.

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:

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Reframing assessment: Using social software to collect and organise learning.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: A Stylistic Analysis of Graphic Emoticons: Can they be Candidates for a Universal Visual Language of the Future?

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Learning-by-Teaching in Educational Games.

Peter Scott, Director of the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, UK, spoke about mentoring. Technology is cool, but is only valuable in the way it supports and enables people. So it’s useful to contextualise tools as follows:

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Designing Game Based Learning - a Participatory Approach.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: The Alternate Reality Game: Learning Situated in the Realities of the 21st Century.

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?"

In the development world, getting a project profiled in The Economist is a bit like a rock band being profiled in Rolling Stone.  This week’s Economist has a profile of Dabba. Pretty cool.

The appearance of ‘Friction over Fan Fiction‘ an article in the July/August 08 of the Literary Review of Canada signals a new, mainstream concern with a burgeoning phenomenon. It also, without intending to, raises to important arguements for limitations to copyright which explicitly set out that fan fiction is permitted. I say burgeoning because according to the article; “a Google search of ‘fan fiction’ brings up over 26 million hits”.

We are finally starting to get under the hood of the foundation. We have published the first in our ‘How we work’ series on Open Licensing and have been getting some great feedback. As we know, we are not perfect, but we do have a clear policy on what we want to do and very real ideas and opportunities to get there. Every agreement we enter into, be it with a service provider or in the form of a donation ensures all material and resources are open and will remain so, they are also free from technical protection measures.

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.

So what might the undersea cable environment for sub-Saharan Africa look like by the end of 2010? Perhaps it will look a bit like this:

In a previous post, the Traditions of Knowledge, I referred to the appropriation of traditional knowledge by means of industrial revolution intellectual property.

Last week in Berlin at a Forum on Social Entrepreneurship hosted by German venture capital company Hasso Plattner Ventures, Rael Lissoos and Dabba won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 award. The event, sponsored by Deutsches Bank and MAN brought together 250 social entrepreneurs together with investors.

Conventional intellectual property laws claim to confer rights only on knowledge that is individually authored, reduced to material form and ‘original’. The antithesis of that modern knowledge paradigm is traditional knowledge which is by its nature traditional, communal and frequently oral. Some developing countries have adopted sui generis legislation that attempts to craft a regime appropriate for traditional knowledge. But if appropriation is carried out mostly by corporations head-quartered in developed countries, and appropriated knowledge is exploited in developed countries through the mechanisms of conventional intellectual property the sui generis legislation in the country of origin won’t work. This is exactly what seems to be going on.Developing nations including South Africa have advocated strongly for recognition of sui generis traditional knowledge rights in the global trade system through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and World Intellectual Property Organisation. Developed country trade reps put the kibosh on this idea during the Doha round.

I have been gradually getting my head around bandwidth purchasing models for undersea cables. In my second contribution to the Mail & Guardian’s innovative Techleader site, I use a real estate metaphor to contrast the various scenarios.

Globalisation and Its Discontents has a far better description of globalisation than the World is Flat, which I have previously reviewed. This even though the book is primarily concerned with global financial governance, the IMF and the World Bank, and how they behave, especially in the developing world. Stiglitz contends that IMF’ policies have attempted to serve Wall Street have failed not only developing countries but the global economy and so the United States. The explanations of the economics is clear, and easy to follow. This is all the more remarkable since Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist, rather than a journalist or trade author.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Simulation Development by Students: An Alternative Cross-Thematic Didactical Approach.

At the Shuttleworth Foundation, the geek factor runs pretty high for a charitable foundation.  However, my colleague Jason and I felt like lightweights at the the Village Telco workshop that we hosted here at the Foundation two weeks ago.

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: ProBoPortable: Development of Cellular Phone Software to Prompt Learners to Monitor and Reorganize Division of Labor in Project-Based Learning.

At ICel 2008 Sue Greener of the Brighton Business School, University of Brighton (UK), presented her research titled Plasticity: The Online Learning Environment’s Potential to Support Varied Learning Styles and Approaches.

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.

A putative bill which creates a system require patenting of tax payer funded research will be published today.

A putative bill which creates a system require patenting of tax payer funded research will be published today.

May 2008 was a really great month at the Foundation. We went through what seemed like a spring clean of our thoughts, processes and communications.

A talk worth watching is Paul Collier’s heartfelt presentation at the TED event earlier this year. He talks a bit about his book The Bottom Billion which, as a non-economist, I am finding both insightful and accessible.

Anyone living in a consumer society is likely to benefit from reading this book, finding it an insightful if disturbing expose of manipulation techniques employed by marketers, media and politicians. You will never trust a salesman again.

Anyone living in a consumer society is likely to benefit from reading this book, finding it an insightful if disturbing expose of manipulation techniques employed by marketers, media and politicians. You will never trust a salesman again.

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.

According to a press release the International Standards Organisation has suspended publication of OOXML as an ISO standard during the appeal process.

According to a press release the International Standards Organisation has suspended publication of OOXML as an ISO standard during the appeal process.

Last week was the 5th annual Games for Change conference in New York. An interesting blog post to come out of that discusses the need to localise social issue games.

I’ve posted a round-up of the eLearning Africa conference on Tech Leader. Helpful input to the pie

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.

I have been hearing a lot lately about ACTA, a treaty which is being drafted at the behest of a handful of old economy monopolies. IPJustice has a useful anaylsis. ACTA is an accroym for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Who could be against measures to prevent counterfieting? No doubt the name was chosen for exactly that reason, to imply that anyone who wishes to debate the provisions or even the necessity for the agreement. Its also sold as a trade agreement, which in some of the countries taking part in negociations means that executive sign-off is suffecient to bind that country, and the treaty need not pass scrutiny by the legislature.

I have recently returned from Uganda. From 27 to 29 May 2008 I participated in the PALM Africa Workshop on alternative publishing models in Africa, which was hosted by the National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU). The participants in the workshop represented a wide range of types of organisations, including public and private sector publishers, and an equally wide range of competences, and attitudes toward alternative publishing models. The organisers of the workshop are to be congratulated on patiently and persistently explaining the potential benefits of alternative licensing. Experimenting with alternative publishing models offers a low cost, low risk way of testing the opportunities available to developing country publishers.

My presentation at eLearning Africa was Digital storytelling for Africa: Case study of an international digital media project.

On Wednesday this week, the City of Cape Town made the final approval to launch its ground-breaking municipal Broadband Infrastructure Project.

Below are notes from the eLearning Africa session titled mobile phones offering a lifeline to learners.

I am in Kampala at a workshop hosted by the National Book Trust of Uganda on alternative publishing models, PALM Africa. The air is full of new ideas, emerging business models…change.
There is considerable promise that local publishers will be able to find new sources of sustainability and increase access to knowledge. These are important benefits of open access publishing models. There is another, often overlooked benefit of open access publishing models.

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 ...

Here is the full text of the South African Appeal iro the ISO OOXML process.

“Appeal from the South African national body regarding the outcome of the fast-track processing of DIS 29500 Office open XML

In the midst of grim and troubling news about outbreaks of violence against Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, there is a good reason to be proud of being South African today.

In many countries a basic monthly telephone subscription entitles the subscriber to free local calls. In other words, a subscriber pays a flat fee, and can make any number of phone calls within that area without paying any additional amount.

Microsoft has announced that it intends future versions of Office to support Open Document Format, the international open XML document format used by other developers.

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!

I'm switching to Wordpress. Ukubuza is now officially laid to rest. All of the postings from here have been transferred to my new blog: innovating education.

Grand Theft Morals, or ultimate role model? is a piece written for Tech Leader, the M&G’s new offering in the Thought Leader stable.

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.

Mark Surman has written about an interesting new business model: Noank. You have to read his post to understand this one.

The Guardian this week published a review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” The journalist quotes Zittrain as saying

Bill St. Arnaud points out that Pipe International, who are building an undersea cable from Sydney to Guam, have taken a completely transparent approach to communicating about project development and progress. Even to the point of having dynamic online maps of cable development.

At the Foundation, we aim to drive innovation, we pilot projects, we comment and cajole in policy discussions and we slowly move forward to a better, more connected, more educated and prosperous South Africa (and Africa and the world).

The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Science and Technology, (National Assembly), will receive a briefing by the Department of Science and Technology on the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Bill (IPR Bill)], Venue to be confirmed, 10:00, Tuesday 3 June, 2008.

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.

Here is a short note on where things stand with Dabba and the Village Telco. The Shuttleworth Foundation is planning to fund the hacking/adaptation/development, to at least alpha version, of an Open Source “Village Telco” integrated suite of applications.

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.

Every year the Constitution of South Africa requires that the provisions of the constitution should be reviewed. A parliamentary committee reviews the provisions of the constitution. This year an invitation for public submissions (details below) has been sent out, submissions due by the end of May.

In an earlier post, I wrote about a very cool publishing model used by a bible publishing company in the U.S.

On the 27th of February 2008, the Department of Communications published a notice inviting comments on Proposed Guidelines For Rapid Deployment of Electronic Communications Facilities in Terms of the Electronic Communications ACT, 2005 (ACT NO.

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.

At the Foundation, we want to drive innovation in education and technology.

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.

File this one under thinking out loud but why isn’t there a commons for ideas? For example, if I came up with a useful workshop facilitation methodology, I would share it. However, if I knew that I was likely to be given credit anytime anyone used it, I would probably share more enthusiastically and maybe even put more effort into polishing the methodology for use by others.

I lurk on one of the more interesting mailinglists in the world. act-KM, originally an Australian but now global community of practice on Knowledge Management or since I abhor the term Knowledge Management, let’s say on the nature of knowledge in general and how to make it grow and flow in and across organisations. It is a high traffic list and not a very peaceful one. The debate rages (I choose the adjective carefully) between academics, practitioners, corporate hacks, and grass-roots types. It is not always kind and at times I find some of the sniping simply unpleasant. However, that is substantially outweighed by the calibre of discussion. It is a privilege to hear the likes of Dave Snowden, Steve Denning, Patrick Lambe (to name just a few) hashing issues out in a community space.

Having decided to help Dabba explore the replication of their Orange Farm success down here in the Western Cape, it was not immediately clear to me how to go about finding the right place for such a project. Alan Levine of Vanilla (Dabba’s partner in the Cape) initially provided a connection to a local NGO working with schools to provide support services to children affected by HIV to enter formal schooling with the necessary skills. However, after visiting the NGO sites, it was evident that while there was interest in the Village Telco concept, technology and entrepreneurship were not their sweet spot. They could see the value and would make great clients but were not the sort of organisation to drive an idea like this.

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.

The most populous countries in the world have rejected the OOXML as an international standard but its been pushed through anyway. China, India, Brazil and South Africa have all firmly rejected OOXML as an international standard, in a re-visit of the voting process which took place during September 2007.
Although ISO has yet to officially release the result, early reports suggest that extensive lobbying has engineered a vote change in a sufficiently large number of countries so that the specification will be pushed through.

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:

The Economic Value of Taking Things Apart

In the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Paul Romer writes:

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.

Dabba relies on a variety of Open Source software application to enable their network. Here is a profile of some of those applications.

Business Day Africa profiles the Communications Commission of Kenya’s decision to offer ISM-band spectrum to non-profits:

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 ...

Reading the tech news in South Africa, you get the impression that WiMax is going to very shortly solve all of the country’s broadband issues. Articles like this one give the impression that WiMax will shortly be available in every major city in South Africa. Municipal WiMax enthusiasts argue that this is “no business case for WiFi”

The conventional wisdom in the ICT4D community is that people in developing countries spend a higher percentage of their income on communications than the global average. For South Africa, this notion became is widely accepted (I think) thanks to the Vodafone study on mobile usage, in which Diane Coyle of Enlighenment Economics says:

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. 

Meet Rael Lissoos, a economist turned geek entrepreneur. While I have been talking about Village Telcos, Rael has been out building one in Orange Farm, a township about an hour south of Johannesburg.

A little late, but below are my notes from the Integrated Education Program (IEP) Conference in Pretoria (6-7 February 2008).

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?

Earlier this week I came across this wonderful master’s thesis entitled Generation of Complex Diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti by Noah Iliinsky. We have all at various times had our minds numbed by needlessly complex diagrams that did more to obscure the issue than explain it. This is the first insightful analysis I have seen about what makes a good or bad diagram. Well written and with many excellent examples of great and awful diagrams.

Seacom has emerged as a clear front runner in the African undersea cable stakes. They are the first initiative to declare a completion date, 17 June 2009 (after which cable company Tyco will incur performance penalties). More impressively they have revealed their wholesale pricing scheme which looks like this:

Tim O’Reilly points out some very cool publishing models being used by Logos Bible Software. The have a pre-publishing service in which clients commit to order at a discount in exchange for placing a pre-order for a specific product and Logos can guarantee that there costs are covered. Each potential pre-publish book has a meter which displays the current level of pre-orders.

In the spirit of the previous post consolidating information on African undersea cables, I compiled the image at the right to create a consolidated picture of existing and future cable initiatives around the continent. The relative cable sizes are roughly to scale according to the advertised capacity of the cables. There is certainly a contrast between the various initiatives.

As Mark Twain once said, “reports of my death were great exaggerated”. This could be very aptly applied to the optimistic perception that the Internet and cheap telecommunications meant that it didn’t matter where you were, the so-called “death of geography”. The future was in telework and invisible global supply chains. While there is truth to the flat world notion popularised by Thomas Friedman, it is equally true that “local” has become more important than ever. Strangely the more connected we become, the more local seems to matter.

“…broadband thrives on a mix of competition and active regulation, to ensure an open context.” This succinct summation comes from an Economist article from a couple of weeks ago entitled “Open up those highways“.

Having funded and watched and occasionally participated in the wireless hacker space in Africa for the last few years, I have the sense of “waiting for the next leap forward”. Wireless hackers have been successfully building cantennas, woktennas, and waterbottletennas, to name a few. They’ve been flashing Linksys Routers with a variety of free firmware replacements and in general tinkering with WiFi in a very cool way. I say cool because I think tinkering is one of the best ways of learning about something and also because taking something apart is a way of demystifying technology and ultimately making it something that serves you as opposed to the other way around.

Mostly in order to keep them all straight in my head, I have compiled a list of African undersea cable initiatives and their features, investors, etc.

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'?

We often hear educators complain that when their learners use the internet to find information for projects they simply copy and paste from the first reference that comes up on Google.

Microsoft’s well publicised release of its “Citizen Service Platform” claims to introduce easy e-government. The basis of that claim is the use “templates”.

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.

In YouTube’s OK for scholars, non-profits and the queen (Thought Leader) I give examples of academia, international organisations and monarchs using YouTube to share content and engage their constituents.

On this trip, I've started doing my open philanthropy work at the Shuttleworth Foundation. The biggest piece of this is developing the Foundation's theory of change and an accompanying open philanthropy manifesto (will post on this soon). The other bit is developing a series of 'how we work' papers.

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:

I wrote Fan fiction: Improving youth literacy to introduce fan fiction and a study that showed it as a legitimate way for youth to improve their literacy skills.

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.

A new study from Nokia and The Future Laboratory predicts that by 2012, a quarter of all entertainment will be "circular", that is created, edited, and shared within peer groups rather than being generated by traditional media. The bulk of the study was based on interviews with trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles.

ICT4Champions is a Google group concerned with the use of web 2.0 in South African schools. Today Maggie Verster, founder of the group, lead a workshop on blogging in the classroom. It was attended by 10 educators, all from private schools, who were shown how to create and customise a class blog using Edublogs. I attended to meet Maggie and the others in the group and to pick their brains on the state of Web 2.0 in our schools. The bottom line: basic use of ICTs, let alone for connected, creative, collaborative web 2.0 activities, is limited and problematic in South African schools. According to the attendees of the workshop, reasons for this include: