Recent blog entries

The obsession with mobile

Steve Vosloo — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:54:55 -0600

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

There is a justified obsession with mobile in developing countries. There are far more mobile phones in the developing world than the developed, and therefore a delivery device in nearly every pocket.

FullMarks Invitation to Cape Town Teachers

Mark Horner — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:13:17 -0600

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!

North West Province: Workshop 1

Mark Horner — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:44:59 -0600

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

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

Technical / Content Training

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

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

Community Building

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

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

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

The Way Forward

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

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

The particularly exciting part was that all groups committed to:

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

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

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

Digital Storytelling: The Evolution of Publishing Fiction on a Mobile Device (TOCCON 2010)

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:47:40 -0600

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).

Mobile phones know where you are, what time it is, are communications devices and are fully programmable.
Starting question: Given these features, what story can you tell?

The Carrier is the first transmedia graphic novel as an iPhone app. In it’s “print” form, the novel would consist of 680 panels, 35 chapters — about 120 pages if printed out. Really it’s just images on a screen. But given the transmedia way it is told — in real time over 10 days — the story is a lot more.

Because mobile phones know what time it is, stories can be revealed over time. Depending on the time of day that reading begins, readers begin the story in a different way. This puts the storyteller in control. In real time the story pushes out messages.

The authors have created a lot of fictional sites — alternate reality game-like. They also created merchandise in Cafe Press that they linked to, which readers could buy. Messages were pushed to iPhone readers using Urban Airship (first 250,000 messages sent a free!) Geoff considered using SMS for messaging, but that option was too expensive (the author pays for the messages, not the reader).

This was an interesting presentation, given the transmedia features and story extras we built into Kontax.

FullMarks Demo

Mark Horner — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:57:29 -0600

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.

Full Marks Demo

Consumers in the Cloud: Google and Digital Books (TOCCON 2010)

Steve Vosloo — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:18:35 -0600

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

There are millions (billions?) more browsers than ebook readers, so why not use the browser as an ereader? You can walk into a bookstore and buy any book. Not so with ebooks, e.g. Kindle locks you into ebooks from Amazon. Google no like … Google Books mantra: buy anywhere, read anywhere. So Google moves into the ereader market with Google Editions — it’s browser-based and in the cloud (of course)!

How it works: Users preview book on Google.com. They can buy the book directly from Google.com or through retailer site. User then owns a Google Edition ebook. All users books will then be online and accessible anywhere, anytime in the cloud in their Google Books library. Further:

eBooks will be full colour (they were scanned in colour)
Social features / sharing margin notes
Seamless reading between devices
Using HTML5, users can also read offline
Simple ereader interface in the browser
Will support DRM and DRM-free content (depending on publisher requirements)
Will allow copy/paste/print or not (depending on publisher requirements)
Revenue split when buying directly from Google Books: 37% to Google, 63% to publisher
Territory rights of the publishers will be respected (not sure how they’re going to do this)
You’re not locked into Google if you buy their books.You can take the files with you if you leave. And devices should be able to access the open-standards data. Google Books is part of the Data Liberation Front at Google
Ideas: bundling ebook with print book
The Google eReader will launch in 2010, mostly likely in the early part of second half of the year.

Abe: “This is a great year for ebooks and Google’s gonna be part of that.”

OK, so this is all very interesting. Yes, Google will still be a
controlling party in the value chain (let’s not forget that they make
money … they don’t just love freeing information for the love of it).
But their control will be less restrictive than current publishers.
Definitely a space to watch.

Keynotes @ day one of TOCCON 2010 and what they mean for m4Lit

Steve Vosloo — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:36:22 -0600

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:

Enhancing the ebook
Peter Collingridge, Enhanced Editions
One of his previous projects is www.bookseer.com — a book recommendation service.

How can digital innovation provide premium reading experiences?
The future of publishing can be summed up in one word: change.
Questions: What will the publishing value chain look like in 2013? What skills will be needed? What will you do about it today?

Law is not a business solution
William Patry, Google Inc.

People say that you can’t compete with free. Wrong way to think. Provide something of value to people and they will pay for it.

Are ebooks dead?
David Skip Prichard, CEO of Ingram Content Group

USA teens aged 8-18 spend 7.5 hours / day in front of an electronic device. How will publishers engage this generation?
Simplify: know what your business value add is and focus on it (differentiate). Limit the variables. (More options does not translate to increased sales.)

Publishing is dead: Long live publishing!
Ariana Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post

Books don’t end in print. They’re conversation starters. Reviews are conversation enders. What people want are conversation starters.
The medium is definitely not the message.
We have entered the golden age of engagement. Publishing needs to combine best of old and new worlds.

How does this apply to the m4Lit project?

We want reading to be social (community) and engaging (interactivity) (see our m-novel Kontax). Enhanced Editions has affirmed this approach.
We’re reaching teens where they are — on their mobile phones.
m4Lit should focus on one thing: bringing books to teens in developing countries through mobile phones (NOT including iPhones). Our differentiator is a user experience that is low-end device specific and cognisant of price (keeping data traffic to a minimum).

Copyright for Educators course open for enrollment

Andrew Rens — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:58:57 -0600

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.

The next cycle of course is now open for enrollment. The course will be led by Delia Browne, a copyright expert with enviable practical expertise in copyright and education. Delia will have a unmatched team of experts from different jurisdictions.

Go to p2pu to enroll now.

Or read more about the course:

“What is ‘Copyright for Educators’?
It is a six week course for educators who want to learn about copyright, open content material and licensing. It is open to all educators around the world.

The course is taught around practical case studies faced by teachers when using copyright material in their day to day teaching and educational instruction.

By answering the case scenarios and drafting and discussing the answers in groups, the participants learn:

* about what copyright protects
* whether exceptions or blanket licences apply
* when they need to seek permission and who from
* what an open education resource is
* what a creative common licence is
* how OER and CC can benefit teaching

Participants will also get to learn about how these issues are dealt with in different countries.

The Course leaders

As stated above, Delia Browne is the course organiser. She will be assisted by:

* Lila Bailey (Creative Commons Counsel) based in San Francisco at Creative Commons
* Jessica Coates (CC Australia and Queensland University of Technology) based in Brisbane
* Tobias Schonwetter Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Intellectual Property Research Unit in South Africa
* Prodromos Tsiavos – London School of Economics
* Andrew Rens, Research Associate at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Intellectual Property Research Unit in South Africa .

How is the course taught?

The course is not taught, it is facilitated by the course leaders. The course is student participation focused.Students are divided into small groups to work through each week’s case scenario and the weekly readings.

The groups organise their online communications/discussions (via email, Google docs, Skype, tokbox etc) and jointly submit an answer to the weekly case scenario (week 1- 5) and final assignment (Week 6) on the course blog.

The http://p2pu.org<http://p2pu.org/> website platform allows students to communicate asynchronously via wikis (group communication and discussion) and a course blog (group answers submitted).

Synchronous tools are not supported by the site but there are recommendations of some real time communication tools each group may elect to use to hold a class meeting or discussion.

In addition, each group also provides an assessment of the other groups’ answers to the weekly case studies.

The leaders basically review and mark the student group work (pass/fail) that has been posted to the blog and provide comments where they have gone wrong. As stated above, the leaders act as facilitators rather than traditional teachers.

In the final assignment, groups may elect to create helpful OER tools on copyright or draft a letter to their government on a copyright law reform issue or create an OER plan.”

FHSST site upgrade update

Mark Horner — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:47:10 -0600

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.

Now we can revisit the new functionality I mentioned in a previous blog. The idea was to make it much easier for people to submit errata and manage the corrections, submit contributions and capture testimonials. This will require significant theme changes which is why the site is currently using the default Drupal theme.

I’ve learnt not to even attempt to suggest deadlines for the new functionality to be rolled out and the new theme designed and implemented but it’ll be there as soon as I can get it up. The functionality was being looked into by Telementa and I hope to resurrect that as it seemed like the functionality would be quite quick and simple for them to implement. The bottleneck was myself upgrading the site to Drupal 6.

Progress towards an uploading sprint for FullMarks

Mark Horner — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:41:44 -0600

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.

The purpose of the sprint is to ensure that at the site isn’t empty at the launch event which would disappoint everyone and knock the project’s momentum. Participants in the sprint aren’t expecting a website full of content so there will be no disappointment there. They will know that they are leading the way in setting up a site that captures the attention of many other teachers, something they will benefit from as users of FullMarks, when it is launched.

Having an upload sprint means that the relatively mundane task of uploading thousands of questions into FullMarks becomes a shared burden in a very tangible way, it focuses the effort into a single day and makes the process a much more sociable exercise. In this way, not only are teachers sharing with each other in a structured, categorised and efficient way, and laying a platform to help many isolated and under-resourced teachers, they are also strengthening the teaching community.

I’ve approached a number of schools about an opportunity to present the project to a representative of the school and have so far visited (in order of first visit):

The reason I am approaching schools first rather than subject focus groups is that I want the maximum breadth of questions entered into FullMarks so that it is of interest to the widest possible spectrum of teachers. Sufficient schools participating will give the bank the depth it needs. I will definitely still be approaching the subject focus groups that I know of once I have confirmed the participation of a number of schools.

I have had the opportunity to return to Wynberg Girls’ High School and Pinelands North Primary School to demonstrate the scope of functionality of the alpha version of the site to interested members of staff. At both schools the principals have sanctioned the participation of their teachers in the sprint. However, I still have to convince teachers to participate. Pinelands North Primary is the first school to go the next step and to confirm that they have a set of teachers who will participate which I am very excited about.

I will be approaching more schools in the coming weeks and contacting the mathematics and physical science swap and share groups that I became aware of through the Siyavula project. My ambitious goal is 150 participants in the upload sprint and hopefully 10 000 questions. That would get the project off to a flying start!

Upfront Systems, the team that is developing FullMarks, also confirmed today that they will provide the technical support at the sprint event which is great because they know the site better than anyone. It will also help future development of the site because it will give teachers the opportunity to talk directly to the developers making sure everyone is on the same page. It is crucial that FullMarks be aligned with teachers needs as well as being as easy to use as possible so that it gains real traction and has a positive impact in South Africa.

Things are really starting to fall into place for FullMarks and the next 6 weeks will be very exciting for this project.

If you are reading this and you or your school are interested in a demo just leave a comment or send me an email and I’d be more than happy to show you the site and give you more details about the project.

North West Province and Siyavula

Mark Horner — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:07:31 -0600

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

The training will focus on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Icey Grip of Reality

Mark Horner — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:24:19 -0600

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.

p2pu 2nd cycle of courses

Andrew Rens — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:00:50 -0600

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

The second cycle of courses begins shortly. I have posted a shortened version of p2pu’s official release below:

Peer 2 Peer University announced its second round of free and open online courses today, opening sign-ups for 14 courses dealing in subject areas ranging from Physics to Transformational Art. Some of the courses were offered in the first phase of the pilot which launched last September, but seven are brand new, including “Urban Disaster Risk Management,” “Mashing Up the Open Web,” and “Solve Anything! Building Ideas through Design.” P2PU is also excited to announce its first Portuguese language courses organized by Brasil’s Casa de Cultura Digital, one of which is an introduction to the thinking of Paulo Freire (educational theorist who is author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed). The P2PU community has grown and is excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.

Sign-ups for all courses are available at http://p2pu.org. Deadlines for sign-ups are 28, Feb 2010. The second pilot phase will run for six weeks from 12 March to 23 April. Each course application may require additional information.

Second Support Workshop for Edunova Primary Educators.

Mark Horner — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:33:47 -0600

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.

Interesting stats about the Kontax winners

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:56:16 -0600

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

all are prepaid mobile users (not contract subscribers);
ages range from 15 to 17 years.
5 are girls;
5 have isiXhosa as a home language, 1 has isiZulu as a home language;
4 come from Khayelitsha, a township with a low socio-economic status; and
5 are from the Western Cape, 1 is from Gauteng;

An interesting turn out of events!

Winning entries for the Kontax Sequel Ideas Competition

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:35:34 -0600

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.

English winners
1st Place: Zindles (R2,000)

Kontax will still be fully functional and the friends still united as ever.song works after school and on weekends so she can help out her sick mother. Airtime realises that his feelings for song r getting stronger by the day. K8 has been distant for a couple of weeks but nobody knows why or where she is,they just asume she’s busy. Sbu and Airtime try to help Song in everyway they can-they even acompany her to go get ARV’s at the community clinic. Airtime,for once in his life,came up with a brilliant idea:to take Song’s mother’s situation and turn it into a learning opportunity for others. Sbu suggests that they do a kontax project on HIV/Aids and how it is not a death sentence. But mostly they wanted to stress the fact that the community should come together to help people infected and affected by HIV and Aids. Sbu also suggests that they take Song’s mother’s employer to the CCMA for unfair dismissal. We watch how the trial develops and eventualy they win the case.

2nd Place: Amila (R1,000)

Sbu starts hanging out with the wrong crowd.Luvo and Thando had always had a bad reputation around the township but that didnt stop Sbu from wanting to be accepted by them.Songz,K8 and Airtym tried speaking to him but they just couldnt get through to him.Sbu finds himself in a rather uncomfortable situation when Luvo and Thando hijack a car while he was driving with him.Sbu had no choice but to continue driving as he would also be thought to be part of the hijackers.Sbu is furious with Luvo and Thando but there is nothing he can do about it because they start threatinig him and his friends.He turns back to his friends and reveal all.They encourage him to go to the police and report.They get arrested and are convicted for otherr things they had done in the past.Sbu becomes friends with K8 and them again.Sbu is punished to do commumity work.

3rd Place: Lisa (R500)

Sbu tells s0ng about the job interview 0n the m0nday,s0ng is very excited and gets the job,airtime starts realisng that he has developed feelingz for song and he c0nfeses them 2her..k8 and sbu get offerd a pr0fesi0nal job at an art studi0 2 showcase their grafitti and this is a dream c0me true for both of them..sbu keepz c0ntct with adele and they bec0me very cl0se friends ,adelles direct0rs bec0me interestd in sbu.s st0ry and decide 2 make a m0vie out of it nd it goes platinum …s0ng and airtime start dating nd with tha m0ney she earnd she managd 2get her m0ther treatment and healthy again..the m0vie recieves a grammy nd goes big nd sbu gets an award for his role…

isiXhosa winners
1st Place: Sbuja (R2,000)

USbu owayehlala ezilalini waze waza edolophini.USbu wayenamaphupha angawaziyo, into eyenza ukuba agoduke ayokubona igqirha.Igqirha lamxelela ukuba ufuna ukusetyenziswa zizinyanya ukulwa ububi obuzathi buvuke, izinyanya zaye zaxabana(kukho icala elingcolileyo nelilungileyo). Izinyanya ezingcolileyo zazifuna uku-controller ilizwe lonke.USbu waye wabuyela edolophini enikwe i-powers, kodwa kwakufuneka ukuba afunde ukuzisebenzisa.Wayene-powers zokwenza imvula, ezokwenza umoya, ezokwenza umlilo, ezemilingo(uyakwazi ukunyamalala).Waye waqala umsenzi wakhe wokulwa umoya ombi, ngokuthi ahambe esilwa nabantu abasetyenziswa zizinyanya ezingcolileyo(wayethi akumoyisa umntu amncede ngokuthi akhuphe umoya omdaka).Ekugqibeleni uyaphumelela kwaye izinyanya ezingcolileyo ziyagwetywa kwilizwe lezinya.

Translation: Sbu who lived in the rural areas came to the city. Sbu had dreams he did not understand so he went back home to see a Sangoma. The Sangoma told him that the ancestors wanted to use him to fight the bad that were going to spring up. The ancestors fought amongst themselves (there was a good side and bad side) The bad ancestors wanted to control the whole land. Sbu went back to the city after being given powers but he had to learn how to use them. He had rain making powers; wind making powers; fire making powers, and magic making ones (he could disappear into thin air). He set out to do his work of fighting the bad spirits by going to fight the people who were being used by the bad ancestors ( when he had defeated the person he would help him by taking out the bad spirits). Finally he succeeded and the bad ancestors were banished to the land of the dogs.

2nd Place: Sugar (R1,000)

Abalinganiswa bethu bendingathanda ukuba bacacisele abanye abantu malungana negrafitti yabo ukuze abantu bezakubona elicala lilungileyo elibonwa ngabo, hayi into yokuba bayangcolisa apho bahlala khona. Ukuba kungathandwa ukuvezwa kakhulu icala lasesikolweni, sibone ukuba ngubani ungqa phambili apha phakathi kwabo. Ingasinika umdla into yokuba kubekho lo ushiyekelayo kwimisebenzi yakhe yesikolo ukuze abahlobo bakhe bazame ukunceda, ukubonakali izihlobo zokwenyani, kodwa kungabilula ukwenza oko kuba engafuni ukuyamkela into yokuba uyashiyekela kwimisebenzi yesikolo. Isizathu sokuba ashiyekele kwimisebenzi, yinto yokuba akalali ebusuku obu, kukho lento ayenzayo yonke imihla le, efana nento yokuba uyasebenza ukuze kutyiwe kokwabo. Mhlawumbi umama wakhe uhlukene notata wakhe umntu ebezisa kutya apha endlini ukuze batye, mhlawumbi uthengisa iziyobisi okanye ucinga nento yokuba athengise nangomzimba wakhe, kodwa ekugqibeleni abahlobo bakhe ngabona bantu abazakuzama ukumbonisa ezinye indlela.

Translation: I would like our peers to explain to others about their graffiti so that people can see the good that they see in it and not only the part where they are regarded as making the places they live in dirty. If possible I would like to be shown quite a bit on the school side so we can see who is best amongst them. It would be more interesting if one of them was lagging behind in their school work so that the friends could try and help and we can see true friendship but it should not be easy to do that because he/she refuses to accept that he/she is lagging behind in his or her school work. The reason for lagging behind is due to not sleeping at night because he or she is busy with something everyday like maybe work, so the family can eat. Maybe the mother is separated from the father, who was the bread winner. Maybe he or she is selling drugs or is even thinking of selling his or her body but in the end the friends should be the ones who try to show her or him other ways.

3rd place: Mayongi (R500)

Kubali elilandela okungenze usong angathatha ispani esi asinikwa nguAdelle ngenxa ka sbu ukwenzla anakakele ioledi lakhe.kwelinye icala isbu angamane ebhelela uAdelle nje ukuqhuba incoko,ngokwnza njlo kulapho bangasndelalna kakhulu lnto ingth ide ifike exsheni lokub bathandane.kwelicala lokupaynta igraffiti bangath bafunde bade bagqiba apho bazakuth baspane bathole inyuku yokuth bathnge indawo bazokth bapeynte kuyo apho izokuba njengeofisi lapho apho bayakuth xa bepeyntle babize abntu abasezmalni ukuze babone imisbenz emihle abynzayo pha.

Translation: In the next story what could happen is that Song takes the job that Adelle gives her because of Sbu so that she can look after her mother. On the other side Sbu could keep writing to Adelle just to drive the talk, by so doing it would bring them closer together so much that they end up in love. On the graffiti painting side they could study until they finish so that they can get work and money and buy a place where they could paint in, like an office, where they could mount exhibitions for people with money and show off the good works they are doing there.

Well done to all of the winners! And thank you to all who submitted entries. Keep trying in Kontax 2.

Siyavula Foundation layed at CHSA

Mark Horner — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:42:57 -0600

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.

Educators responded with enthusiasm to the new learning they were able to garner and were thrilled at the idea of being able to collaborate online.

CHSA educators were trained in conceptulising the Connexions terminology, locating and downloading resources and participating in work groups.

The team has been invited back to train at their teacher development program during the June school vacation,during which time we would also need to conduct a follow-up workshop with the high school educators whom we introduced to Siyavula last year, and train a new group of intermediate phase teachers at the school.

Mozilla Jetpack Design Challenge invites 10 teams to Design Camp

Philipp Schmidt — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:25:25 -0600

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.

The selected Jetpacks support a wide range of learning activities. They help users learn foreign languages, support the development of sophisticated web-skills or turn the web into a quiz engine. A list of finalists (and all Jetpack prototypes) can be found on the Mozilla Wiki:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning

The Design Camp in March will give the selected teams an opportunity to complete their prototypes with support from some of the world’s foremost Jetpack experts. The event is co-organized by Aspiration. An overall winner of the Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge will be selected during the camp and announced at the Mozilla SXSW event.(*)

The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge uses an innovative combination of competition, training, and workshop to build skills in web development and drive innovation for learning on the open web. Online seminars provided participants with the necessary background on extension development and Jetpack technology. An active mailing list was used by participants to discuss and solve challenge they faced. All seminars and discussion are openly available for anyone to review and help them build their own Jetpacks.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. We do this by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by assisting others who are building technologies that benefit users around the world. Through the Mozilla Education initiative we work with computer science, design and business schools around the world to create learning opportunities for a new generation of Mozilla community members and help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning. By doing this we hope to move closer to Mozilla’s broader goal of making openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life. More information is available at education.mozilla.org.

The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. In 2006 MacArthur launched its digital media and learning initiative to explore how young people are changing as a result of digital media use and what the implications are for libraries, museums and schools. More information is available at www.macfound.org/education.

(*) The Design Challenge is not connected to or affiliated with SXSW in any way.

Why SMS in Africa?

Steve Song — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:05:01 -0600

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.

I think most would agree that the answer is not either/or but a mix of the two. That being the case, it it worth unpacking the merits of either option. I’ve written previously about why IP-based infrastructure in Africa is essential to break down the walled-garden environments that have been established by mobile operators. And though it’s good to have a vision of what communication infrastructure should look like, it is equally important to recognise what exists. Here are five reasons why I think SMS will remain important for some time:

Familiarity of Experience: An important reason for continuing to bet on SMS is the comprehensive familiarity of experience that it enjoys. Everyone understands how SMS works. It works pretty much the same on every phone. SMS is a consistent user experience. Contrast this with designing something even as simple as a USSD app and you find that individual phone design (both physical and OS) interrupts that familiarity of experience.
Always On: SMS is always on. You never have to worry about whether you’ve signed in or not. Or whether it is taking up memory in your phone that is slowing everything else down or worse that it has completely taken over your user interface while in operation. You can rely on SMS to work as long as your phone is on.
Already secure: SMS is directly linked to your phone number which provides a level of identification and transaction security. This makes monetising transactions a whole lot easier. This brings up a side issue for me as to why phone numbers aren’t as personal, universal, and operator-independent as email addresses but I’ll save that for another post.
160 chars is a killer app: What we’ve learned from Twitter is that 160/140 characters is enough space to be valuable to everyone no matter how fast their Internet connection is. SMS is the same. There is room for loads of innovation with SMS alone, if only it were priced appropriately. If SMS cost what it should cost i.e. just a tiny bit more than nothing, then ANY mobile can be an affordable, viable bridge to the Internet.
Network Effects: The biggest reason of all to carry on investing in SMS-based app development is the massive network effects that SMS enjoys. Everyone uses SMS and is reachable via SMS. In order for an IP-based service to be meaningful, it has to reach a critical mass of users. MXit has achieved this in South Africa through a massive take-up among the teen population but I don’t believe this is a generalizable example across the continent, largely because MXit is not a very open platform for developers. For an app to become popular a significant number of the people close to you have to be using it too. It may be that Google’s Android environment does that. Microsoft are also trying to solve that problem with their OneApp solution (Mibli in South Africa). One the other hand, the soaring popularity of Facebook on mobiles may lead to it evolving as a generic platform. Certainly, the first platform to establish itself as a popular consistent sign-on and open application development environment will be a game changer.

10 Global Trends in ICT and Education: my take

Steve Vosloo — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:01:40 -0600

10 Global Trends in ICT and Education is a post by Robert Hawkins on EduTech, the World Bank’s blog on ICT use in Education. It’s a great list, an “aggregation of projections from leading forecasters such as the Horizon Report, personal observations and a good dose of guesswork.”

While I feel that the trends apply mostly to well-resourced, developed-country educational institutions, I’m happy to report that in South Africa (SA) we are seriously exploring:

Trend 1) Mobile Learning — although we’re not focusing on smart phones but rather on feature phones with GPRS-capability, e.g. in the m4Lit (mobiles for literacy) project.

Trend 8) Teacher-generated open content — the Siyavula project from the Shuttleworth Foundation is building a community of teachers and a platform for this very thing.

I think the trends least likely to take hold in SA are 2) Cloud computing (bandwidth is just too expensive and the infrastructure for it not well enough established) and 10) Teacher managers/mentors (in-service teachers don’t want to relinquish the role of font-of-knowledge and “head” of the classroom. A number of factors, such as poor learner discipline and low teacher content knowledge (making the teacher only just a font-of-knowledge, more like a trickling stream of knowledge) make this a complex issue … it is not simply a case of teachers being resistant to change).

A good year on Slideshare

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:10:35 -0600

Last year was a good one for me on Slideshare. In 2009, I uploaded 13 presentations and got:

6,969 views
536 average views per presentation
16 favorites
7 followers

That sets the goal for 2010!

m4Lit strategy ideas from Geek Retreat

Steve Vosloo — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 04:53:20 -0600

At the Geek Retreat at Stanford Valley Lodge I brainstormed two key questions for the future of m4Lit. The idea generation was awesome (despite some Geek Retreaters being wildly hungover). Below is what we came up with.

1. How to grow Kontax? How to make it more “sticky”?

Learn from the Disney model: create characters as a brand in one channel, then take across multiple channels, e.g. TV, radio, merchandise.
Refer a friend / invite a friend.
Advertising: advertise in top youth sites (mobile and web) and MXit. What about Mig33, The Grid?
Campaign with youth brands, e.g. Levis or Coca Cola. Cross over from m-novel to physical product, e.g. Coke can, or virtual merchandise.
Run competition in schools, e.g. write a story or remix a Shakespeare dialogue. Competition where they draw the characters.
Incentivise viral marketing behaviour:

Readers get points when referring friends.
Or they get something of value, e.g. a wallpaper for download after referring 5 friends.
If we publish a Choose Your Own Adventure style story, when arriving at the end of a particular branch of the narrative, send that to a friend, e.g. “This is how my story ended — how will yours end?”

Quiz at the end of a chapter (this is also applicable to the Education version of the mobile library). Have a game aspect, e.g. a leader board.
Facebook:

Have a presence on FB using the Fan feature.
BUT it’s very easy for users to forget they’re fans and not revisit that page, so the story or site must give a reason to go to the Fan page, e.g. for the inside scoop on an event in the story or extra wallpapers.
Put up images of Kontax and tag them.
Write an app that allows users to read the story on FB; when adding the app invite friends; and when the user interacts with the story to post those activities into their newsfeed (status, profile, wall) so that all of their friends see it.

Host story multiple platforms, e.g. www.obami.com.

2. How to monetise Kontax?

Digital is free, pay for print (from print-on-demand service).
Merchandise! Virtual merchandise (paid for), e.g. ringtones, wallpapers, gossip channels.
If we charge for one story, e.g. 2010 Action, then don’t charge for the story alone but bundle it with a ringtone. Or buy a ringtone and get an alternative ending to the story.

A general suggestion: Make the story multidimensional, e.g. story links through to images, videos, chat, etc.

Overall, the weekend was great for networking, putting faces to Twitterer I follow, hearing about very cool projects — such as Cognician — and getting ideas for projects. I’ll definitely attend future retreats. See photos from the weekend.

Further down the rabbit hole; are universities commercial entities?

Andrew Rens — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:46:23 -0600

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

The decision in University of Central Lancashire v Information Commissioner and Colquhoun states:

“We do not consider that the fundamentally charitable character of a university means that it should have no commercial interests. A body which depends on student fees to remain solvent has a commercial interest in maintaining the assets upon which the recruitment of students depends. Moreover, we accept on the evidence that UCLAN operates in competition with other institutions of higher education in seeking to sell its products, namely undergraduate courses, to potential students.”

It is important not to conclude that the ruling is saying that universities are commercial entities. Instead the tribunal found that universities do have commercial interests. It does not follow that universities are commercial entities by virtue of either their nature or their role in society.

The dispute

The tribunal is set up under United Kingdom Freedom of Information legislation, and decides appeals from rulings by the Information Commissioner on information requests. Professor Colquhoun a pharmacologist and research professor at University College London made an information request to the University of Central Lancashire. UCLAN offers a B.Sc degree in homeopathy which is not a regulated profession in England. Prof Colquhoun, sceptical of claims that homeopathy is a science, requested copiesof learning materials from the homeopathy courses from UCLAN. The university refused and Information Commission ruled in Prof Colquhoun’s favour, that ruling was appealed to the tribunal which refused the appeal, and ordered that the information be disclosed.

I am not going to discuss the intricacies of the tribunal’s reasoning, or its place in access to information jurisprudence. There is a summary discussion of the ruling by the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

UCLAN argued that it has a commercial interest in its learning materials, and that disclosure would harm those interests. The tribunal agreed that UCLAN has an interest but found that disclosure would not substantially harm those interests, and that they would be outweighed by the public interest in diclosure

Implications for Creative Commons Non Commercial Licences

Does this ruling have a bearing on the incorporation of Creative Commons Non Commercial licensed material in learning a materials? Although the ruling is that universities have a commercial interest in their learning materials this interest is not necessarily best served by non publication of the materials. The tribunal held”

“Whilst there may be dangers in equating university competition for students with competition within the professions, we note that accountants, solicitors and barristers` chambers, for marketing purposes, routinely publicise without charge the fruits of their experience and professed expertise in the shape of articles, seminars and web – based instruction. Ms. Proops ` argument that UCLAN undervalues the commercial advantages of publishing its wares has some force, we conclude.”

In other words the commercial interest which the tribunal found may be identified with the right to publish the material free as much as it might be with the right to charge for access to the material. The ruling can does not clarify what constitutes “commercial use” because commercial interests may served by free publication as much as by charging for access.

Rather by suggesting that universities are engaging in commercial activities which include their use of learning materials in some way the ruling further complicates the analysis of whether use is commercial or not. I have suggested on this blog that the difficulties of deciding whether a particular use is “non commcercial” or not can best be resolved by adopting a definition of commercial use as actual transactional use; “selling the work, letting the work, including the work in a paid for advertisement or work for hire”. I am willing to be persuaded differently but haven’t seen a compelling arguement, or much arguement at all, to the contrary.

Parting Thought:

If universities are commercial entities like banks, then they should be subsidised, like banks, instead of being starved of funds, like public institutions.

On txtng and language

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:42:54 -0600

In a 2007 article titled Has txt kild the ritn wd?, Geoff Strong (writing in The Age) makes a delicious contribution to the txtng and language debate.

Firstly, he describes the result of txtng as “an emotionally stunted, encrypted creole that has left language purists reaching for their smelling salts and linguistic adventurers salivating.”

Secondly, Strong quotes RMIT University’s Julie Faulkner, who studies trends in popular culture, to highlight the long history of coded communication in the English language: “The implication is that the language of Shakespeare has witnessed a decline but isn’t Shakespeare as heavily coded a form of communication as txt itself?”

Lastly, he says: “Linguistic puritans might moan and long for a golden era of “proper” usage but they forget Shakespeare invented every tenth word he wrote and we still use many of them daily from aggravate to homicide and submerge. Others he invented such as “tortive” meaning twisted and “vastidity” meaning immensity have dropped out of use. Unhandled exception and p(^-^)q could well suffer the same fate.”

Language is constantly changing, increasingly influenced by the medium of communication. Txtng is undeniably a part of that change, whether for the better or not.

Imagine if there was no secret science!

Philipp Schmidt — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:49:53 -0600

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.

Beating the drum for Open

Andrew Rens — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:38:30 -0600

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.

It is the potential of this recursive process; an open process to sustain open processes which gets my attention. Can the forces of enclosure use the open process against the commons? Or are open processes themselves the best protection against enclosure? Openness is always under attack, I am grateful that there are initiatives like Drumbeat to keep the internet open.

Coverage of Kontax (part V)

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:31:33 -0600

The most recent coverage of Kontax has been on the Soul Beat Africa site (from December 2009).

New works in the South African Public Domain

Andrew Rens — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:18:21 -0600

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

Why the 1st of January? For musical, literary and artistic creations (what copyright law calls ‘works’) the term of copyright in South Africa is the life of the author plus fifty years. The fifty years is actually a bit more than than fifty years, because it ends at the end of the year on which the author died. As a result, the 1st of January every year is the day on which new works enter the public domain, or least should enter the public domain if copyright terms are not extended again.

How it works is this. If an author died during 1959 then in South Africa, that author’s works enter the public domain in South Africa. It doesn’t matter whether that author wrote in an another country which has retrospectively extended the copyright term, such as Germany, in South Africa you are free to copy, change and distribute the entire work.

If an author died before 1959 then her work is already in the public domain. If the author died after 1959 or is still alive then the work is still in copyright, unless the work was published pseudonymously or anonymously and the author’s actual identity was not revealed, in which case the copyright expired after fifty years. For photographs, sound recordings, films and computer programs copyright expires after fifty years.

Wallace MacLean identifies an interesting mix of works which entered the public domain yesterday including: “Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens; Anglo-American novelist Raymond Chandler; British sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein; and American architect Frank Lloyd Wright”.

Although some of those authors are from the United States their work will not become available to their countrymen today. Prof James Boyle of Duke explains: “What is entering the public domain in the United States? Sadly, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019.”

This is because lobbyists in the United States were able to persuade Congress to retrospectively extend the term of copyright. Since then those extensions have been vigorously exported to the rest of the world. South Africa however resisted pressure to extend copyright and as a result did not enter into a so called “Free Trade Agreement” with the United States.

As a result we have new work enriching the public domain.

Some South African artists who died in 1959 whose work now enriches the public domain:

Artists:

Cyril Manganyi, Nicolaas Martitz, Keith Calder, Jane Alexander, George Velapi Mazimba, Jacobus Kloppers, Moses Tladi

Authors: Lionel Forman (You Can Hang for Treason)

Architects: David Strachan Haddon

The first Prime Minster of “Grand Apartheid” D F Malan also died in 1959, and his book “Afrikaner Volkseenheid en my ervaringe op die pad daarheen” is now in the public domain. While this may not seem cause for celebration it is necesary for democracies to be able to freely discuss ideas, even or perhaps especially of those who constitute themselves as enemies of democracy.

If you are aware of any other South African artists, musicians, architects and authors who died in 1959 please list them in the comments.

2010 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:32:21 -0600

The HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition will soon be accepting applications. There’s good money to be secured for your projects and it’s open to South Africans. I was a judge for the competition last year and can confirm that they look for innovation from developing countries — so we should go for it!

2010 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition

We are pleased to announce that all information regarding the 2010 international HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition—including detailed category explanations and guidelines, critical deadlines, application materials, etc.—is now available at www.dmlcompetition.net.

The theme of this year’s Competition is Reimagining Learning and there are two types of awards: 21st Century Learning Lab Designers and Game Changers.

Aligned with National Lab Day as part of the White House’s Educate to Innovate Initiative, the 21st Century Learning Lab Designer awards will range from $30,000-$200,000. Awards will be made for learning environments and digital media-based experiences that allow young people to grapple with social challenges through activities based on the social nature, contexts, and ideas of science, technology, engineering and math.

The Game Changers category—undertaken in cooperation with Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) and Electronic Arts (EA), Entertainment Software Assocation, and the Information Technology Industry Council—will award amounts ranging from $5,000-$50,000 for creative levels designed with either LittleBigPlanet™ or Spore™ Galactic Adventures that offer young people engaging game play experiences and that incorporate and leverage principles of science, technology, engineering and math for learning.

Each category will include several Best in Class awards selected by expert judges, as well as a People’s Choice Award selected by the general public. The online application system will open on January 7 and will include three rounds of submissions, with public comment at each stage.

Please see www.dmlcompetition.net for all details.

Siyavula Workshops: Growing Active, Teacher-Led Communities

Mark Horner — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:18:44 -0600

Since March of this year, ISKME has been studying Siyavula’s workshops, documenting the project’s model for teacher professional development and community building as a way to shed light on the formation and engagement of Siyavula’s OER communities. Through workshop observations and interviews with workshop facilitators and Siyavula project leaders to date, our work has revealed the following:

Workshop participants viewed the ability to share and collaborate as a key benefit of Siyavula and OER, and expressed interest in ways that they could increase collaboration at their schools. Teacher comments from the workshops included, “Wow, this is really a paradigm shift – we are sharing and can collaborate,” and “How do we move this [concept of sharing] into our school sites?”

During the workshops, observers noted that communities of teachers began to organically form groups around subject-specific content areas; however, participants and facilitators indicated that additional support is needed to help the groups sustain momentum. They also cited limited Internet access on behalf of teachers as potential hindrance to sustained communities.

Several participants expressed their intention to take concrete next steps to implement or share information about Siyavula in their schools, and two have already emerged as advocates for Siyavula, training their own colleagues on the model with help from Siyavula’s facilitators. Several requests for additional professional development sessions have emerged out of Siyavula’s initial workshops, many of which are existing communities seeking to contribute and upload their existing content to Siyavula on Connexions.

ISKME’s next steps include expanding on the community-building themes that have begun to surface from the research through analysis of data collected during its November 2009 workshop observations, school site visits and teacher interviews. During the spring of 2010, ISKME will continue its data collection efforts to document and assess the ways that individuals and communities of teachers are sharing, using, reusing and localizing Siyavula content, and how participation in Siyavula has potentially impacted teaching and learning practices and perceptions on behalf of teachers.

Notes to self on Tweeting Conferences etc

Andrew Rens — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:22:04 -0600

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.

(1) Use a hashtag so that others can search the tag and see tweets about the process other than oneself.

(2)Remind followers to search the hash tag to get a fuller picture.

(3) Tweet links to background documents, relevant websites and other resources that will enable people to make

(4) Invite questions about the process people following the proceedings. If you can pose questions to speakers all the better but even if not, an offer to clarify can change the conversation.

Mozilla Jetpack For Learning Design Challenge enters phase II

Philipp Schmidt — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:33:13 -0600

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.

The selected teams are eligible to participate in a set of online seminars covering Jetpack development and user interface design. They will also get support and mentorship from the Mozilla community to help them turn their ideas into Jetpack prototypes. At the end of phase II up to 10 participants will be invited to a hands-on Design Camp at SXSW Interactive 2010.

Have a look at our phase 2 projects:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning

The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge invites software developers, designers, and educators to help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment. It is sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

KZN Year-end Conference

Mark Horner — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:51:20 -0600

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.

Our KZN group certainly has our attention and we thank them for their dedication and zest. KZN you rock!

FullMarks Design

Mark Horner — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:54:16 -0600

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.

We have got the look of the front-page tied down though and here is a screenshot of what www.fullmarks.org.za will look like early in 2010:

Once the site is up we’ll be organising some content uploading sprints to make sure we get the breadth of subjects covered as quickly as possible.

2009: A year in review

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:38:40 -0600

What did I do in 2009 as the fellow for 21st Century Learning at the Shuttleworth Foundation?

I have focused on mobile learning. Why?

In South Africa (SA), up to 100% of youth have access to mobile phones. Access to computers is around 10%. The mobile phone is the technology in the hands of young people.
Enabled by mobile phones and social media like MXit and Facebook, the way young people communicate and socialise are fundamentally changing. Mobiles are driving a “social revolution“.
Most of the time mobile phones are used outside of the educational sphere. At school they are banned (I argue that this is not the right response); in the media, teens are abducted by MXit contacts, or use their phones to make and share child porn. Even the very idea of mobile phones to support teaching, learning and administration cannot be entertained because of all the negativity surrounding them (I have found this in South Africa and in Zambia!)

While the potential for learning via mobile phones is enormous, very little is being done to exploit this — in way of projects, research or policies. As a fellow, I couldn’t just stand there any longer and watch this opportunity get wasted.

The reality is that mobile phones are highly pervasive; they are used to communicate, to disseminate information and to play games; to develop identities and be social; and for creative expression. In learning terms, these are highly desirable attributes. Mobile phones are incredibly powerful — arguably more disruptive than PCs as tools for learning . Of course, there are risks and constraints. But these can only be managed if we seriously engage with mobile learning. This needs to happen inside and outside of schools (in the 21st century, as at all times in history, learning doesn’t only happen in the classroom).

Given the above, I did three things: 1) made some noise about mlearning to popularise it, to challenge perceptions (like that txtng is all bad, which it isn’t), and to offer new possibilities to teachers; 2) created an online space for mlearning related materials; and 3) focused on one particular area where I think huge impact to increase reading and writing can be made: m-novels.

1. Raised awareness of mlearning

I’ve presented at conferences in South Africa, New York and Florida. I’ve spoken to 230 principals in Johannesburg, curriculum advisors in Zambia, and pre-service teachers in Cape Town. I’ve written for the M&G’s The Teacher (SA’s largest teacher focused publication), and Tech Leader and Thought Leader blogs. These blogs invite South Africa’s thought leaders to give commentary and analysis. Together with other researchers, I’ve co-authored a conference paper (mLearn 2009) and a journal article. I’ve written a paper and book chapter related to mlearning. I interviewed teens about their mobile phone use and made videos.

Much of this effort entails putting mlearning in the minds of teachers, principals, curriculum advisors and even parents. We are in the early days of mlearning — but just where on the adoption path is hard to say. It’s difficult to compare it to traditional elearning, where for many years the focus was on providing access to PCs. Mobile phones are already in the hands of people. The focus is on utilising existing assets and providing cheaper access to voice, SMS and data services. This path is about effective use, not uptake.

2. An online resource for mlearning in Africa

I created mLearning Africa, a site for projects, papers and news about mlearning on the continent. This is the first such site on the web — a necessary step to begin connecting the few people and projects in this space.

3. Mobiles for literacy

It is well known that one of the contributors to the low-literacy levels of South African learners is that not enough reading and writing happens at schools and home. 51% of households don’t have any leisure books! Teens are actually reading and writing all the time on their mobile phones, e.g. MXit sends 250 million messages each day. (In the USA, the same has been found: huge amounts of reading and writing, but not formally — rather as IM conversations, SMSes, MySpace posts, Facebook updates, etc. But they need to be reading and writing longer pieces of text too. Traditional literacy is a requirement for these “new media” literacies.

Since August I have led the m4Lit — mobiles for literacy — project, which has explored whether teens are interested in reading stories on their mobile phones, whether and how they write around those stories using their mobiles, and whether mobiles might be used to develop a love of reading. Read the overview of the project, or for up-to-date news the project blog. I looked at the phenomenal success of m-novels in Japan and wondered, will they work here? With SA’s severe shortage of books, and our teens not reading and writing enough, can mobile phones fill that gap?

To find out, I commissioned an m-novel, and followed how teens experienced it. Kontax is a teen mystery short story, published on a mobisite and on MXit. (Check out the story illustrations and the story launch press release). The story is aimed at 14-17 year olds, and written in English and isiXhosa (a world first for m-novels!) I didn’t just want to tell a story though, I invited reader participation — on the site they could comment, meet the characters, write on their walls. I even gave them prizes for commenting and submitting Kontax sequel ideas.

The m4Lit team researched 50 teens in Cape Town (from Langa and Guguletu) as they experienced the story, and also looked at the engagement with the story from teens around the country. This is what we found:

The kids love it! Over 5,000 teens have read the story since it’s launch in September. In SA, a book that sells 3,000 copies is a best-seller. Comparing ebooks to printed books is problematic for many reasons, but in the absence of other comparable ebooks, it is somewhat useful. (Do you have to sell something for it to be a best-seller — Kontax is free, after all? No. Amazon’s ebook bestseller list is based on number of downloads, not sales — there are free ebooks in the list.)
The readers like to comment and submit ideas. We received over 300 comments on the mobisite, and over 1,500 sequel ideas on MXit.
In terms of language, there is interest in indigenous language stories. Of the surveyed teens, 25% read at least some of the isiXhosa version of the story; on the mobisite, 50% of isiXhosa-speaking users posted comments in isiXhosa; and on MXit, 51% of of isiXhosa-speakers in the Western Cape read the isiXhosa version of the story (estimated). Associate Professor Ana Deumert, a linguist, pointed out: “Given the systematic marginalisation of isiXhosa, the lack of access to isiXhosa literacy in the education system and the dearth of isiXhosa reading material, the uptake should be seen as a success.”
From the survey we established that there is a strong correlation between language choice and communication mode, e.g. the teens spoke isiXhosa to someone else “face-to-face” but used English, isiXhosa and txtspk when communicating digitally. In schools, it is only traditional paper-based and oral forms of communication that are practised and valued.
From the survey, Dr Marion Walton, an expert in mobile literacies, found that “for most of our target group, digital writing takes place primarily on mobile phones. Computer use is intermittent and seems to rely on public access (school, library) rather than home access. In contrast, mobile phones and MXit are pervasive. When digital texts are created or read, they tend to be short texts on mobile phones – SMS and MXit. There was more evidence of digital reading (browsing the web) on computers than of word processing or other computer-based writing.”
For the survey participants most reading takes place on mobile phones or on paper. Other than Facebook, SMS and MXit (46% of what the survey participants read), everything our sample learners had read on the previous day was printed on paper.
There were many requests for teens to be able to write their own pieces (poems, lyrics, stories, etc.)

In addition to the interesting research findings, Kontax drew a huge amount of interest from the media, including from the BBC (radio and web), SAfm, Metro FM and Business Day. It also won a Bronze Pixel in the Bookmarks Awards 2009 (the only medal in it’s category).

So, for me two things are important:

Kontax has clearly demonstrated that mobile phones are a viable platform for teen reading and writing, as well as for teens to network around their literacy practices.
Teens are doing their digital reading, writing and communicating on mobile phones; it is crucial to understand and take advantage of this for educational purposes.

This must be exploited in SA. If we can provide m-novels for teens and a platform for them to write their own content, then we will make a profound impact on literacy in this country.

What next?

The question we always ask at the Shuttleworth Foundation is So what? What do we do with the m4Lit findings? I believe the following must happen:

More stories must be published … a “mobile library” — where we publish Kontax and public domain titles.
Kontax must be grown — more readers and more translations (done via crowd-sourcing) in other South African and international languages. An m-novel with high readership – one prominent success story – is a very powerful way to get other people into this space, like authors, publishers, teachers.
Teens must be given a space to write and read and comment on stories, poems, lyrics, etc., via their mobile phones. Fan fiction sites like fanfiction.net have been shown to be spaces for peer-to-peer language and grammar learning.
Alignment of Kontax – or any story on a mobile phone, and learner writing around that – with the curriculum, ideally having it used as a prescribed text. There has been an offer from a high school in Cape Town to include Kontax as a prescribed book next year, and with learners writing assignments on it (for marks). In the bigger picture, there is simply not enough recognition within the education system of mobile literacies, despite the striking prevalence of both in South African teens’ lives. This must change.

I will continue to make noise, to put mlearning materials online, and to employ mobile phones for teen reading and writing. SA simply cannot afford the wasted opportunity cost of not doing these things.

Advocating Openess

Andrew Rens — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:22:42 -0600

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

Some three years ago pioneers of social innovation in South Africa, excited about access to knowledge, openness and the knowledge commons were struggling with the default setting of closed in policies, laws and minds. People seeking to radically change education, scholarly communication, innovation, publishing and standards in South Africa encountered Intellectual Property law as an obstruction. Intellectual Property law is complex, technical and in many cases unclear. How could engineers, teachers, techies and social entrepreneurs navigate around the obstruction?

Presciently Helen Turvey hired me not only to help open projects as they grappled with intellectual property issues but also to identify the major systematic challenges to open presented by intellectual property law and opportunities to change it. I became, in the words of my good friend Philipp Schmidt “chief counsel for the open movement in South Africa”.

The team at the Shuttleworth Foundation reckon that good change happens faster if we can first change default settings of closed to open. Often the default is set by to closed by intellectual property; law but also by intellectual property policy and practises.

During the first two years we learned that if we were familiar with the shape of problems, and the solutions which had been tried that we were prepared, so that when conditions changed and presented an opportunity we could act quickly. We learned to take advantage of existing processes for policy advocacy, as well as devising longer processes for systemic change. We acted as a resource to others so that they could move faster and challenge the barriers in their own spheres.

After nearly three years the social innovation space in South Africa is moving towards openness. Although I haven’t achieved all that I’d liked to in the time, thanks to the support of colleagues, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and our partners we’ve given shape to desirable reforms, mapped major obstacles, neutralised some dangers and helped a lot of projects. There are now many more people working in this space who know how to navigate around the hazards of Intellectual Property.

Sharing ideas and experiences was always central to my work but during 2009 I concentrated on turning our previous efforts, and learnings into resources that others can use in the future. This has resulted in two initiatives: Copyright for Educators, and an analysis of access to knowledge efforts in South Africa.

Copyright for Educators is an open, scenario based, course which incorporates many of the lessons we’ve learned from grappling with copyright issues in learning environments. Copyright for Educators was one of the anchor course of the Peer to Peer University pilot. One of the participants was able to get credit for the course as independent study in his Instructional Technology PhD. His assessment of the first iteration of the course was: “for a first pass, I felt the organization of the Copyright for Educators course was very good. The content was interesting and to the point.”

The most challenging issue which the course deals with is the inclusion of copyright works used under exceptions, like fair use, in materials that are under open licences. For example someone might use a photograph under an educational exception in an instruction module that is under a Creative Commons licence. I first raised this issue in a Shuttleworth Foundation issue paper, which subsequently became a chapter in a book: Implementing the World Intellectual Property Agenda (available for free download). The issue has been taken up by ccLearn, the people at Creative Commons focused on open education, who’ve developed a report “Otherwise Open” and recommendations for educators.

There have been a wide range of approaches to increasing access to knowledge in South Africa, but no single record of the different approaches. During 2009 I was able to organise many of the activists, scholars and entrepreneurs to contribute to research on the different approaches and projects, and to have it published as part of the Yale Access to Knowledge Research Series. It examines the battle for open standards, the Foundation’s intervention into the Pearson publishing mergers, the Free High School Science Texts project, and the work of partner projects such the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge project, and the Opening Scholarship project at the University of Cape Town.

I had the opportunity to contribute a great deal to the Foundation’s Open Resources policy. The policy and the thinking behind it were featured as cutting edge in a report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing, Policies, Practices and Opportunities.

South Africa still has a long way to go towards an open knowledge society, the kind of society with networks of links, code and content open at every level. But there is now movement towards open as a default setting. Increasingly, closing resources is no longer assumed to be good in itself but must be justified.

Siyavula Cape Town year-end conference

Mark Horner — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:11:47 -0600

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.

Crowdsourced covers are in.

Mark Horner — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:31:42 -0600

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.

We had many submissions and there were some great ones but these were the most popular amongst members of the FHSST and OpenPress teams. I’ll write up a more detailed follow-up post when we’ve got the maths ones in.

Alternative accreditation - first ideas and upcoming workshop in Boston 2010

Philipp Schmidt — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:16:22 -0600

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.

I recently participated in the Berkman Center Free Culture Research workshop, which brought together an interesting group of free culture researchers and activists at the place where — one could argue — it all started. We were asked to prepare short essays on our key interests for free culture research, and I decided to focus on peer assessment and accreditation. Although my interest is education and not free culture per se, the mechanisms by which peers evaluate each others work, and collaboratively improve on it, lie at the heart of commons-based peer production, and are hence relevant to the broader free culture movement as well. You can download the essay from the Berkman wiki.

Together with Chris, Stian, and Joel Thierstein I wrote a longer piece on “Peer-To-Peer Recognition of Learning in Open Education“ for the International Review on Research of Open Distance Learning (IRRODL).

The two papers provide a first impression of our thinking on accreditation in the open social education world. With support from the Shuttleworth Foundation, we will be organizing a P2PU research sandpit (in the Boston area, possibly in May 2010) for a few people who want to design what this open accreditation world could look like - and then build it. If you are working on similar ideas, or know someone who is, we’d love to hear form you. The idea is to start talking in a slightly larger group now, and then meet in Boston with the ones that want to implement what we come up with.

I’d like to close by saying -> Q3DFN58YF93S <- yes, I only now signed up for Technorati.

Alternative accreditation - first ideas and upcoming workshop in Boston 2010

Philipp Schmidt — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:16:22 -0600

I’d like to close by saying -> Q3DFN58YF93S <- yes, I only now signed up for Technorati.

AMESA KZN- First upload-focussed workshop

Mark Horner — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:32:29 -0600

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.

Reflections on Choosing Connexions

Mark Horner — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:49:25 -0600

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.

Just for interest, my off-the-cuff list of the big OER platforms is (apologies to those not mentioned):

Connexions

Curriki

CK12

WikiEducator

I’m the first to admit that it would be an incredible amount of fun and possibly extremely satisfying (assuming success) to try to build a new, better, slicker, faster solution from scratch but the OER world has some pretty significant players now and there is little to be gained from additional fragmentation. In fact, consolidation may be one of the best things we could see in the OER space now that governments are starting to take OERs seriously.

Context: Education in South Africa

A quick context description is the best place to start and I’ve put some of the context information down in an earlier post about the Siyavula strategy.

The four key features that the Siyavula software framework needs to provide are:
Importing – the ability to import already existing material so that teachers and organisations can share easily
Editing – the ability to edit, adapt, enhance and reorganise resources
Vetting – the ability to flag content as approved by either an individual or organisation
Typesetting – the ability to produce print-ready material because the vast majority of South African learners need hardcopy material, this is the primary accessibility requirement in South Africa

As part of our sustainability model Siyavula did not want to be responsible for building another web-portal from scratch and maintaining it. We sought a platform that we could use or partner with that embraced openness. We chose Connexions as our platform and have been working with the Connexions team for well over a year now.

Apart from ensuring that the platform had a strong team backing it, good governance and other due-process related things, we considered:

Open Licence

Connexions demonstrates an extreme commitment to openness in all aspects. The software that is used on www.cnx.org is an extension of Plone and is available as a separate open-source project called Rhaptos.

The content on Connexions is licenced under Creative Commons By-Attributions licence. This licence ensures that the content is compatible with all other projects using Creative Commons licences, even those that have chosen more restrictive ones and also enables the possibility for the exploration of commercial enterprises based on the open content items. Many other projects use more restrictive licensing constraining use and innovation.

Homogeneous vs. Heterogeneous Repositories

For communities with real diversity to form rapidly within the body of content it should be rapidly re-usable and re-mixable. For this to be possible the content needs to be edited and mixed easily and rapidly online, imposing the requirement that the content be homogeneous in a number of respects.

Format

Repositories that allow users to upload files in a random selection of formats do not promote rapid re-use and re-mixing as users are required to have all the relevant software packages (many proprietary) to make adaptations. This places an unnecessary burden on the users and hampers content adaptation and enhancement.

Connexions imports all text-based content and homogenises it, storing it in XML. This ensures that all content in the repository can be re-mixed without users requiring any special transformations or software packages. XML also allows proper semantic mark-up which has many additional benefits, for example equations stored in MathML can be imported into the vast majority of maths packages allowing users to interact with the content.

Licence

Repositories that contain content of mixed licensing can be frustrating for users as they are often not clear what content can be re-mixed, even if the format is compatible.
All Connexions content is licensed under the same copyright licence ensuring maximal mixing.

Structured Content

The vast majority of K-12 (known as R-12 in South Africa) content requires structure. Wiki-based platforms, based on a model involving a flat structure of individual pages are not well suited to the collaborative development of cohesive, coherent structured texts (see FHSST How-To for detailed anecdotes of WikiBooks usage). It is possible to restructure wiki software to behave more like a content management system with structured content but the simpler solution IMHO is to begin with a content management system.

Connexions provides the ability to develop structured content in the form of collections, ensuring that small units can be developed, modules, as well as books or entire courses.

The full revision history of any published resource is also permanently available on Connexions allowing courses, books or sites to reference specific versions of resources even though new editions may exist.

Editing

To simplify the content creation process and ensure that once a user had access to the content repository they were able to adopt an authoring the platform had to provide both authoring as well as a solid repository.

Connexions is such a solution, allowing users to edit content that has been imported or create content from scratch online.

Permissions

Although all content can be re-mixed by all users on Connexions, users still have control over their own versions of a module. This in fact increases freedom as users produce their own versions of content rather than entering into flame-wars around controversial resources, particularly prevalent in wikis where a single page exists on a topic.

A solution was required that would allow different versions of resources to exist in parallel. This is particularly important in a context like the South African context where we expect many parallel versions of a resource to exist to cater for the vast number of cultural and social contexts that need to be catered for.

Workgroups

The sustainability of content in the Siyavula project will be ensured through communities of practice. All candidate platforms needed to provide organic communities with a space in which to exchange content, ideas and collaboratively develop new resources.
Connexions provides this through workgroup functionality.

Vetting

To ensure credibility with the vast majority of the teaching corps, content vetting is required. Connexions provides light-weight lens functionality which easily allows for multiple vetting agencies to approve the same content items.

Typesetting

The primary accessibility requirement in South Africa is still hard-copy. A solution that allows for the typesetting of content is needed to gain real traction.
Connexions provides a typesetting solution which handles mathematics well, something most solutions aren’t capable of handling.

Decision

The primary platform discriminators for the Siyavula project were:

homogeneity of format and licence,
structured content, and
typesetting.

Serious consideration was also given to choosing a platform and deploying it ourselves but this was shelved for sustainability reasons. For reference, some platforms considered were:

Plone / EduCommons
Drupal (extension of www.fhsst.org)
MediaWiki

Topics like homogeneity of repository and requiring structured content (to wiki or not to wiki) eliminate many of the candidate platforms. Coupling the need for proper typesetting ensures that Connexions is the only sustainable solution that simultaneously:

allows external development on the underlying platform,
imports content into a homogised format,
provides an authoring platfrom with the relevant permissions and structure,
supports the organic growth of virtual communities with their own space,
enables effective solutions for vetting, and
is coupled to an effective typesetting engine.

P2PU - learning from open source (2)

Philipp Schmidt — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:47:28 -0600

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

As open communities grow, governance becomes a (fascinating) challenge. If you want to scale, and P2PU does want to scale, you need more people to feel ownership and take responsibility. That can be scary for the people who started the project, because how do you retain focus as more people with more (and different?) ideas arrive, and how do you preserve a sense of common values and culture?

I spent some time investigating how open source communities deal with issues of governance to see if we can learn from their experience. There is a great video on poisonous people in open source communities, which touches on a lot of issues that are relevant to governance of P2PU, although I think it’s better to frame the topic in a positive way. Rather than fighting against poisonous participants, it’s really about creating a healthy open source community. The video is long, but worth watching if you have an hour over lunch or so: http://sites.google.com/site/io/how-open-source-projects-survive-poisonous-people

The difference between decisions and discussion

It’s ok to have different levels of responsibilities, but communication has to be transparent and open. People often think the essence of open source is that anyone can do anything. That is far from true. Open source projects generally have clearly defined levels of quality control and responsibility, and processes how participants can gain such responsibility. Usually, only a small group of developers has the right to “commit” new code into the core application. Other developers can submit their proposals for new or improved code, but these suggestions are reviewed before they become part of the application. Usually the developers who already have commit rights can grant similar rights to more people, effectively promoting them based on their contributions to the project.

While the core group is trusted to make decisions on behalf of the community, all discussions and deliberations that these decisions are based on, happen in the open and anyone can in fact add their voice and opinion. This is fundamentally different from traditional organization, where typically the people who make the decisions discuss them amongst each other, and then announce certain developments to the wider community. In open source projects these discussions are open to all. This provides a constant check on the decisions of the code committers, because there is no room to hide bad decisions, and it turns the role of accountability on its head. In open source, the ones who have special responsibility become accountable to the community, rather than the other way around. The only discussion that remains private, is the one focused on promoting new people to higher levels of responsibility - in order to avoid embarrassment to the individuals.

There are some important differences between software and P2PU. We don’t have the focus on a single artifact (the software code) that everyone works on, and which has to function together. The closest thing we have to software code are courses, which are typically designed by one or a few individuals, and which don’t rely on each other to function as a whole. One way we could map the concept of a core group of “committers” would be in the form of course shepherds. Only trusted community members, who have earned this extra responsibility can “commit” a new course to P2PU. I can see lots of complications with an approach like that for P2PU, but it is an avenue worth exploring.

A lesson from open source that is easier to implement right now is the opening up of discussion and deliberation. Currently, P2PU has three tiers of conversations: the founders discuss organizational questions that are mostly focused on keeping the P2PU machine running so that the community can do what they would like to do. This includes things like organizing the next workshop, the need for a non-profit organization (or not), etc.. Increasingly the main conversations are migrating from that small group to what we call the P2PU gang mailing list, which brings together people who have made a significant contribution (organized a course, helped us with licensing issues, advised on technology, etc.). We currently rely on recommendations from this core group to add new people to the list. And finally there is the broader P2PU community that would include all of the above, but also participants in courses, and potentially outsiders. We don’t currently have a space for this wide open conversation, but it is something we are building into our new web-site.

General rough consensus works

Another misconception about decision-making in open source is that all decisions happen by voting. In fact, one quote from the video that really stood out, was “If you see a community that is voting all the time, something is very wrong”. During our Berlin workshop we adopted something called the “(emerging) general rough consensus”. In all group discussion we had one note keeper, who would at the end of the discussion, list all the points that the group seemed to have consensus on. Disagreement was encouraged and if one person flagged an issue as needing further discussion then we either discussed it more or noted that no general rough consensus could be found. It sounds complicated, but worked like a charm.

Unfortunately we weren’t the first ones who came up with it. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been using a process that is sometimes referred to as rough consensus and running code to guide its deliberations on the technical foundations that keep the Internet running. If it’s good enough for the Internet, it’s good enough for us.

Culture counts

Culture is another important aspect in open source communities, and I took away two key lessons on culture form the video: One, the founders of a project create the initial culture, which ideally becomes self-selecting in the sense that people who share this culture will be attracted and feel welcome in the community, whereas people with different values and ideas will not. And second, it is important to articulate both a clearly defined (and narrow) focus and a few core values as boundaries around your culture, so that you can refer to them when needed.

At P2PU, I think we have been quite successful with the first one. It certainly felt that the community that worked together in Berlin shared a substantive common set of values and culture and was excited by similar ideas for the future of P2PU. There are always individual differences, and that is a good thing, as long as there is enough overall coherence on what we are trying to do.

With respect to the second point of articulating culture and values, I think there are some potential downsides, or rather pitfalls if it is not done carefully. I have experience discussions in the free culture movement, where attempts to define the “movement” led to fragmentation - as people tended to focus on differences, rather than commonalities. Once the conversation is framed in the context of differences, it becomes very difficult to remember that after all, we share most of the important ideas and values. Sometimes it is easier to manifest culture in action and implementation than it is to define it through a discussion. Given those reservations, I think we do need a set of shared values - broad values - that we articulate on our web-site, and Alison has started compiling a draft version of what that could look like.

The video also speak about paying attention to newcomers and that is something we decided to start doing more seriously, both in the form of someone from the community welcoming new members when they create an account. For people interested in organizing a new course, we will offer an orientation — a set of pointers on how to best structure a course for P2PU, and the possibility to speak to someone who has organized a course in the past and is available to answer any questions that might come up.

The last aspect about culture that I want to mention here is the friction between growing very fast and retaining a shared culture. Nadeem who is head of development at Talis explains that take a lot of time to get to know job applicants in order to understand if they fit in with the organizational culture. He argues that it is easier to help developers become more productive, than it is to integrate them into a culture they don’t click with. Which makes me wonder how Google does this. They seem be very good at establishing and retaining a strong corporate culture even during a period of rapid growth of their community.

What started out as a few ideas around governance, mushroomed into a monster blog post. If you read all the way down to here you deserve a special treat. Here is a video about culture that highlights two important lessons: one person is enough to make a difference, and people like to do stuff together.

Siyavula as a Framework

Mark Horner — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:06:03 -0600

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.

How is Siyavula going to achieve its goal?

The short answer is we will enable the appropriate use of technology to support the formation of new and enhance the process of existing communities of practice of teachers that share, adapt, develop, enhance and redistribute resources.

A simple schematic of the education system shows how the curriculum is determined by the Department of Education (DoE) and then propagates through the provinces, districts and ultimately to the Curriculum Advisors who are charged with ensuring and supporting its delivery in the classroom. When we look at the landscape of teachers we find that the majority of teachers feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of them. Issues like insufficient support, resources or training contribute to this and makes them feel isolated.

We do find groups of teachers (communities of practice) that come together to share resources, discuss curriculum and content and support each other. These groups swap and share information, resources and support. One notable feature of these groups is that they often seem to be formed by reasonably well-resourced teachers, so the access to resources is not the sole driver for their existence, and the sharing of information and support is important too. Sharing is fundamental to teaching and a core part of teachers’ values.
To enhance the effectiveness of groups and support the isolated teachers, given the the ideas Siyavula is building on, we need to provide:

Online learning materials	Curriculum	Community / Workgroups
Online repository Accessibility Online tools	A curriculum framework Vetting roles for experts	Community tools Support Enhanced sharing

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

One of the beautiful features of using a web-based platform to support the sharing is that the teachers who are creating material aren’t impacted by others downloading it whereas, with paper resources, they’d need to produce extra copies, transport them and actually push their content out. Now the resources can be accessed when and as needed with no extra work required by the original author.

To support as many teachers as possible from the launch of the project, Siyavula has acquired a set of curriculum resources which teachers can use, adapt, print and enhance in addition to adding their own resources to the project. The material that Siyavula has acquired so far covers:

Foundation phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
Intermediate phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
Senior phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
FET phase – textbooks for Physical Science and Mathematics

The acquisition and sharing of this content allows Siyavula to engage with teachers as a sharing partner, in contrast to seeking donations of content in good faith or adopting a pure advocacy role.

Over time isolated teachers will also begin to share resources back, ensuring that their latent knowledge, especially around context challenges, starts to be shared, and then either form their own communities or join existing ones so that we eventually have communities of practice that are adapting and enhancing resources for all the imaginable contexts that exist within the South African education system. The wide variety of contexts is something that the traditional publishing model is unlikely to address and requires very localised and specific knowledge. This enabling feature of OERs is likely to have even more of an impact than the cost savings that are possible.

A Treaty for the Visually Impaired

Andrew Rens — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:02:20 -0600

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.

Countries participating in the WIPO meeting are considering the Proposal by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay, relating to limitations and exceptions: Treaty proposed by the World Blind Union (WBU) at the Copyright Committee of the World Intellectual Property Organisation on May 25, 2009.

What are the legal considerations from a South African perspective of the proposed exceptions and limitations?

How would the treaty proposal interact with existing South African law?

The most important law in South Africa is the Constitution which is the supreme law. South African supreme law requires that visually impaired persons should not be discriminated against on the grounds of their impairment (section 8 of the Bill of Rights). The South African government is obliged not only to prohibit such discrimination but take positive steps to ensure that visually impaired persons enjoy the progressive realisation of their rights to education (section 29) and access to information (sections 16 and 32). The progressive realisation of these fundamental rights is currently constrained by dual limitations on the adaptation of material for the needs of visually impaired persons.
Firstly the current Copyright Act, drafted decades before the advent of democratic government, forbids the South African government from simply adapting materials to serve the needs of visually impaired citizens. Secondly even if permission is obtained for ta particular he adaptation of a particular work then that work must be adapted in South Africa, even if it has been adapted elsewhere. Adaptation is costly, so the duplication of adaptation efforts is grossly ineffecient.

The proposed minimum exceptions and limitations offer a solution to the problem created by legislation passed by the previous non-democratic state which limits the rights of visually impaired South Africans in an unconstitutional way. As a result amending South African copyright law in line with the proposed Treaty to enable visually impaired persons to exercise their rights to education, and information is not just desirable but required by the supreme law, the Constitution. The proposed Treaty will assist to make exceptions and limitations in South African legislation for visually impaired persons much more effective because it will address the second factor, the restrictions on the import of materials adapted for visually impaired persons, by permitting materials adapted in countries with relatively more resources to be shared in South Africa. The Treaty is in harmony with the supreme law of South Africa, the Constitution 106 of 1996.

How will the treaty proposal interact with existing international obligations of South Africa?

Like all sovereign nations South Africa is entitled to agree with other sovereign nations to vary its existing obligations in terms of international law. Although a possibility for South Africa this is not necessary in the case of the proposed Treaty which intends to harmonise minimum exceptions for visually impaired persons. Minimum exceptions for visually impaired persons fit into the types exceptions guaranteed to countries by the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property.

What are the possible benefits of or concerns about the treaty proposal, including with regard to the objectives of the treaty proposal, how those objectives could lead to improved access for the blind and visually impaired, and any concerns about the implementation of the proposed treaty provisions in South Africa or abroad?

A major concern is that the overbroad provisions of the proposed enforcement treaty (ACTA) currently being written without the participation of South Africa and most developing countries will make cross border transfer of materials adapted for visually impaired persons into criminal offences. Apparently even though South Africa and most developed countries are not permitted to be party to the ACTA planning it is intended to be unilaterally imposed on South Africa and other developing countries. Unfortunately its impossible to engage in deeper analysis the likely negative impact of that treaty on the rights of visually impaired persons since it is being negotiated in secret.

Globally far too few resources are available to address the needs of visually impaired persons. Currently those resources are being wasted, as each effort to adapt material for visually impaired persons whether permitted by national exceptions or through voluntary arrangements is confined to a specific country. Thus in each country resources may be devoted to adapting a work even though it has already been adapted in many other countries. The Treaty will enable the creation of global systems which enable efficient use of the limited resources.

What other possible courses of action would facilitate access by blind, visually impaired, and other reading disabled persons?

One alternative proposal that has been suggested is that publishing industry, by which is mean the three or four incumbent multinationals which dominate the global publishing industry enter into some sort of voluntary agreement between them and the representatives of the visually impaired to enable theblind. However recent technological and consequent economic changes put the continued viability of the publishing industry in question, so a voluntary agreement may not be a long or even medium term solution. A voluntary undertaking by incumbent publishers will also not give access to orphan works. Orphan works are copyright works that are inaccessible because permission cannot be obtained because the rights holders cannot be located, and possibly no longer exist.

Minimum exceptions are thus necessary to ensure that visually impaired persons have access in a technology neutral way which operates in all environments, and without requiring the consent of any information intermediaries whether search engines, internet service providers or other intermediaries. Only a treaty which creates legal rights will ensure that visually impaired persons get access to knowledge not matter what happens technologically or economically.

Legal opinions and reviews for other jurisdictions are hosted at a US government site.

Follow Up on Mbilwi Secondary School

Mark Horner — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:21:30 -0600

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.

It turns out that Mbilwi has been doing an excellent job of interesting its students in science for many years as Azwinndini was quick to point out that he too attended Mbilwi. Azwinndini mentioned the possibility of going back to the school to talk to the students and I suggested that we might be able to support the school with some of the OER resources we’re looking to print and I think we’ve got a great opportunity to spread OERs, create new partnerships and even get Mbilwi feeding back into the OER world.

It was nice to be able to reconnect with Azwinndini as we really have an opportunity to give Mbilwi further recognition for their achievements as well as give me an opportunity to work on the UCT Physics Department to think about the impact of OERs (hint, hint).

SMS Interconnect Fees

Steve Song — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:48:55 -0600

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.

Less speculative is the cost to the operator of sending an SMS. I have written previously on the egregiously high cost of sending SMSes in Africa. However, to add insult to injury, in at least 17 African countries, operators charge an interconnect fee for connecting with other operators nationally. In many cases they are doubling even tripling the cost of sending an SMS. The argument for levying an interconnect charge is based on the need of the operator to recover the costs of terminating a call or in this case an SMS on their network. But let’s face it, the incremental cost of terminating an SMS on an operator’s network is effectively zero or near enough to zero to as to make no difference. In many countries, including South Africa, there are no internal interconnect fees for text messages. So here is a list of the most egregious offenders:

Country	Dominant Operator	SMS Interconnect Markup
Niger	Zain	200%
Uganda	MTN	160%
Mauritania	Mauritel	150%
Nigeria	MTN	114%
Benin	MTN(Mascom)	100%
Botswana	MTN	100%
Congo	Zain	100%
Gabon	Zain	100%
Guinea	Areeba (MTN)	100%
Mali	Orange	100%
Rwanda	MTN	77%
Senegal	Orange	50%
Algeria	Djezzy (Orascom)	43%
Kenya	Safaricom	43%
Zambia	MTN	40%
Ghana	MTN	25%
Togo	Togocel	25%

Kontax wins a Bronze @ the Bookmarks

Steve Vosloo — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:19:15 -0600

Kontax won a Bronze “Pixel” in the Bookmarks Awards, the only medal in the Mobile Publishing category. Kontax “beat” M-Net, Football365, EntertainmentAfrica, CAR magazine and Soccer-Laduma, which is the most visited mobisite in South Africa. One of the competition organisors told Steve Vosloo that Kontax won a medal because it showed creative thinking and innovation in its category.

This year, as with last year, no Gold or Grand Prix prizes were awarded — a message to the local industry that we’re getting there, but have some way to go yet. According to 24.com, “The total number of awards made was 25, amounting to a fraction over 1% of the entries” — so competition was stiff.

Once again, well done to the Kontax team!

For more info see the list of the Bookmarks Finalists and winners. BizCommunity covered the awards ceremony — looks like lots of fun was had by all.

the fall of the education wall: p2pu in Berlin

Andrew Rens — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:54:08 -0600

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.

One can’t help feeling that there is an unfolding order, p2pu has the potential to bring down the barriers which prevent most of the young people in the world from aspiring to tertiary education.

Appropriately we are using a face to face peer learning strategy, without hierarchy and expert presentations, instead lots of interaction, brainstorming and consensus seeking. Its not over, we are meeting again this afternoon, but its a useful moment to reflect on the workshop.

The genesis of p2pu is open education track at the 2007 iSummit held in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The conversation that began there culminated in the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education but it didn’t end there. One the ideas generated has emerged into the peer to peer learning initiative we call p2pu, thanks to the vision and hard work of Philipp Schmidt .

Thanks also to the contributions of a team of incredibly creative, self motivated volunteers. Last night we met up with some of the people involved in Open Everything Berlin, very edgy, energetic people. But they think that we are even edgier.

Communities of Practice

Mark Horner — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:00:38 -0600

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.

Communities of Practice

CoP research was pioneered by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave and Etienne has a nice, succinct definiton on his CoP page which I’ll reproduce here:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

CoPs have:

a domain or area in which all members share an interest,
members engage in discussion and activities, helping each other and sharing information and
members who are practitioners and develop a shared set of resources, knowledge, experience, tool and techniques.

In working with teachers there is ample opportunity to support the formation of communities of practice. Teachers have a common domain, they can benefit from discussion and sharing information and their shared experience, tools and techniques will improve classroom practice. In fact, it has been shown (see for example: Zaslavsky, O., & Leikin, R. (2004) Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 7, 5 – 32 and Graven, M. (2005) Pythagoras, 61, 2 – 10) that participating in communities of practice is a powerful form of professional development for teachers.

There has been a lot written on CoPs and I’m not going to delve into it here, what I do want to mention are a few anecdotes related to what communities of practice are not.

Forced Groups

I often suggest that people consider working together with the hope that a community of practice will emerge and this is often met with the standard refrain “One person ends up doing all the work!”. My own experience is similar. When forced to work in a group for projects one person often ended up doing all the work (I’m not even going to pretend it was me).

However, forced group-work failing is not a counter-argument to CoPs being useful. It is merely an illustration that you can’t force people to be a community. My own feeling about forced group-work is that nobody wants to be there, the group dynamics haven’t ironed themselves out yet, nobody feels comfortable and the pressure builds up until someone just wants out. After a while this behaviour is reinforced sufficiently that someone takes on the task as soon as the group forms and none of the group workings are ever sorted out.

Rapid Deployment

CoPs are communities, no matter which group development process you favour, all teams or communities grow and this takes time. The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing process, proposed by Bruce Tuckman, is one well known example of how the process has been categorised. What is important is that there is an organic process a group of people have to experience before they perform (i.e. they are a community, never mind a community of practice).

The challenge here is that even if an organisation has bought into the idea of communities, they take time to evolve and not all are successful. It is impossible to include communities as deliverables on a timeline. The harder you try the more frustrated you are likely to become.

Purpose

Communities consist of people, it’d be much easier, if much more boring, to manage them if they didn’t, but they do. So, assuming we get some people together and they overcome their group dynamics, achieve the ability to communicate effectively, share ideas, information and even criticism, they still need a purpose to bring them together to be community of practice. The thing about people is that they want to be able to choose.

If people are going to find the time and energy to participate, to overcome the group dynamics, accept and give criticism, then they need to resonate with the purpose of community. The easiest way to achieve this is to allow the communities to decide their own purpose. You will probably also have to accept that their purpose isn’t going to be identical to the one you’d like them to have.

Forcing a group together to immediately work on something they’re not interested in is clearly going to be a disaster. For success we have to rectify all the mistakes in that process, not just one of them. So if we’re somehow going to use CoPs in our work we need to keep this and much, much more in mind. With a lot of help from Hélène Smit, Layo Seriki and Judith Haupt, I do try but I’ll save the details for another blog post.

Coverage of Kontax (part IV)

Steve Vosloo — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:15:57 -0600

Coverage of Kontax continues as follows:

Web:

Mobile novel a hit with SA youth (South Africa: The Good News, 2 Nov)

Newspapers:

Mystery on your phone by Estelle Sinkins for Weekend Witness, Kwazulu-Natal (7 Nov)

Branding This Blog

Mark Horner — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:23:24 -0600

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.

Here is the design brief (see the site for the full details and attached images if you are keen on having a crack):

brief overview

I’m a Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation where I work on a bunch of projects all related to using technology to drive open education in South Africa. Projects like supporting communities of practice that share content online, developing open assessment banks of items to save teachers time and working with volunteers to write textbooks that are free and open.

I keep a blog related to all my projects and, contrary to popular wisdom, personal stories. I use categories to separate the two.

I can’t face using a “thoughtful” photo of myself as the headline image to my blog and a cartoon depiction would be more fitting, especially seeing as I’m mixing my personal and work blogs. I’m quite taken with this crowdsourcing idea so I’m here to try to get the cartoon made.

brand name

Mark Horner

target audience

The audience is the general public, a mixture of work related visitors, information seekers and those seeking personal updates. Some of the cartoon features will resonate with work related visitors and some will resonate with those interested in personal stories.

requirements

I want a cartoon that will ultimately be part of the header on this blog: www.markhorner.net

Cartoon content all clearly visible:

1) My cartoon self on a camping chair with a laptop (Lenovo T500 if it mattered
2) A bottle and glass of red wine
3) A potjie on a fire in the background, this image captures the idea quite well:

http://www.south-africa-tours-and-t…africa.jpg

Cartoon styles I like:

http://media.smashingmagazine.com/i…/final.jpg

I’m not tied to the style, but I’d like something that will scale down reasonably well, not to an icon size but possibly to fit on a business card.

I’ve attached some pics and sketch to help out. I’m not a designer so please use your own judgement as to the best way to include the elements and don’t feel you have to stick to the attached sketch – its just an idea.

The final files need to be in a vector format suitable for printing purposes as I may need to include it on printed media as well as png files for web-usage.

Drupal Module for FHSST Feedback – quotes wanted

Mark Horner — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:22:19 -0600

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.

I’m looking for some development quotes and thought I might get some additional exposure if I post the draft specification on my blog. If you’re a Drupal person and would like to have a crack at this feel free to contact me with any clarifying questions or a quote for the work. I intend to make a decision by the middle of next week (18th November) so you’ve got a week to get the information to me.

FHSST Feedback Module

The FHSST site allows authors to build books in LaTeX. The original goal was to have many LaTeX-competent authors working on many sections. We have learnt that very few people are comfortable with LaTeX and PSTricks. To better accommodate people who still want to make contributions but not get their hands dirty we must provide a simple way to give the necessary input.

We would like a feedback module to be written for Drupal to help with this. This module should allow three types of feedback:

errata
suggested contributions
testimonials

Errata

Each erratum needs to contain:

erratum title (mandatory)
detailed erratum information (mandatory)
book for which it is submitted (mandatory)
book version for which erratum is applicable (mandatory)
book section in which error occurs (mandatory)
book page number (optional)
submitter’s:
- name and surname (mandatory)
- email address (mandatory)
- role, one of:
  - learner
  - educator
  - parent
  - other
timestamp of submission (recorded automatically)
status (only changeable by coordinator – starts in pending):
- pending
- corrected
- disputed
timestamp of resolution (i.e. corrected or disputed state change – recorded automatically)
person changing state (recorded automatically)

When submitted, an erratum must go into a queue and the coordinators of the relevant book should receive an email notification that it has been submitted. They can then login and review the erratum. Once they have processed it they must be able to set it to either corrected or disputed in the case where the erratum is actually incorrect.

A page should be provided where users can see all errata submitted, the submitters’ name, the relevant book and version, and the status of the errata. The title should link to the full erratum view.

A block should be provided where users can see the 5 most recent errata submitted (title, book and status).

Suggested Contributions

This is to allow general users to submit a contribution to be included in the book by a LaTeX-enabled author. Each contribution should have:

contribution title (mandatory)
detailed contribution (mandatory)
attached files (optional)
book for which it is submitted (mandatory)
book section (optional)
submitter’s:
- name and surname (mandatory)
- email address (mandatory)
- role, one of:
  - learner
  - educator
  - parent
  - other
timestamp of submission (recorded automatically)
status (only changeable by coordinator – starts in pending):
- pending
- incorporated
- discarded
timestamp of resolution (i.e. incorporated or discarded state change to be recorded automatically)
person changing state (recorded automatically)

When submitted a contribution must go into a queue and the coordinators of the relevant book should receive an email notification that it has been submitted. They can then login and review the contribution. Once they have processed it they set it to either incorporated or discarded state in the case where the contribution cannot be used.

A page should be provided where users can see all contributions submitted, the submitters’ name, the relevant book and version, and the status of the contribution. The title should link to the full contribution view.

A block should be provided where users can see the 5 most recent contributions submitted (title, book and status).

Testimonials

This is simply to collect information about how the content has been used.

testimonial title (mandatory)
detailed testimonial (mandatory)
book for which it is submitted (optional)
book section (optional)
submitter’s:
- name and surname (mandatory)
- email address (mandatory)
- role, one of: (mandatory)
  - learner
  - educator
  - parent
  - other
timestamp of submission (recorded automatically)

Administration

For the feedback module the books for which feedback is being received need to be configured. This should happen from the module administration page and not depend on the book module of Drupal. The administrator will add the books for the module and then add, on a book-by-book basis:

versions
chapters and sections
coordinators

When a book is added at least one version number is required. For each version number provided, a list of chapters and sections is required. A book will have multiple versions, each with their own unique chapter and section listing. This listing can be a simple textarea where each line is a chapter or section heading.

Each book must also have a list of coordinators who are users on the system. Coordinators should be able to access a list of all errata and contributions for their books. They should be able to view them and change the status if necessary. The time when the status is changed should be recorded.

Special Remarks

All the feedback types should be node types and should integrate into the Drupal CMS properly so that they can be integrated with other modules designed to manipulate nodes. The theming information should also be separated so that they can be re-themed.

A special page should be provided that can be used as the homepage. This page should have a customisable body of full html and then have forms for all three feedback types. This will be presented to non-authenticated users as the homepage allowing them to provide the feedback directly from the front page. We would like jQuery/jQuery UI integration in this page so that a button can be shown for each type of feedback and if clicked the form must render as a modal window. Submission using these forms should be via AJAX and should trigger an update on the blocks for the content types if they are shown.

To simplify the forms when a user selects a book the relevant versions should be loaded. Once the version is selected only the relevant sections should be loaded. Validation for all form fields should be implemented.

The module should be written in such a way to conform to the Drupal 6.X API and should only have dependencies on well established modules (modules that are actively maintained and have demonstrable support and traction within the Drupal community).

We would release all the code under the Gnu General Public Licence.

Fair Mobile – Some data

Steve Song — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:16:03 -0600

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.

Mobile Costs

In order to relate mobile charges directly to income, I needed data that hadn’t already been converted into USD or similar. This mean going to the operator’s websites for data. Obviously there are hundreds of different rates and packages for mobile access. I started by choosing the operator with the largest market share in the country. From that operator, I chose one minute of air time during the day i.e. prime time and outside of the mobile network. I was in some doubt as to whether to choose outside to the fixed line operator or outside to other mobile operators and went with the latter assuming it would represent the widest possible access. I deliberately chose off-net calls to bring in the issue of interconnect fees. This represents about the most expensive local call you can make in a country.

Minimum Wage

As I mentioned, the ILO were kind enough to point me at a spreadsheet they maintain which has a fair amount of data on minimum wage in African countries. They have up-to-date data from 24 countries. However, as we start to unpack things, there is some complexity here that I haven’t fully processed yet. For instance, when I looked for data for Kenya (which was absent from the ILO data), I found this article which mentions two minimum wages, one for urban and one for rural agricultural workers. In South Africa I know there is a specific minimum wage for domestic workers. I would like to focus on the lowest wage earners but it is challenging to try to pick something that is consistent across countries. I also thought of nurses wages or a day labourer’s wage.

Another assumption I made was that people work five days a week. The ILO data gave a monthly wage but I wanted a daily wage for the index so I divided by the average number of working days in a month (22). I’m not sure whether this is a fair assumption at the bottom of the pyramid.

Needless to say, I welcome corrections and insights here.

Number of SMSes a days work will earn you at minimum wage

Number of call minutes a days work will earn you at minimum wage

Country / Currency / Dominant Operator	Minimum Wage - Monthly	Minimum Wage -Daily	Mobile call to other network cost/min	SMS to other network cost	Minutes per day affordable at min wage	SMSes affordable per day
Algeria algerian dinar Djezzy (Orascom)	12000.00	545.45	9.5	5	57.42	109
Angola kwanzas Unitel	8600.00	390.91	25.92	9	15.08	43
Benin CFA MTN	30000.00	1363.64	100	50	13.64	27
Botswana
Burkina Faso CFA Zain	30684.00	1394.73	230	30	6.06	46
Burundi francs U-Comm (Orascom)	3466.67	157.58	300	20	0.53	8
Cameroon CFA MTN	28246.00	1283.91	200	50	6.42	26
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Chad CFA Zain	28000.00	1272.73	260	25	4.9	51
Comoros comoran franc	30000.00	1363.64
Congo CFA Zain	54000.00	2454.55	145	50	16.93	49
Congo (Democratic Republic)
C?te d’Ivoire CFA Orange	36607.00	1663.95	99	50	16.81	33
Djibouti
Egypt egyptian pound
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia birr
Gabon CFA Zain	80000.00	3636.36	250	50	14.55	73
Gambia dalasi	508.30	23.1
Ghana ghana cedi MTN	607500.00	2.76	0.14	0.05	19.72	55
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Kenya kenyan shilling Safaricom	3270.00	148.64	15	5	9.91	30
Lesotho maloti Vodacom	812.00	36.91	2.9	0.75	12.73	49
Liberia liberian dollars	3120.00	141.82
Libya dinar Libyana	130.00	5.91	0.24	0.05	24.62	118
Madagascar ariary Orange	70025.00	3182.95	390	120	8.16	27
Malawi kwacha Zain	3692.00	167.82	47.71	13.16	3.52	13
Mali CFA
Mauritania ouguiya Mauritel	21150.00	961.36	65	8	14.79	120
Mauritius rand Orange	3180.67	144.58	3.9	0.6	37.07	241
Morocco dirhams Maroc Telecom	1933.36	87.88	4.8	0.8	18.31	110
Mozambique metical
Namibia
Niger CFA Zain	28000.00	1272.73	195	75	6.53	17
Nigeria naira
Rwanda
Senegal CFA
Sierra Leone
Somalia
South Africa rand Vodacom	1737.06	78.96	2.99	0.8	26.41	99
Sudan sudanese pounds Zain	124.00	5.64	0.14	0.08	40.26	70
Swaziland swazi emalangeni
Tanzania tanzanian shilling Vodacom	65000.00	2954.55	360	45	8.21	66
Togo CFA Togocel	28000.00	1272.73	132	50	9.64	25
Tunisia dinar Tunisiana (Orascom)	188.93	8.59	0.23	0.05	38.17	172
Uganda uganda shilling MTN	25000.00	1136.36	500	130	2.27	9
Zambia kwacha MTN	268000.00	12181.82	1435	287	8.49	42
Zimbabwe

Is 4,000 reads a lot?

Steve Vosloo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:11:45 -0600

Kontax has been read by 4,000 people in it’s first 10 days on MXit. I asked a friend in publishing to put that figure in context in terms of regular teen books sales in SA: is that low, high, ok? While we can’t really compare m-novels to printed books — they’re so different in so many ways — her response is still very interesting:

I can’t testify about teen books in particular, but a typical trade book first print run is 3,000, and a book publisher is usually satisfied if that sells through, particularly for fiction. Figures are much higher for prescribed school books of course, but you’re talking about a voluntary sign-up here. Also, you need to consider the time-frame: the equivalent of 4,000 copies ’sold’ in less than a month? A publisher might expect that kind of performance over a year to 18 months.

I think this project overcomes so many of the problems of book publishing (language, relevance, distribution, cost) that comparing it with book sales is the ultimate apples-and-oranges. But, as a book publisher, I’d be seriously impressed with these figures.

m4Lit presented at the Africa Media and Broadcasting Congress

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:40:29 -0600

At the Africa Media and Broadcasting Congress I presented m-Novels for Africa: A South African Case Study.

m4Lit presented at mLearn 2009

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:37:10 -0600

At mLearn 2009 I presented m4Lit A teen m-novel project in South Africa. The presentation covered the paper of the same title co-authored with Ana Deumert and Marion Walton, as well as some interim results of the in-progress project.

Kontax on MXit

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:12:48 -0600

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.

There has also been marketing within MXit itself: splash screens to the 11-14 and 15-18 age groups, and a Tradepost broadcast message. It will be interesting to compare the two approaches to publishing m-novels: mobisite vs MXit. In the 9 days since it’s gone live on MXit, 4,000 readers have read the whole story, as opposed to about 250 for the mobisite. There is an interesting drop-off trend after the first few chapters for both versions.

Today at the Africa Media and Broadcasting Congress, Rick Joubert spoke about the mobile web in South Africa (before joining Yonder Media he was head of Mobile Media at Vodacom, so he has considerable commerical experience in mobile). He said that in general the mobile web is for 18s and over, and to reach the younger audience one should go MXit.

The best solution seems to be a mobisite that is accessible via MXit — something that has become possible only recently.

Kontax a finalist in the Bookmarks

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:32:50 -0600

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.

Kontax is a finalist in the Mobile Publishing category. Winners will be announced on 12 November. Just to be a finalist is a great honour. Well done, team!

Kontax reader trend

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:22:35 -0600

Kontax is published in two places: as a mobisite and also on MXit. As we begin to see the statistics for the viewings per chapter, a clear trend is emerging: high volumes in the beginning, then a sharp drop-off and stabilisation of the die-hard fans who read all 21 chapters.

(Source: Shuttleworth Foundation, CC-BY-3.0)

For the mobisite, chapter 1 has received 1,683 visits, and about 250 readers have finished the story. For MXit, chapter 1 has received 35,149 visits, and about 4,000 readers have finished the story.

Over the next few weeks we’ll keep watching the usage stats and try to make sense of the difference between the mobisite and MXit. For one, there was marketing within MXit around Kontax: splash screens were shown to the 11-14 and 15-18 age group users and a Tradepost message alerted all users to the story. We hope that it was teens (14-17 year olds ideally) that read the story, but of course you can never know for sure in the virtual world.

A question I have on the drop-off trend is whether it applies to printed books too, where, say, 10% of books that are sold aren’t read to the end? In print you can’t track this, but in digital it is very easy to do.

Quick edit/Reuse coming to Connexions – A Preview

Mark Horner — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:30:38 -0600

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.

Connexions separates the content viewing aspect of the site from the editing side. If you find a resource you like and would like to edit your current options are:

add the content to a lens (your favourites for example) and then from the lens listing add the content to your personal workspace or a workgrouph, or
go to the workspace or workgroup where you would like to work on the new version and then use the search functionality to locate the resource and add it.

Both of these require an intermediate step which is non-intuitive and slows the process down.

Here is a screen capture of the content header of a typical module on Connexions.

This image is small but the list of links on the top right are actions for the user, Add to a lens, Download PDF etc. Why can’t there just be an allow-me-to-immediately-edit-my-own-version-of-this-resource button? Of course there can, with a slightly different name of course.

In partnership with the Connexions team, Upfront Systems have been developing this functionality for us. I was visiting Upfront yesterday to do some beta-testing and captured a few quick screenshots along the way to give you a preview of what is coming.

The new option will be called Reuse / Edit. Reuse is applicable if you are not currently an author of the module and are making your own version whereas editing is applicable if you are the author or have editing privileges on the resource. The option will be added to the actions listed at the top of the module with the new list looking like this (without the shading of course):

Selecting this option will expand a drop-down menu. This menu will be sensitive to whether your on a module in isolation or browsing a collection. If the latter is true then it will ask which of the two items, the module or the collection, you want to work on as shown on the right.

Once you’ve selected which resource you’re interested in you just need to select the relevant options in the dialog boxes that follow.

The options that you can select cover:

where you want the resource located, allowing you to move it to a collaborative workgroup or your personal space,
decide whether you’d like to jump straight into editing it or come back and browse for more content, and
whether or not you agree to the licence (a necessity to ensure the integrity of the repository content).

That’s it. Conflicts with existing versions in the target location will be checked and the user will be warned and given a choice of actions depending on the specific circumstances. This will be much faster than the old process and a lot more transparent and intuitive to users.

No definitive release date yet but it’ll be out as soon as we can get it out.

Open Assessment Bank: FullMarks well underway

Mark Horner — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:22:58 -0600

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.

The logo and website are still pending and, of course, we’re crowdsourcing their design. Feel free to take a look at 99Designs where we’ve just opened the competition.

We are extending the work done by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) on a closed bank (but open source software). We have the blessing of the HSRC to proceed but, in the interests of full disclosure, with a strong word of caution that an assessment bank can be a blunt intstrument. A bank will save teachers time and increase the average quality of items but their research has shown that, unless teachers act on the identification of learners’ strengths and weaknesses, little real impact is felt when considering learners’ understanding.

I’m happy to charge on ahead with development of this particular blunt instrument, not because I’m irresponsible (trust me, if I wanted to be irresponsible I wouldn’t give myself another project to worry about) but because I feel that their concerns provide the very justification for the open bank. I’ll have a crack at a brief explanation of why I think this is so.

Saving Teachers’ Time

Have you spoken to a teacher in South Africa lately? Time is their biggest concern. Now I expect to have some people disagree with that, they’ll cite resources, lack of support etc. but the very first thing teachers tell me is that they don’t have enough time. Sure, I hear about resources, poor support, curriculum obfuscation, and all sorts of other things, but time is always first.

This isn’t a trick to get teachers’ attention, there is no question that time is an issue so we should work to save them time if we can. The time saving decreases stress and leads to focus that can be deployed elsewhere.

Improved Quality of Assessment Items

We know that the sharing of assessment items can lead to an increase in the average quality of items used in the classroom. Again, there is no question that this is a good thing. As the number quality items grows, teachers will need to develop fewer questions, allowing them to spend more time being creative and focusing on quality rather than quantity.

Open Assessment Bank

Just saving time and improving quality can still lead to little impact on the learner as the HSRC point out. In their analysis, however, they’ve been looking at a closed bank where teachers are passive consumers. My bank will be an open bank allowing questions to be viewed, added, duplicated, and adapted. We will also allow for feedback in a few ways. Users will be able to vote as to whether or not a question’s solution is correct, they will be able to rate questions and they will be able to comment on questions and answers.

Feedback is the key to making sure that the assessment bank is an effective tool (as opposed to a blunt instrument). A lot can be learnt from receiving feedback from your peers as to whether or not the solutions to your questions are correct. Even more can be learnt from a detailed discussion around whether or not a question tests the assessment standards that it is tagged with and how to respond if learners struggle with the question. This will also help teachers further their understanding of the outcomes and appropriate assessment of them. Teachers just need to participate in the community, sharing items, ideas and feedback.

The final possibility of improved understanding of the outcomes and how to respond to learners’ responses, correct and incorrect, is what gives FullMarks so much more potential impact. It is the open aspect that is crucial. My job is to create an environment where teachers feel there is real benefit to contributing. At first this will be to save time, but over time it will evolve to active participation in discussions around how to assess according to the standards and respond when learners struggle.

Connexions training manual available

Mark Horner — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:50:52 -0500

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.

Part 1 – Introduction

Part 1 of the manual deals with the Siyavula project in general and explains how Siyavula, Connexions and all the other partners fit together. It also covers our suggestions for starting to form your own workgroups, for support and the sharing of resources.

The first part of the manual can be downloaded from the papers section or directly here.

Part 2 – Casual Browsing

The second part deals with what you can do on the Connexions site as a passive consumer of material, without needing to create an account, login or register in any way.

The second part of the manual can be downloaded directly here.

Part 3 – Registered User

The benefits of registering for an account and logging in are explained in Part 3 of the manual with step-by-step instructions on how to get going.

The third part of the manual can be downloaded directly here.

Part 4 – Workgroups

In the final part we link back to the idea of creating workgroups and how you can use the Connexions platform as a tool to support real-world or virtual workgroup activities.

The final part of the manual can be downloaded directly here.

Another successful workshop!

Mark Horner — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:34:13 -0500

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 on the BBC

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:43:25 -0500

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).

During the programme one of the regular readers and commenters on Kontax, Sugar, was called. She made some very interesting comments about the story — in particular that she looks up words that she doesn’t understand in a dictionary (the printed version), which means that the story is improving her vocabulary. This is also what Sexyeyez — another reader and commenter — said in the interview on Bush Radio about why she liked the story (it improves her vocabulary).

After the interview, Gareth Mitchell asked his co-host Bill Thompson whether reading an m-novel is going to lead someone to actual books. Bill responded:

It might do, and even if it doesn’t it’s going to encourage them to read narrative fiction, to read stories. And I think given that so much information presented these days is in chunks, e.g. on social network sites or as emails, anything that gets young people reading longer forms is a good idea.

It’s well established within the world of children’s fiction, where there’s a genre called “high low” fiction (stories written for older children with younger reading age) — that these are very successful. So I think projects like this that engage with children do stand a good chance of working.

Kontax was also written about on the BBC website (Mobile novels switch on South Africa by Dave Lee). A great quote is given by Bernard Kedge, manager of Galloway and Porter, a Cambridge bookshop which sold its first book in 1902.

“This is sometimes how education works,” he said. “Anything that actually encourages people to read more is a really excellent idea.”

Other recent coverage of Kontax includes:

Radio:

Steve Vosloo was interviewed on SAfm by Karabo Kgoleng (19 Oct)
Nkululeko Mabandla was interviewed on Umhlobo Wenene fm by Nobathembu Kani (23 Oct)

Web:

South Africa: Kontax launched (Pambazuka, 1 Oct)

Usability lab South Africa-style

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:49:03 -0500

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!

Source: Marion Walton

Crowdsourcing versus Traditional Design

Mark Horner — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:27:46 -0500

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.

The covers will need to be available in the next 10 days or so and we were discussing the best way to get them done. The obvious way to go is to commission the work from a designer and go with that. We also considered the option of crowdsourcing the covers and have had a lot of debate about the merits of crowdsourcing.

To resolve the issue, once and for all (maybe), we’ve decided to run our own internal competition. The prize will be bragging rights as the optimal process for future covers for OpenPress / FHSST texts. We are going to allocate the same budget to the Maths and Physical Science covers, but we are going to have the Maths set commissioned by a regular design firm and we’ll get the Physical Science ones created on 99Designs.

Although it isn’t really a competition it will be fun to see the results. The only way to keep the results comparable is to give both processes the same:

budget,
brief,
quantity and quality of feedback, and
the same timeline.

I’ll post the brief a little later and the results as well so you can decide which you think is the best set and whether we’ve chosen the best process based on this little experiment. If nothing else this should be fun.

Early verdict on copyright for educators

Andrew Rens — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:20:57 -0500

A participants feedback on the Copyright for Educators Course:

Readers of this blog kindly made suggestions for an online course on copyright for educators.
The first iteration of the course was run through the Peer to Peer University project.

One of the participants, Tom Caswell has blogged on his early reflections on participating in Copyright for Educators. Thanks Tom, this kind of feedback is very useful in any iterative process, and the p2pu concept is most definitely iterative.

A nice way to start the day ….

Mark Horner — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:28:24 -0500

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:

Feedback on Connexions collection: Natuurwetenskappe Graad 7 (http://cnx.org/content/col11078/1.1)

Baie dankie vir die artikel wat u op sure en basisse wat op die internet gepos was, dit het my gehelp met al my natuurwetenskap wer en oor 3 weke sal ons die grad sewe eksamen op dit skryf. Dus is die informasie van ‘n groot hul en ek wou net laat u weet dat alle inligting wat u op die webblad gepos het nie net deur ek en my twee susters gebruik word ne, maar ook deur ander kinders by ons skool.

Groete en alle voorspoed!

Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge - We want your ideas!

Philipp Schmidt — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:02:33 -0500

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.

What are the browser extensions that you want to use for your learning projects? No need to wait for someone to create them - here is your opportunity to roll up the sleeves and develop Jetpack extensions yourself. Jetpack is a new Mozilla Labs technology that makes it easier to build Firefox add-ons. We are looking for good ideas and will help you turn your ideas into prototypes. A little tech background is useful, but you don’t have to be a software developer to participate, and we would also like to see inter-disciplinary teams apply. Here is the official blurb:

We’re looking for designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas about learning online into working prototypes in the form of Firefox add-ons. We’ll help you refine your designs and teach you how to create Firefox add-ons using Jetpack and other Mozilla technologies. Participants creating the best prototypes will be invited to the Jetpack for Learning Design Camp and the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2010.

Head over to the official project page to read The Brief and fill out the submission form.

Fair Mobile – A Start

Steve Song — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:14:01 -0500

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?

Magazines like The Economist have embraced the miracle of mobiles (see their recent special report “Mobile Marvels”) and among development agencies, adding the letter “m” for mobile to existing initiatives e.g. m-health, m-governance, m-learning, etc has become the latest in tech-savvy development. Unfortunately not enough attention has been paid to two significant downsides to the current status of mobile infrastructure in Africa, namely uncompetitive telecommunications markets and walled garden practices by mobile operators.

1. Uncompetitive Markets

Mobile markets are dominated by incumbent operators and are typically uncompetitive and overpriced. Telecommunications regulatory expert Ewan Sutherland neatly summarises the issue:

A very small number of market players, protected by high politico-regulatory barriers to market entry, can easily result in price shadowing and even in collusion. Analyses of the markets for mobile call origination in France, Ireland and Spain have illustrated this problem, despite operators competing on the market for some years. In the case of France there has been shown to be collusion between the three operators, resulting in heavy fines (Conseil de la Concurrence 2005). To date, there has not been detailed analysis of markets in Africa, nor the regulatory action to remedy the lack of effective competition.i”

African countries still lack detailed market analyses that could lead to regulatory action but we know enough to suggest that such analyses are needed if prices are to be brought down. By any standard, mobile markets in Africa are uncompetitive. Vodafone and MTN, two of the largest operators in Africa, command on average more than 50% of the market in the nearly 20 African countries in which they operateii. Safaricom, the largest operator in East Africa, holds more than 80% of the mobile market in Kenya.

Evidence from the pan-African research network, ResearchICTAfrica, points to a remarkably high percentage of income being spent by the poor on mobile services. For low income earners across 17 countries studied, the average African is paying more than 50% of their disposable income on mobile services.

At the same time, mobile operators are posting impressive profits. Kenyan operator Safaricom generated over 900 million USD in revenue last year of which a staggering 40% was Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA). Other operators are also posting impressive profits with most operators on the continent announcing year on year increases in revenue.

The startling contrast between the remarkable benefits of mobile infrastructure and the high price being paid for mobile services in Africa while mobile operators post record profits leads to the conclusion that more competitive mobile markets in Africa would lead to even greater social and economic benefit for all but especially the poor.

2. Walled Gardens

Most of the discussion of the benefits of mobile infrastructure focuses on the increase in efficiencies that access to communication can provide. What is not often discussed is the environment for innovation and entrepreneurship that mobile infrastructure can provide.

There have been some significant innovations with mobile services in Africa. The most significant one is the development of mobile banking and money services such as mPesa in Kenya. This and other similar innovations are largely top-down from the operator and have been slow to evolve in spite of the obvious demand. What is missing on the continent is end-user innovation of the sort that leads to serendipitous discovery of social and commercial services.

In Africa, mobiles are too expensive too encourage the kind of experimentation that leads to innovation. Consider that in Rwanda, 4 minutes of local mobile communication or 10 SMSes constitutes an entire day’s wage for a labourer. While this is expensive, it is obviously useful enough to spend a significant proportion of income on its use for essential calls. What will never happen in this context is the kind of playful use that happens when one doesn’t have to consider the cost of each call and each SMS.

The cost of SMSes in particular are a barrier to innovation because they represent a gateway to the Internet for every mobile phone no matter how simple. Because an SMS message carries data, it offers the opportunity to extend the reach of Internet applications whether for data collection, commerce, social networks or other innovative services. Yet SMS services represents the most profitable aspect of mobile operator networks. SMS charges are estimated to be between 80 and 90% profit.

However, it is not just cost that is a barrier to innovation. Mobile operators jealously protect their mobile services and use them to help lock users on to their network. It is impossible to launch a mobile service across mobile networks without negotiating access with every mobile network involved.

This is in stark contrast to the generative environment of the Internet which has spawned what are now some of the largest companies in the world (Google, Facebook, et al) from the minds of individuals who developed these services without huge corporate backing and in markets that did not exist until they created them.

If we were able to drive down the barriers to mobile voice and SMS use through reduced cost and more Open Access style networks, individual and small-business innovation in the delivery of novel voice and data services would very likely blossom on the continent.

So What Can We Do?

When I initially chatted with Katrin about Fair Mobile, what I had in my mind was an index of how fair mobile markets are in various countries. Now the ITU already maintain an excellent ICT Development Index but I was thinking of something simpler and more focused, something like the Economist’s Big Mac index which uses the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger as a proxy for purchasing power parity (PPP) but perhaps even closer might be the Alternative Big Mac Index which measures how long one has to labour in a given country to earn the price of a Big Mac.

So what would that look like? Well, what initially sent me down this path was Nathan Eagle’s description of nurses in Kenya and how they refused to send SMS updates to an online blood bank database simply because the cost of an SMS represented too significant a proportion of their daily wage. Since then Katrin and I have discussed various indicators and metrics that might best make up a Fair Mobile Index. Armed with these ideas, I went off a couple of weeks ago to the IDRC’s Acacia Research and Learning Forum 2009 in Dakar and had the opportunity to organise an OpenSpace session on Fair Mobile at the event. About a dozen people attended the event, including among others, Alison Gillwald, Christoph Stork, and Godfred Frempong of the ResearchICTAfrica network as well as Willie Currie from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC).

We discussed the basic dilemma of the high cost and closed nature of mobile networks and brainstormed a number of factors that affect equity in mobile access, including:

transparency and market complexity
number portability
tariff complexity and transparency
issue of quality of service: dropped calls, network coverage, voice quality, etc
demand perspectives – cultural influences on usage
taxation issues both on handsets and on usage
the need to establish mobiles as a generative platform for innovation
foreign ownership
interconnection rates

A Simple Ratio

In the end, Alison suggested that it might be simpler to start with something very basic such as the ratio of basic mobile costs to the national minimum wage in a country. Discussion followed on how to get the average cost of mobile and the suggestion was made to take a minute of peak time use on the largest operator in the country. In the end, I propose to take 2 minutes of air time and 4 SMSes as the proxy which hopefully represents what might be a typical day’s phone use.

Obviously this simple ratio of mobile usage cost to minimum wage only begins to scratch the surface of Fair Mobile but it seems to me now that it is better to start with something simple and easily understood and refine it over time rather than try to come up with the perfect basket of indicators.

The next thing I think I would like to add is the percentage EBITDA of the largest operator in the country. This would add a sense of proportion or disproportion between what people are paying and what sort of profit the operators are making. More complex will be developing a metric around the “thickness” of the walled gardens.

So stand by for more as I start to compile some of this data. I’m hoping that AfricanSignals will prove an ongoing useful resource on mobile pricing.

Finally, I should emphasise that these are just emerging thoughts on Fair Mobile. I reserve the right to recant, adapt, and evolve rapidly.

Bullyboy Publishers?

Mark Horner — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:45:18 -0500

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!

Often, when presenting Siyavula or FHSST, I am asked about the “poor publishers”. Please don’t mistake that for sarcasm, people literally use the phrase “poor publishers”. People are concerned that free, open, volunteer content projects are somehow going to destroy big business. For the record, we’d love to see the publishers participating in the Open Educational Resources (OER) arena and there are a number of ways this can happen. This post isn’t about OER business models for publishers though, its about whether the “poor” part is justified.

Publishers and Market Forces

The rise of OERs, and platforms to support them, are market forces in the world of publishing. Many other markets have had to respond to changing cultures and technology. The large international publishers have no excuse for not being aware of what is happening around open content. The publicity around Wikipedia alone should have made them all sit up and take notice. Businesses that don’t respond to changing markets allow themselves to become irrelevant. The publishers have had more than enough time, and they have more than sufficient monetary reserves to have done research aplenty into the technology, licences and developments taking place. If they haven’t, then, quite frankly, they deserve to feel a little market pressure.

I was pointed to a great article a while back on the future of scientific publishing written by Michael Nielsen, which expands on some of the reasons that publishers are feeling a bit of pressure at the moment. Many of the ideas mentioned, relating to why large businesses struggle to adapt, are applicable to all areas of publishing and I strongly recommend giving it a read. Nielsen points out that the very traditional structures that have led to the publishers’ success are now holding them back. They do need to adapt to survive and some of them won’t make it.

Publishers and Underhanded Tactics

Publishers feel the need to strengthen the messaging around their copyright in school textbooks.

Here is a scanned page from a South African school textbook published by a well known publisher. I have tried to obscure everything except the message of interest and am looking forward to an angry letter from a publisher, which I’ll be sure to share.

It is important to note that this message is in addition to the standard copyright notice. This message can only have been added through a series of deliberate actions by the publisher. It certainly didn’t get there by accident. Someone with sufficient authority within the publishing house made this decision and, one can only assume, they consulted their lawyers regarding the language. It would be ludicrous to make statements about the law without checking.

Given the language of the message, it can only have been added for one purpose and that is to stop some set of people photocopying pages out of this book. I guess that the publisher became aware of some people photocopying this book or other titles in their catalogue and felt that such a message would stop them. It could have been anybody, but let us be realistic, this is a grade-specific school textbook. There are two groups of people who will ever look at this book: teachers and learners. This means that it must have been one of these groups that had been photocopying pages.

If you visit the website for the Publishers’ Association of South Africa you will find this text:

Am I allowed to photocopy part of a book for my own personal and private use?
Copyright is not infringed by any fair dealing with a literary work for the purposes of the personal or private use of the work by the person making the copy. What is ‘fair’ in any given situation will always depend on the circumstances of that situation.

Is it correct that as long as I photocopy 10% or less of a published work, this is permitted?
No, it’s not correct. The Copyright Act says nothing about any percentage. 10% may be ‘fair’ but then again, it may not, since the test for fair dealing is qualitative as well as quantitative.

But surely I am allowed to make more than one copy if there is no commercial gain involved?
The regulations to the Act offer certain concessions for educational institutions and for non-profit libraries. These include a defined number of multiple copies strictly for classroom use or discussion, but exclude compilations.

I want my each of students to copy for themselves an article from a journal. Can I put a photocopy of the article on the reserve shelf in my educational institution’s library for each student to copy under ‘fair dealing’?
No. The copy on the reserve shelf is an infringing copy because it is not made for the private use or study of the person making it.

How about if I put the journal itself (not a photocopy) on the reserve shelf and tell my students to copy it for themselves?
Although each student may make a ‘fair dealing’ copy, 100 students each making a copy results in 100 copies, whereas fair dealing is intended to apply in the case of the single copy made by the person using the work.

What this is telling you is that there are fair dealing and educational exceptions to the rule stated categorically in the message publishers have chosen to add. Furthermore, those exceptions apply specifically in the contexts of the only reasonable audiences for the textbook. Despite the fact that these exceptions exist, and the publishers are well aware of them, they have chosen not to mention them in any way. As far as I am concerned, the message publishers have added is incorrect in the majority of circumstances that it is trying to influence.

Now, do teachers and learners know about these exceptions? Learners probably don’t, I certainly didn’t when I was at school, and teachers might. If teachers do, then adding this message is redundant because teachers know that it has all sorts of caveats attached and wouldn’t change their activities. But the message was added and so I can only assume that the majority of teachers don’t know about the exceptions and (publishers clearly hope) will be influenced by the message. This message would only have been added deliberately as a means to try to change their behaviour.

Remember, this book is only useful in an educational context to learners and teachers and so the educational exceptions will apply very often, allowing photocopying of this book.

Quick summary:

a deliberate message in addition to the copyright notice has been added
it targets teachers and learners
who have legal exceptions to the message
adding the message only makes sense if they don’t know about the exceptions

So I’m left to conclude that the publisher has added a message to intimidate teachers and learners, playing on their ignorance, knowing full well that exceptions, that teachers and learners could benefit from, do exist!

I see this message as a very aggressive defensive-response to activities taking place. Activities that may well be legal and that are taking place because we have an education system that is under-resourced and under pressure. This is not a positive response designed to help anyone, not even the publisher.

Rich Publishers

I get irritated when people only complain about problems and never suggest solutions. Is there a possible positive response under these circumstances? I think so. In fact, I think that it could be so positive that it would help the publisher gain market share and real favour as well as help education.

My imaginary publishing company would have had this message (with a lawyer to check the language first of course):

You may only photocopy pages from this textbook if you are invoking fair dealing or educational exceptions to our copyright terms. If you find yourself in a position where you need to make photocopies for educational purposes, please let us know. This information will help us to identify where books are needed, which books are being used, and whether or not our distribution is working effectively.

Why do I think that mine is better (it is too long!)? Mine has benefits for everyone because it promotes better information flow making those doing the copying allies of the publishers rather than their enemies. Here are some of the benefits that occurred to me off the top of my head:

Publishers’ benefits:
- identify areas where there is a lack of textbooks for future market expansion (where are books needed?)
- identify which books are really popular (which books are being copied?)
- identify if distribution channels are working properly (should they already have our books?)
- identify if only selected sections of books are being copied to identify which book sections are hitting the mark (which pieces of our books are popular?)
Teachers’ and learners’ benefits:
- better equipped to access resources to improve education
- broader access to educational resources without fear of legal repercussions
- better awareness of their rights
- feedback channel to publishers which will help improve content in the long run

Rather than clamping down, big publishers could in fact gain more market presence by opening up a little bit and using this information to improve their products and services. Further, this may ultimately lead to an increase in total market size as the educated population grows.

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

Printing Siyavula resources with OpenPress

Mark Horner — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:38:16 -0500

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.

Before we roll out the online service with the full library of Siyavula, Connexions, FHSST and many other open textbooks we would like to manually do a pilot run. For this we have selected the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book. If you are interested in this book, the other FHSST books or this service please read on. The FHSST books and other open education resources have no authors’, editors’ or publishers’ royalties so we only need to worry about the cost of printing. Everybody knows the more of something you produce the cheaper it gets per unit and the same holds for printing.

If we all put our individual orders together, everybody benefits from a better price. Our goal is to help everybody get the cheapest possible price by finding as many orders as possible and aggregating them together. To make it even more attractive we’ll place an order for the first 1000 books (R50,000) which we’ll donate to severely disadvantaged schools. This will guarantee a maximum price of R50 per book and every additional order will makes the price cheaper for everyone. Details for the first pilot print run:

Book: Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics
Book Pages: 272 A4-pages
Additional: soft copy of the answer key available for educators
Cover: Printed 4 colours on one side only, Matt Laminated one side on Sinar board 230gsm
Contents: Printed 1 colour black throughout on Typek Bond 70gsm
Finishing: Perfect bound, sewn trimmed to size

Price:
R 50.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 1000 books
R 40.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 2000 books
R 35.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 3000 books

The process:

All interested schools, organisations and individuals submit the number of books they are interested in to orders@openpress.co.za
We place the first order for 1000 Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics books with OpenPress
Submissions must reach us before the 15th of November 2009
(Please note that this is merely an expression of interest and not binding. We will not hold you to it in any way)
OpenPress finds the best possible price for the total order
OpenPress contacts everyone who expressed an interest with an offer at their best price
Parties wanting to commit to this print run completes a contract for the number of books they require
OpenPress prints the books, followed by payment and collection.

Other titles:
We are accepting expressions of interest for any of the 6 FHSST Books, Mathematics Grade 10,11 and 12 as well asPhysical Science Grade 10,11 and 12. We can however only guarantee a maximum price of R50 on the Mathematics Grade 10 book to start. As soon as the OpenPress site goes live we will make available the full list of open titles available for order. We have already identified 100s of titles that we will make available.

Regards
The Siyavula, FHSST and OpenPress teams

Top Science School in SA

Mark Horner — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:16:01 -0500

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:

same-sex versus co-ed schools, and
girls being smarter than boys.

I’m not really very interested in venturing down either of those paths at this time, or at any time for that matter.

The report is worth a couple of blog posts but I’d like to start by just focusing on one school that was mentioned. Mbilwi Secondary School was ranked in the survey as the top science school in the country. It is a school that I have never heard and, I am quite sure, many other people had never heard of. I haven’t done any additional research on Mbilwi … yet, but there are somethings that jump out at me from the report:

Mbilwi has large classes, and
students have to share study guides.

Why do those fact jump out? Large classes and a lack of resources are often cited reasons for poor preformance at schools. Reading a little further they point out just how large the classes are (pupil:teacher ratio of 56:1) and that the school attributes their success to:

identifying weak learners at the beginning of matric and providing extra support 4 days a week right up until the final exams,
extra tuition on Saturdays, and
focusing on more than Grade 12 but working to help learners from Grade 8.

These are the reported statistics that allowed them to achieve the top spot (Matric 2008 numbers):

201 Matrics cadidates
Pass rate 100%
Univeristy entrance 93%
309 A symbols
80% passed Maths with more than 50%
75% passed Science with more 50%

My take-away from this is that a lot can be done with the right attitude. If the learners didn’t want to learn the extra tuition wouldn’t mean anything, if the teachers didn’t care but were forced to provide the extra tuition they’d not do a very good job. The fact that they do it, do it well and that it is well received tells me that everyone involved with Mbilwi has reaslised that the problem is not insurmountable and that hard work can pay off, if everyone does their best working together.

Another point I can’t help but mention, EVEN THE NUMBER 1 science school in South Africa will benefit from having access to FHSST, Siyavula and OpenPress to solve their resources problems.

Doing OpenPress By Hand

Mark Horner — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:37:03 -0500

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.

Our vision for OpenPress is to provide a web-service for the aggregation of print orders, offering users the benefit of economies of scale achieved through collaborative purchasing. Our primary aim will be the dissemination of open educational resources (OERs). A cost-effective printing solution will add significant momentum to the adoption of OERs as well as incentivise the creation or release of further OERs and allow real classroom use which is a necessity for the iterative, collaborative development cycle of quality OERs.

OpenPress is beginning to take some real shape and we’ll start spreading the word about our first phase in the next 48 hours. Before we roll out the online service we will do a pilot run. This will be a full manual implementation of the process as a proof-of-concept. The second phase will be the development of the web-service that implements the process, informed by our learning from the manual process.

For the manual process we have selected the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book. The FHSST books and other open education resources have no authors’, editors’ or publishers’ royalties so we only need to worry about the cost of printing. Everybody knows the more of something you produce the cheaper it gets per unit and the same holds for printing. If we all put our individual orders together, everybody benefits from a better price. Our goal is to help everybody get the cheapest possible price by finding as many orders as possible and aggregating them together. To make it even more attractive we’ll place an order for the first 1000 books (R50,000) which we’ll donate to severely disadvantaged schools. This will guarantee a maximum price of R50 per book and every additional order will makes the price cheaper for everyone.

Details for the first pilot print run:

Book:	Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics Book
Size:	272 A4-pages
Additional:	soft copy of the answer key available for educators
Cover:	Printed 4 colours on one side only, Matt Laminated one side on Sinar board 230gsm
Contents:	Printed 1 colour black throughout on Typek Bond 70gsm
Finishing:	Perfect bound, sewn trimmed to size
Price:	R 50.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 1000 books
	R 40.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 2000 books
	R 35.00 per book (incl VAT) if the total print run exceeds 3000 books

The process:

We place the first order for 1000 Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics books with OpenPress
All interested schools, organisations and individuals submit the number of books they are interested in to OpenPress at openpress@siyavula.org.za
Submissions must reach us before the 15^th of November 2009 (Please note that this is merely an expression of interest and not binding. We will not hold you to it in any way)
OpenPress finds the best possible price for the total order
OpenPress contacts everyone who expressed an interest with an offer at their best price
Parties wanting to commit to this print run completes a contract for the number of books they require
OpenPress prints the books, followed by payment and collection.

Other titles:

We are accepting expressions of interest for any of the 6 FHSST Books, Mathematics Grade 10,11 and 12 as well as Physical Science Grade 10,11 and 12 as part of the manual process. However, we can only guarantee a maximum price of R50 on the Mathematics Grade 10 book to start.

As soon as the OpenPress site goes live we will make available the full list of open titles available for order. To date we have located literally 100s of titles that have been released under an OpenPress-friendly copyright license.

Siyavula training session at John Pama Primary

Mark Horner — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:08:57 -0500

This past Thursday (15 Oct 2009), Siyavula conducted a follow-up Connexions technical training at John Pama Primary School, located in the Nyunga township of the Western Cape.

Teachers from a number of surrounding primary and high schools attended the event and shared feedback about their experiences using the Connexions platform. Quinton Davis led a discussion about the importance of building Communities of Practice within schools, and about how these Communities of Practice can work in concert with school administrators and groups from other schools to share learning materials, computer/internet resources and advocacy solutions. Quinton also advised teachers on how to approach school administrators for help in the team building process.

Neels van der Westhuizen reviewed the steps to join and work within Connexions workgroups. Many teachers still echoed the obstacle of lack of internet and computer access at their schools, making access to the Connexions platform difficult. With the end of the school term approaching, many also acknowledged that their schedules had not permitted them as much time as they would have liked to work on the Connexions site. However, all teachers acknowledged the inherent benefit of gathering together in groups to troubleshoot and share learning materials. Some of the teachers performed searches for specific material relating to their subject which they required for upcoming lessons and downloaded it for use in the classroom.

Siyavula will continue to offer follow-up technical trainings to any teacher or Community of Practice who requests one. These teachers, along with all the educators involved in the August Connexions weekend intensive, will be invited for a end of the year wrap-up Siyavula event on November 21^st.

Coverage of Kontax (part III)

Steve Vosloo — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:46:02 -0500

Coverage of Kontax continues as follows:

Web:

M-novel takes on printed lit (Alex Kayle, ITWeb, 15 Oct)

Blogs:

Mobile phones for literature, or m4Lit (Jouni Filip Maho from Blogala Maho, 10 Oct)
m-Novels on the rise (Steve Vosloo from M&G’s Tech Leader, 16 Oct)

Radio:

Steve Vosloo was interviewed on Metro FM by Azania Ndoro (15 Oct)

Newspapers:

Kontax crew tackle teenage issues in m-novel by Toni Stuart for Southern Suburbs Tatler (15 Oct)

m-Novels on the rise

Steve Vosloo — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:43:38 -0500

m-Novels on the rise is a piece by Steve Vosloo about m-novels and Kontax in particular for M&G’s Tech Leader.

First Support Training for Philippi & Nyanga group

Mark Horner — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:34:20 -0500

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.

Kontax.mobi is “mobile ready”

Steve Vosloo — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:35:33 -0500

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.

Well done to Fontera, the mobisite developers.

Start ups in the Silicon Cape?

Andrew Rens — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:39:07 -0500

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.

Despite these differences “the idea that the Cape in South Africa had the potential to become the Silicon Valley of Africa” has captured the imagination of a group of people who’ve formed the Silicon Cape initiative.

“The Silicon Cape vision is of an ecosystem in the Western Cape of South Africa, that serves to attract and bring together local and foreign investors, the brightest technical talent, and the most promising entrepreneurs, to foster the creation and growth of world-class IP start-up companies in an environment that competes with other similar hubs around the world against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful settings and pleasant places to live, work and play on the globe.”

While that may seem somewhat idealistic I must give the organiser’s credit for not claiming to own the idea, the website states:

“The concept of the Silicon Cape is not owned or controlled by any single entity. It is a living community and an organic, ever-developing concept in the hearts and minds of every participant…”

I’d classify myself as a critical friend of the Silicon Cape idea. However I am concerned that in addition to the differences which I’ve listed, there is one critical difference which could founder the Silicon Cape. The San Francisco Bay area includes quite a number of very good universities, not least the public school, Berkeley and the private school Stanford. The creation of Silicon Valley is credited to the proximity of these schools, and the interplay between the faculty and postgraduate students and the entrepreneurs who turn the knowledge from those institutions into wealth producing businesses.

The kind of interplay which I witnessed in San Francisco will be stifled by the provisions of the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act. The Act, which is not yet in force, has consequences for South African entrepreneurs interacting with universities and research councils.

The Act gives 100% ownership of any intellectual property which was developed with public research funds to the government. The Act does not set a threshold for how much public research assistance someone must get to fall under the Act, as a result if an entrepreneur gets 0,01% of her finance from government research funding then all the intellectual property belongs to the government. This assistance need not be money but could be office space or use of a laboratory or even travel money to attend a conference (if it comes from a research fund).

Entrepreneurs who are concerned about their intellectual property falling under the Act should be extremely careful when working with universities and research councils like Mintek or the CSIR because the proponents of the Act claim that it applies automatically to any person receiving funding. The most important thing to ascertain is whether there is research funding involved and whether the entrepreneur can be regarded as having received any assistance from it.

Proponents of the Act will tell you that the Act requires that universities (and the new agency created to hoard patents) must give licences to SME’s, and the Act does say that, but the SME’s can’t in the first instance get exclusive licences, so incumbent companies will have access to the same technology. In other words entrepreneurs will be able to use technology based on government funded research but that technology must not be an entrepreneurs unique value proposition because it will be available to everyone else. While an incumbent corporation won’t be able to do an exclusive deal with a research institution and lock up technology (which is good for start ups) an entrepreneur will not be able to rely on intellectual property from a research institution as its unique value proposition. Its not too great a concern to an entrepreneur whose unique value proposition is speed to market or low price but otherwise it should be a large red warning light.
The Act does permit institutions to exceptionally give exclusive licences but the granting of such a licence is in the gift of the university, it must also be justified to a government department and the exclusive licensee must manufacture or offer the services in South Africa. Can you imagine such exclusive licences being granted quickly?

More profoundly choosing to work with a university or research council means that the architect of the Act has chosen an entrepreneur’s business model for her. The Act makes it difficult at best to develop FLOSS, crowd sourced or other open licensed business if one has any public research funding. Whether it will be possible at all depends on regulations which have not yet been finalised. The Act also prevents an entrepreneur from owning the intellectual property her business is based on, and makes obtaining an exclusive licence difficult. In other words it eliminates both ends of the spectrum, open businesses and businesses based on a monopoly on a particular technology.

Another more diffuse effect of the Act on entrepreneurs will be to reduce the knowledge available to entrepreneurs. Journal articles have been becoming increasingly available online in open access journals as the result of a policy by the same Department (Science and Technology) which sponsored the Act. The Act though prohibits publication of new knowledge until a patent is obtained. Unlike open access journals the full text of South African patents are not available online, only a type of summary is available online and then only if one pays a subscription fee to the database. The database lacks state of the art search functionality. As a result entrepreneurs in technological fields will not be able to efficiently make use of taxpayer funded research.

A researcher is allowed to publish an article after the patent is granted but the researcher would have had to wait while the university decided to patent or not, and then if not continue waiting for a government office to make the same decision. If a patent is to be applied for then the researcher must wait for the application, by which time someone somewhere else in the world is likely to have published first and the research is no longer cutting edge.

Complete learner workbooks now openly available as collections

Mark Horner — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:06:40 -0500

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.

Please download your subject’s complete workbook!

We invite you to search for the workbook which relates to your grade and subject and download it as a .pdf. Try printing it out as a reference in class or source of alternative examples and exercises.

Join a workgroup and collaborate on adapting it.

If you are not yet part of a workgroup, please join a workgroup where you can post questions or ask for help. You can discuss changes to the workbook or share your own material. One person make a copy of the collection for your learning area/grade and add it to the workgroup. Send out an email to all group members asking them to take a look at it and post in the forum their likes and dislikes about the workbook. Have a meeting to discuss how you’d like to change it / improve it / contextualise it and then work as a team to make a better workbook you can all use next year!

Example 1: Collection in Connexions

See the Table to Contents on the Grade 4 maths workbook below. The workbook is split into four terms and each term has a number of sections or topics.

Example 2: Collection downloaded as a .pdf

See the Table to Contents on the Grade 4 maths workbook below. This .pdf file contains all the pages in the collection in a single file, ready for print.

How to find the workbook for your subject and grade

Go to the Siyavula lenses at http://siyavula.cnx.org/lenses/siyavula and open the learning area you fall under. In this case it would be Siyavula: Mathematics (Gr. 4-6).

Search for it like you normally do, but as a search ‘CRITERIA’ use ‘COURSE’ and the ‘RESOURCE TYPE’. See example below:

Reflections on crowdsourcing the OpenPress logo

Mark Horner — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:00:11 -0500

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).

The experience of crowdsourcing the logo on 99Designs was interesting, fun and ultimately quite exhausting. For the record, we are happy with the logo that we have and, as we’re moving forward with the project, here is the logo for your viewing pleasure:

As with anything design-related there are always going to be opinions so it will be interesting to hear what other people think of the logo. We had a total of 140 designers submit 840 different designs. Some extremely good, some incredibly bad. We prepayed a prize of $500 and, as soon as we had a number of logos we felt we could live with we, guaranteed the prize.

Prepaying and guaranteeing a prize are incentives for designers to participate in your competition. We felt that guaranteeing the prize about half-way through the competition would be a strong, positive indication that the designs we had not yet eliminated were serious candidates.

The fact that design is very subjective is a key thing to bear in mind when using a crowdsourcing tool like 99Designs. That is not to say there are aren’t some well established guidelines for design. We found this list of 45 Rules of Great Logo Design to contain a number of good basic checks even though we broke a few. I’d recommend looking through that list (or any list for that matter as there are many) and then making as specific a specification for your logo as possible before launching your competition.

To get the most out of 99Designs do:

realise that not every designer who will submit a design is really a designer (an amateur with MSPaint can still sign up)
specify your constraints very clearly including things you’re not sure about (they need to know what parameters they have to play with)
provide regular feedback (to guarantee convergence)
be consistent in your treatment of logos
update your specification early on if you want to stop trends developing
eliminate designs that you don’t like in a timely manner
make a checklist of basic things and stick to them, things like:
- must work in B&W
- must scale well
- etc.
prepay your prize

and definitely don’t:

don’t spend the first day refreshing your browser, we were really excited by the first 20 designs discussing them all in detail but when you’re going to get 840 its not worth getting too bogged down early
get involved in any offline discussions with designers about their designs
consider designs not submitted through the 99Designs site
try to provide a detailed response to everyone
get too excited in the first day

If you provide regular feedback that is consistent and you make it available to all the designers by keeping it in the competition you are more likely to get something you like as well as keep the designers interested and keep frustration levels down. If you oscillate and are inconsistent designers will get irritated and move on. The designers definitely feed off each other and the whole contest becomes a dynamic system you get to prod and with many designers tweaking/riffing off each other tempers can flare-up. As long as you’re consistent and following the rules it should converge.

If you do embark on a crowdsourcing experience brace yourself for a busy week and have a look at this post on bad logos to keep your humour up.

September Update

Mark Horner — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:57:53 -0500

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.

Some of the highlights of September were:

Second Teachers’ Workshop

We held our second workshop for teachers in Kwa-Zulu Natal on the 4th and 5th of September. Approximately 60 people attended our workshop and it was a resounding success. The workshop goals were:

show the power of the Connexions platform for using, building,
sharing and adapting resources;
promote the formation of new communities forming that use
Connexions as a use to support their activities and provide the
possibility of for new communities to form; and
provide an environment that can enhance existing communities or
swap and share groups.

You can read more about it at
Kwa-Zulu Natal Workshop

Community Presentation Available

We made the slides for the community side of our workshop available and you can find them on here on Connexions.

Teach South Africa

We had the opportunity to train the Teach South Africa ambassadors to use the Connexions site, please read the blog post for more details:
Teach South Africa Ambassadors

This was a great opportunity to provide new teachers with access to resources to help them get their teaching careers off to a good start. We hope to have an opportunity to train the new ambassadors early next year so that they can benefit from the content and community tools on Connexions.

Technical Support

We also had the opportunity to respond to a number of support requests and we are looking forward to more from interested workgroups.

We’ve trained two teachers from KZN to provide support to workgroups in Tongaat so those groups will receive support if they request it.

Things are ticking along steadily and October will be a busy month. Visit this site for updates on our activities and for support requests send an email to support@siyavula.org.za

Digital Textbook Initiative in California

Mark Horner — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:41:02 -0500

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:

SB 48 by Senator Elaine Alquist (D-San Jose) requires that any individual, firm, partnership or corporation that offers textbooks for sale at the University of California, the California State University, the California Community Colleges or any private postsecondary education institution in the state, to the extent practicable, make them available, in whole or in part, for sale in an electronic format by January 1, 2020.

Before we discuss this further lets remind ourselves of the context. We’re talking about developments in a digital space, in the world of OERs where the movement has been accelerating significantly this year with projects like Connexions, CK12, Flat World Knowledge and Curriki (to name a few) all taking off. In this context, I think this is completely laughable!

Lets think about this for half a second:

to the extent practicable: an opt-out clause of note!
in whole or in part: so if I make a page or two available am I done?
January 1, 2020: and you’ve got geological rather than digital timelines to do …… nothing!?

Perhaps I should dig deeper into it but even if the majority of the content needs to be available, the deadline alone makes this a joke. Collaborative technology and its use will leapfrog this little piece of legislation in the next 18 months. Any publisher clinging to this as a timeline to get their act together regarding the digital distribution of content has just committed suicide.

Even in South Africa we already have almost the entire curriculum available online, just combine the scope of content covered on Connexions by Siyavula, the material that can be downloaded from the Mindset Network and fill in some gaps with what you can find on Thutong. This is all just my opinion of course.

Open Assessment Bank Approval

Mark Horner — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:35:19 -0500

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.

We are not going to re-invent the wheel and will be extending (NOT forking) an already existing assessment bank that has been developed by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) which they are calling TARMii. The HSRC has indicated that they have no objection to us creating an open bank as they’ve released their source code under the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). The HSRC implementation locks down the authoring side of the bank to a few specific users at the HSRC. Their bank is populated with Grade 4-6 (Intermediate phase) items for English and Mathematics and will allow teachers to:

create class-lists,
generate a test extremely rapidly, providing a question paper and memorandum,
capture learners results for the tests, and
generate reports on a learner-by-assessment standard basis.

We will keep all this functionality, which they have already tested, as it is really useful to teachers but we want to allow them to benefit from such a tool for all subjects and grades as quickly as possible. The HSRC will spend some time trialing the site with teachers and the items they have created before extending to other learning areas/subjects and grades.

To make this available to everyone we need to open up the authoring side and provide some means for community vetting. Our extension to the assessment bank software will cover:

community feedback:
- ratings
- comments
- verify as correct
authoring:
- simplify UI
- allow question cloning for minor modifications
- add version control
test generation:
- allow test to be tweaked (not currently available)
- browsing for additional/replacement questions.

This compliments Siyavula as it will bring more people into a the OER space but channel time and energy that Siyavula is not trying to channel as teachers spend a lot of time sharing, adapting and creating assessment items. The possibility of integrating the two exists as TARMii has made use of a number of tools/standards used or developed by Connexions, for example the WYSIWYG MathML editor, and the same development team, Upfront Systems, that has helped us extend the Rhaptos platform, on which Connexions is built, built TARMii and will do the extensions for us.

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

It is great to be building a tool in response to a real demand as a lot less energy needs to go into advocacy and messaging.

Coverage of Kontax (part II)

Steve Vosloo — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:51:17 -0500

In the week after the launch of Kontax, we’ve had the following coverage:

Web:

First English Xhosa mobile novel launched (Biz Community, 5 Oct)

Blogs:

Mobile Phones for Literacy? Launch of Kontax (Neerja Raman of Digital Provide: From Good to Gold, 4 Oct)
On a new m-novel (David Crystal of DCblog, 9 Oct). David is the author of Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 and Language and the Internet.

Radio:

Steve Vosloo was interviewed on Bush Radio (3 Oct). It was blogged about by the Bush Teens crew.
Steve Vosloo was interviewed on SAfm by Michelle Constant (10 Oct)
Steve Vosloo was interviewed on Good Hope FM by Carl Wastie (10 Oct)

Kontax goes cross-media

Steve Vosloo — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:55:11 -0500

Kontax is exploring what South African youth make of cross-media stories. We have a couple of tricks up our sleeve, with the first one being unveiled tomorrow. In the story, Sbu is trying to find Adelle. He has her cellphone so he goes through her contacts and calls each one. We’ve used real numbers and created voice messages for each so that readers can call or SMS the contacts.

Azure Hotel: 083 763 2623
Hyena Personal Guards: 073 658 9100
East London Township Museum: 083 716 8551
The Daily Eye: 078 739 3536

Why not try it yourself?

Inspiration for this came from the popular cross-media teen novel Cathy’s Book. In the book, which is Cathy’s lost diary, the numbers, email addresses and web addresses are all real, taking the reader from the print medium to other media as he or she explores the back stories and extras surrounding the story.

It worked in America. Let’s see if it works here. Perhaps in South Africa we need to create MXit profiles — it’s cheaper than making a call.

Launch of Kontax, a teen m-novel

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:43:55 -0500

Kontax is the m-novel that we’ve just launched as part of the m4Lit project, which I lead. It’s the world’s first English and isiXhosa m-novel. Check it out!

The Kontax launch @ the Book Lounge

Coverage of Kontax

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:12:09 -0500

Kontax launched yesterday. Here is some of the coverage that it’s been getting:

TV:

Steve Vosloo was interviewed about m4Lit on the Hip2b2 TV show on Monday 21 Sept
Kontax was mentioned on the Hectic Nine-9 TV show twice in the launch week

Web:

First African m-novel (Tech Smart) (1 Oct)
Sam Wilson’s English/isiXhosa M-Novel for Youth, Kontax, Goes Live (Book.co.za) (30 Sept)
First Mobile Novel Launches in South Africa (Creative Commons) (30 Sept)
m4Lit (Musical Mover and Shaker — Gabi Goldberg, an SA teen: “M4lit has huge potential and looks to change the attitudes of South African youths’ towards to reading and writing, as well as it leading the way for more interactive m-novels in South Africa.”) (30 Sept)
Kontax: The Mobi-Novel Mystery (Hip2b2)
m4Lit: Mobile phones for literacy (Marion Walton) (29 Sept)
Daily chapter teasers of Kontax (Hip2b2 mobisite)

Radio:

Steve Vosloo was interviewed on Radio 2000 by Carol Mashigo (1 Oct)

Print:

Kontax briefly covered in You and Huisgenoot magazines (1 Oct)

Hopefully there’s lots more coverage still to come!

The future as fishbowl

Andrew Rens — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:57:20 -0500

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.

But that tendency has been confined to specific social settings, where one would be primed, and where the extent of what one could find out about someone is limited by the knowledge or speculation of one’s informants.

Matthew Buckland thinks thats about to change, through augmented reality technology:
“You’d be able to hold up your phone in a crowded room and work out who is connected to who. You could instantly guage your primary and secondary networks and work out instantly who you should chat to, what the conversation points are — and who you should avoid. Where are the cliques. Whose an outsider? What’s the buzz. We’ll never forget a name again.”

Matthew’s written a fascinating blogpost The future of social networking – a concept investigation with some interesting mockups of what AR tech might look like.

Privacy concerns seem to arise on two levles, on the one hand the social games that people play, making judgements about other people, finding out about them, and managing the knowledge others have about your will be a lot more complicated. Will every lie become like that of a movie star or politician in which managing one’s public persona, the information one gives out, the information one conceal, the spin one puts on the past become a pre-occupation?

It seems that the privacy concerns raised in that context are best resolved though changing social norms. There is another, far interesting category, the stranger who starts talking to you and although you’ve never met him he seems to know you, who turns out to be a pushy salesman. That category seems to require the crudity of regulation, criminalising the intrusion in manner of the anti-spam regulation we never got.

The Protection of Personal Information Bill has recently been introduced into Parliament but as always law lags technology.

Launch of Kontax

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:44:18 -0500

Tonight Sam Wilson, author of Kontax, and Steve Vosloo, m4Lit project leader, launched the teen m-novel at the Book Lounge. The crowd asked some thought-provoking questions and seemed genuinely interested in the project.

Kontax launch @ the Book Lounge (Source: Shuttleworth Foundation, CC-BY-SA)

More photos on Flickr.

Big thanks for Mervyn of the Book Lounge for hosting the launch. Book launches are usually held with the hope of selling a few books. Not this one: the launch of a “non-book” that was not for sale in the store. Thanks Mervyn for being open minded. Long live printed books, long live m-novels.

Invitation to the Kontax launch at the Book Lounge

Steve Vosloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:39:43 -0500

On 30 September 2009 Kontax – the m-novel created for the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project – launches in South Africa, making world history as the first of its kind to be offered in both English and isiXhosa.

Kontax, a teen novel written by award-winning mobilist Sam Wilson about the adventures of a group of teenage graffiti writers, will unfold chapter by chapter over 21 days from 30 September.

Please join us for the official launch!

Wednesday 30 September
18h00
The Book Lounge
71 Roeland St, Cape Town
RSVP to booklounge@gmail.com or 021 462 2425

Steve Vosloo, m4Lit project leader and 21st Century Learning Fellow for the Shuttleworth Foundation, and the writer of Kontax, Sam Wilson of Clockwork Orange, will both be chatting about the fascinating world of the m-novel and the participatory reading culture of 21st century teens.

Enjoy some vino and snacks as we welcome in a new literary world that consumes, recreates, shares and remixes the written word!

Invitation to the Kontax launch @ the Book Lounge

Kontaxt press releases

Steve Vosloo — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:29:38 -0500

Two press releases for Kontax are online.

The first one is the “popular” press release — aimed at kids/kids publications and tries to get them to read the story. It describes Kontax and how to participate.

The second one is the “discussion starter” press release — aimed at adults/adult publications and tries to get them to profile the project. It describes Kontax within the broader m4Lit project.

Please use these to cover the story and the project.

I want to build an Open Assessment Bank

Mark Horner — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:38:39 -0500

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.

If we support communities of teachers sharing, adapting and enhancing assessment items in iterative, open and transparent ways it will save individual teachers’ time, provide assessment items of the highest quality and enhance the sharing of innovative ideas. The project would need to provide the simple, intuitive tools, support and advocacy necessary to allow teachers to achieve a critical mass of items. Furthermore, assessment items would need to be tagged with meta-data so that learners’ results can be captured and analysed allowing teachers to access reports that pin-point individual learner’s weaknesses and strengths, allowing for targeted interventions to support individual learners’ needs.

I have already been on the receiving end of many requests for an assessment bank, more so now that we are running teachers’ workshops as part of Siyavula. The original software development plan for Siyavula called for the integration of a new resource type into Connexions that would allow the automatic generation of tests. In retrospect it was too ambitious at that time but circumstances have changed and we are now in a position to deploy an assessment bank relatively easily that meets the criteria outlined above.

In embarking on this little exercise I think that we could achieve differing levels of success, all useful:

The basic success criterion is that teachers regularly use assessment items from the bank. For sustainability, it is important that we see items being added by teachers. If we see daily access by teachers and contribution statistics comparable to 1% of visits then we would deem the basic assessment bank as a reference for teachers a success and likely to be sustainable.
Should regular test generation take place on the site, it would indicate that we have sufficient items in a number of subject areas to be a useful tool for a new teacher and could be certain that teachers were saving time by using it and that we are making an impact in the classroom.
If the tools for capturing results and generating reports are being used it would indicate that the tool is useful in helping to guide day-to-day classroom practice and that teachers are now more aware of individual learners’ needs.

Teachers contributing items would also have joined the family of OER authors and it would significantly lower the barrier to getting them to contribute modules to Connexions by illustrating the benefits of sharing, acclimatising them to working online and ensuring that they feel like they are part of a much larger, virtual community. I would expect to see teachers who are comfortable authoring items on the assessment bank quickly stepping up to working on modules on Connexions.

Teach South Africa Ambassadors

Mark Horner — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:14:21 -0500

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.

Landulwazi school looked a little worse for wear, as many township schools do, but deep in the heart of the school were two fully functioning computer laboratories. To their credit, the full complement of computers in the laboratory we used were in perfect working order, something schools in much more affluent areas struggle to achieve.

We had 24 participants in our workshop. Given that we only had 3 hours to do the training we decided to spend a full hour on the concepts of the website so that we left them with a good foundation and then set up accounts, a workgroup and end with covering as much editing as possible. We left them with the draft manuals and a promise to send them the final ones when they were ready.

The group showed a lot of promise, enthusiasm and asked many insightful questions. A personal highlight was when one teacher discovered the WYSIWYG MathML editor and turned to another and said “This is much better than MathType!”. I hope that Connexions and Siyavula are able to provide support to these teachers-in-training to help them do the best possible job in difficult circumstances.

As a follow-up we recently heard that a teacher had relayed to Teach SA that she had “taken herself back to the site and has managed to get back in without asking anyone for help. She has been able to access and download material. She also said how much your explanation, with the rings on the floor, has helped her.”. We’re extremely proud to be supporting teachers and glad that we seem to be on the right track with our approach to technical training as we’ve received a number of similar responses. We’ll continue to refine it, being careful not to lose the elements that work.

KZN Workshop

Mark Horner — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:47:48 -0500

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.

The meeting was a great success with some of the Siyavula team’s highlights being:

7 workgroups being formed on the site after discussion around the workgroup’s objectives
teachers creating their own lenses spontaneously
teachers importing Word documents into their workgroups
teachers actually being happy with the full XML editing
a workgroup editing a document collaboratively in real-time
teachers supporting the group to allow facilitators to deal with problems
teachers talking about the possibility of them writing something which could eventually be used by the whole country
enough pressure for the creation of a school management lens
and quite a bit more ….

This workshop was slightly different to the one we held in Cape Town. Many of the teachers knew each other beforehand as the schools in Tongaat, from which the majority of the participants came, had already been working together. It was their previous collaboration, under Selvan Chetty, to manage the transition between junior and high schools, presented at a conference in Limpopo in 2008, that made an impression on Palesa Tyobeka, Deputy Director General for General Education. Palesa asked us to include them in our roll-out of Siyavula.

The fact that we were dealing with an already established community that was expecting us to help them coordinate and collaborate more effectively, necessitated a modification of our agenda from allowing the gradual formation of voluntary groups and the discussion around roles in groups to the nomination of group focus areas and the discussions of how to create the right environment to benefit from the creativity and knowledge of the entire group and then the actual formation of an initial group.

We had allocated an extra hour of technical training on the second day. Forming groups in the community session before that and allowing the group to write a manifesto meant that the final technical session could be used to actually set the workgroups up on Connexions. This worked well but would not have been possible with a random selection of teachers that had never worked together.

We are busy finalising our training manual and plans for support in KZN and are looking forward to some great work coming out the Tongaat area which will help teachers all over South Africa.

Compulsory Disclosure Agreement

Andrew Rens — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:26:53 -0500

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.

While some remain concerned that their “ideas will be stolen” perhaps because they have so few of them, increasingly investors and innovators are realising that “an un-executed idea is practically worthless” and “ideas have no value, only execution matters“.

Have you noticed how the insistence on an NDA increases in direct proportion to the banality of the information to be locked down? A venture capitalist capped that with the story of the unsolicited applicant for funding who told him that the “idea” was so secret that the applicant would not be able to disclose it even after the funding had been received.

Which explains the rise of the Compulsory Disclosure Agreement. The next time someone insists you sign an NDA just to talk to them insist that they sign a CDA. Here is a CDA you can use.

Compulsory Disclosure Agreement

Definitions

Information means all information including but not limited to all know how, technical information including know how, data design and algorithms, financial information, operational planning, information relating to staffing and employment, product information, trade secrets, ideas, emotions and dreams (both diurnal and nocturnal) however expressed whether recorded by any means including digital data, oral, or by conduct.

Intellectual Property means any creation of the mind that is capable of being protected by law from use by any other person in terms of intellectual property law anywhere in the world and includes patentable inventions, and copyright, designs, trade marks, plant breeders rights and the like

Disclosure means publication via teh Intertubes, through broadcast media, or through publication via a periodical.

Discussions

1. The Parties intend to conduct discussions and enter into this agreement to govern the disclosure of information during the discussions.

2. Each party shall be obliged to disclose all information relevant to, or referred to in the discussions. The disclosure shall be by whatever means are necessary so that the information is readily available for use by third parties.

3. To give effect to clause 2 above parties shall disclose information using open formats, and free of technical protection measures.

4. To give effect to clause 2 above parties shall grant an open licence to all intellectual property relevant to or referred to in the discussions.

5. Parties shall ensure that all their employees, agents and 3rd party contractors disclose all relevant information as required by clause 2 above.

6. Parties need not disclose information where a court or other impartial official tribunal has prohibited disclosure or further disclosure; or when another party to the agreement has already disclosed the information

7. A party must confirm the origin and accuracy of information disclosed by it to the other parties to agreement and third parties but need not confirm information disclosed by other parties.

Duration

8. This agreement shall enter into force on the date of signature, or should the agreement be signed on more than one date then the latest date signed.

Revocation

9. The requirement of disclosure shall persist until revoked by written agreement of the parties, or the expiration of twenty four (24) months from date of signature hereof. All information which has been disclosed by a party in terms of this agreement shall remain disclosed. On revocation or expiration clauses 4,6 and 7, and the definitions shall survive termination and remain in force and effect.

No Further Agreements

10. This agreement does not require any party to the agreement to enter into any further agreement with the other parties to the agreement or to any third party except to effect the obligation to disclose set out in this agreement. In particular the parties shall not be obliged to enter into any agreements requiring the sale of goods, the letting or hiring of goods, payment for services or the loan of any money or moveable property.

Whole Agreement

11.This agreement constitutes the whole agreement between the parties, no amendment or variation thereof shall be of any force or effect unless reduced to writing and signed by both parties. No oral or other written agreements or communications which require or relieve parties from the obligation of disclosure set out in this agreement shall be of any force of effect.

Signature

Signed at ___________________ (place of signature) this __________day (date) of _______(month and year) by _______________(signature) _______________________ (and full name) duly authorised to act on behalf of __________________(name of party)

Images of Kontax

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:14:53 -0500

The English version of the Kontax story is finished — yay! — and is being translated into isiXhosa right now. Some initial images are also complete and available on Flickr.

KONTAX character: Sbu (Source: Shuttleworth Foundation, CC-BY-SA-2.5-ZA)

Siyavula in the news …

Mark Horner — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:34:16 -0500

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

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/410/98/39701.html

http://www.skillsportal.co.za/learning/090908-teacher-resources-open-education.htm

http://www.it-online.co.za/content/view/1311198/142/

http://www.techsmart.co.za/features/news/Siyavula_platform_opens_minds.html

A modest start but hopefully the first of many

First Support Request ….

Mark Horner — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:29:46 -0500

The objectives of the teachers’ weekends are to:

Show the power of the Connexions platform for using, building, sharing and adapting resources
Promote the formation of new communities forming that use Connexions as a use to support their activities and provide the possibility of for new communities to form
Provide an environment that can enhance existing communities or swap and share groups

We don’t prescribe groups, we don’t force communities and we let workgroups find their own organising principle. What we promise is to support any groups/communities that do come out of our training. This makes it a little harder to ensure that a certain number of groups come out of any particular training exercise but should mean that they are less reliant on us and more sustainable.

The good news is that it is paying off, today we got our first concrete support request from a group that has formed from some teachers who were at our Cape Town workshop but, more excitingly, also teachers they’ve recruited to the group that didn’t attend our workshop.

They are already organising their own meetings without our prompting or coordination (sustainability!) and we’ll send a rep to their next meeting to help them form a workgroup on Connexions and answer technical questions.

Changes for the Second Teachers’ Workshop

Mark Horner — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:19:02 -0500

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.

Our second assignment was a workshop in Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) at the Protea Hotel Karridene where we would train 60 people, mostly teachers but some headmasters and even some KZN Department of Education circuit managers. A circuit manager can be responsible for hundreds of schools.

The majority of the teachers were from a ward of approximately 20 schools in the Tongaat area. These schools had been recommended to us by the Deputy Director General of General Education for national government, Palesa Tyobeka, as they were already pro-active in trying to collaboratively address the need for better coordination between primary and high schools in the GET phase.

Ultimately we decided to keep our primary community and technical processes the same but include more technical training time on the second day by starting the day an hour earlier. That would allow us to have more time to form workgroups on the site at the end of the workshop.

The community process was to be the same and the slides from the first workshop can be found here:

Siyavula Teachers’ Workshop: Workgroup Slides

View more presentations from siyavula.

Publicly Financed Research

Andrew Rens — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:45:41 -0500

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.

These claims are wrong.

To explain why I start with a brief plain language description of what the Act does and does not cover, followed by a longer legal analysis.

What the Act covers:

> the Act applies only to research and development, and so not teaching;
> the Act applies only to research and development funded by a government agency that funds research and development such as the National Research Fund;
> the Act specifically does not apply to the research supported by government scholarships or bursaries even if it is from a funding agency which don’t get other government funding;
> the Act specifically does not apply to conventional academic copyright works such as handbooks;
> the Act applies to institutions which are defined as Higher Education institutions and government funded research councils listed in the Act;
> the Minister of Science and Technology must follow a specific procedure to extend the Act to other institutions, the Minster hasn’t extended the Act to any other institutions.

There is no basis in the Act for the claim that the Act covers educational activities or has anything to do with schools.

What does the Act say:

The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act 2008 applies to only to publicly financed research:

“Application of Act
3. (1) This Act applies to intellectual property emanating from publicly financed research and development:”

The Act defines publicly financed research and development:

“publicly financed research and development” means research and development undertaken using any funds allocated by a funding agency but excludes funds allocated for scholarships and bursaries”

The Act defines also defines funding agency

‘“funding agency” means the State or an organ of state or a state agency that funds research and development‘

Research is not further defined and must therefore bear its ordinary dictionary definition which does not include education.

Thus far the only state agencies which finance research and development are under the control of the Minister of Science and Technology. Section 3 also regulates the application of the Act to institutions:

Institutions are defined in the Act as follows:

‘“institution” means
a) any higher education institution contemplated in the definition of “higher education institution” contained in section I of the Higher Education Act, 1997;
(b) any statutory institution listed in Schedule 1; and
(e) any institution identified as such by the Minister under section 3(2);‘

Schedule 1 refers to CSIR, Mintek and other statutory research councils.

Section 3 (2) requires that in order for the Act to be extended to an institution that affirmative steps are required from the Minister
of Science and Technology:

‘3(2) (a) Subject to paragraph (b), the Minister may, in addition to the institutions to which this Act applies, by notice in the Gazettf’, identify any other institution to which this Act applies if he or she is satisl1ed that the institution may develop intellectual property from publicly financed research and development.
(b) Any identification contemplated in paragraph (a) must be done with the concurrence of the Minister responsible for the institution concerned‘

Therefore according to the rules of statutory interpretation; expresio unius exclusio alterius because there is a specific procedure to extend the operation of the Act to institutions it cannot be extended automatically. Extension can take place only according to the specified procedure.

Therefore there is no basis in the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act 2008 for a reading that the Act applies to schools, or indeed to the teaching efforts of universities, or any other government created content,
much of which is automatically in the public domain by virtue of section 12 (8) of the Copyright Act 1978.

Its important to note that the Act does not apply to copyright in the most common outputs of research, specifically scholarly writing such as theses in universities, although it could be read as prohibiting disclosure of such research output while a determination is made whether the research could be patented. This is apparent from the definition of intellectual property in the Act:

‘“intellectual property” means any creation of the mind that is capable of being protected by law from use by any other person, whether in terms of South African law or foreign intellectual property law, and includes any rights in such creation, but excludes copyrighted works such as a thesis, dissertation, article, handbook or any other publication which, in the ordinary course of business, is associated with conventional academic work;‘

According to the canons of statutory interpretation this explicit exclusion precludes a strained reading of the definition of intellectual property being extended to copyright works used for teaching in universities even if that strained reading were to be adopted in the face of the plain meaning of research. An alternative construction of the definition of intellectual property is that it excludes all purely copyright works, refered to as “coprighted (sic) works” in the definition. The point of the such provision would be to offer a rationale for the exclusion, and possibly to qualify that where other rights, such as design or patent apply to the same material, that those are not excluded from the operation of the Act, but instead constitute an activity different to the usual course of academic business. In other words this construction would require that it is not necessary for a thesis with diagrams which are simply descriptive to register those diagrams as designs unless those designs constituted the designs for a new device proposed by the researcher, and thus represent something outside the ordinary course of scholarly activity.

First Teachers’ Weekend

Mark Horner — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:25:28 -0500

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.

The next step is to follow through on our hypothesis that creating an environment where communities of practice, built around curriculum resource development on Connexions, can flourish will achieve sustainability of both the site usage and the material. By partnering with Connexions we’ve already dealt with the sustainability of the software.

We are almost finished with the uploading of English and Afrikaans content for all learning areas for grades 1-9 (you can see it here) and we felt that enough had been done to start getting teachers involved on a large scale. So we jumped right in with a weekend workshop for teachers. We had a great turnout and we had to turn away many enquiries for participation in the weeks leading up to the event. A total of 70 teachers eventually participated in the weekend.

The objective of the weekend was to:

show the power of the Connexions platform for using, building, sharing and adapting resources;
promote the formation of new communities forming that use Connexions as a use to support their activities and provide the possibility of for new communities to form; and
provide an environment that can enhance existing communities or swap and share groups.

The agenda was designed to consist of two parallel themes, workgroups (community) and technical (site usage), which converged in the final session where good group practices were discussed with teachers in potential workgroups. This session coincided with the participants learning how to create workgroups on the Connexions site.

I will post a more detailed discussion about communities, our process and the material we have very soon.

Agenda Teacher’s Workshop August 2009

Day 1: Friday 21st August 2009		Day 2: Saturday 22nd August 2009
15:00	Welcome, check-in and tea	08:00	Breakfast at Town Lodge
15:30	Introduction to Siyavula	09:00	Travel back to the Foundation
16:00	Getting to know each other The ‘Edge Concept’ Importance of listening Workgroups	09:30	Debrief on previous day
18:30	Introduction to the platform Hula Hoops Casual search	10:00	Self organising principles + Group dynamics
20:00	Supper Leave for home or hotel	11:00	Tea
		11:30	Locating and downloading resources
		13:00	Lunch
		14:00	Connexions Members + Your online work space
		15:00	Group dynamics continued
		16:00	Online workgroups Forums and collaboration
		17:30	Tea and biscuits
		18:00	Establishing and maintaining workgroups Good Group Practices + Self leadership
		19:00	Closing
		19:30	Spitbraai

The agenda was very dense but participants were engaged and lively right until the end and the weekend was a resounding success. You can see the photographs on our Flickr stream. We have received a lot of very positive feedback and are looking forward to supporting the participants in their use of Connexions.

In order to achieve this we had to combine a number of different partners, which made the weekend even more of a challenge as it was the first time we had run an event together. The team worked incredibly well together with everyone jumping in to help whenever anything was required. The team that has helped make the event possible includes:

Edunova, an organisation whose goal is support the full integration of ICTs in education and provides Siyavula with technical facilitation capability
Feather Associates and Cielarko, organisations that support the community development within the Siyavula project providing community facilitation capability
Just Think, an organisation specialising in innovative solutions for a wide range of projects and providing the Siyavula project with training material development
Upfront Systems, a software development company that supports Siyavula by developing extensions to the Connexions platform that meet the specific needs of the Siyavula project
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, an organisation providing the monitoring and evaluation of the Siyavula project to make sure that all learnings are captured and made available to other projects

Our follow-up process involves providing support to any workgroups that request help. Workgroups do not have to be restricted to participants from our weekend but can include other teachers as well. If a group requests support then one of the Edunova team will attend their meetings and provide technical and community support on the topics that the group requests. It is important that groups find their own structure, purpose, leadership and identity if they are to be sustainable on their own.

This coming weekend we’re running another workshop in Kwa-Zulu Natal which I am really looking forward to.

OpenEd 2009: Buzz About Siyavula

Mark Horner — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:44:02 -0500

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.

For the research portion of the panel, I shared findings from Phase I of ISKME’s research, which entailed site visits to both under- and well-resourced South African schools, interviews with teachers, principals, school district administrators and curriculum experts, a survey of teachers (n=201), and observations of Siyavula’s professional development workshops. The specific purpose of the research has been to examine the curriculum and curriculum development needs of teachers and education stakeholders specific to the South African context, and to assess the perceived and potential benefits and challenges of creating, using and implementing OER in the classroom within the Siyavula model.

On the panel, I specifically discussed ISKME’s research findings regarding the need for open educational resources by South African teachers, the presence of offline curriculum development activities and teacher communities that can be leveraged to support online activities, and potential barriers to the adoption of Siyavula by teachers, including limited computer and Internet access and low technological efficacy. Highlights from the research portion of the panel included:

Evidence that there is a need for what Siyavula offers: 68 percent of South African teachers participating in the survey reported that they face challenges in terms of not having the curriculum materials they need
Evidence of offline “OER behaviors” in place: 74 percent of teachers participating in the survey reported they discuss materials informally with colleagues, and 72 percent reported they have shared materials with other teachers. Additionally, 83 percent reported that they combine materials with other types of materials, and 65 percent modify materials to meet their needs
Potential barriers to Siyavula adoption: Only 32 percent of participating teachers were reported to have Internet at their schools (limited access to technology), and 20 percent of teachers reported that they do not know what email is (low technological self efficacy)

In closing the research discussion, I presented opportunities stemming from ISKME’s findings, including the need for Siyavula to:

Leverage already existing communities of teachers working collaboratively
Further support teachers’ existing use, reuse, remix and sharing behaviors
Support workarounds for teachers without access to computers and the Internet
Integrate discussions of cultural barriers and basic technology skills training into teacher workshops

Both during and after the presentation, participants expressed enthusiasm for the research being conducted on Siyavula and pointed to the need for more OER research in general, specifically on how teachers and learners are already using curriculum materials and collaborating with peers, as a way to understand how current practices can be leveraged to support online OER behaviors.

Post a comment or question to this blog by leaving a reply below. For more information about the research portion of the panel presentation at OpenEd 2009, contact Cynthia Jimes at cynthia@iskme.org. To download the full panel presentation, click here.

Peer to Peer University: Copyright for Educators

Andrew Rens — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:04:31 -0500

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.

Copyright for Educators is a six week course on ….(you guessed it) ‘copyright’ and its aimed (surprise surprise) at educators. Its a scenario driven course intended to help educators think through scenarios in which ~~they~~ we need to navigate copyright in order to use learning materials.

The course is offered as one of the pioneering courses at the Peer to Peer University which is “an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses”. The first iteration of Copyright for Educators is being facilitated by a team of US, Australian and South African lawyers.

Today is the last day to sign up for this iteration of the course.

Focus group at COSAT in Khayelitsha

Steve Vosloo — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:04:45 -0500

On Saturday we held a focus group with 11 learners from the Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT) in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town. COSAT is a school, based at the False Bay College, that focuses on maths and science. The learners go through a rigorous application process to be accepted there, and once in they work hard to keep up with the high standards (they have school every Saturday morning!)

COSAT focus group (Source: mLearning Africa, CC-BY-NC-SA)

We met with the 8 boys and 3 girls, aged from 16 to 18 years, to ask them about what makes them tick, what interests them and what stories they’d like to read about. First we got them to complete a form with a few simple questions. Below is an summary of their responses (download the complete results):

10 out of 11 have cellphones, which they mostly use daily.
7 out of 10 are on MXit.
Most use the internet daily or weekly.
In terms of music, their tastes really vary (from Slipknot to Pavarotti). Common favourites are R&B, hip hop and house.
Favourite movies? Again, a wide range from “documentaries about previous dictators” to Spongebob Squarepants: the Movie. Overall, action and comedy are favourite genres.
Most read every day or 3-4 times a week. While one learner reads political review books another “does not actually read” — he just looks at pictures in magazines.

It is difficult to cater to a crowd that has such varying tastes. We ran 10 story ideas past them and learned much from that. We also asked them to write their own story ideas — which were all excellent. Sorry, we can’t share those now … it’ll spoil the forthcoming m4lit story! What we can say is that AIDS, xenophobia, soccer and family drama are all popular themes with both girls and boys.

This group is older than the first group that we met with, and their tastes are predictably different. For example, when shown a title in 5 different fonts, the overwhelming winner for this group was no. (4). For the younger group it was (1) and (2) tied for first place, followed by (3) and then (4).

We showed this group 10 different illustration styles:

The clear favourite was (2), followed by (4). They also liked (8).

The session was an overwhelming success and we will definitely meet with this group of bright, outspoken and energetic youngsters again.

COSAT learners, m4Lit writing team and Fre (Source: mLearning Africa, CC-BY-NC-SA)

More photos on Flickr.

Siyavula to be presented at OpenEd 2009

Mark Horner — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:22:36 -0500

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 Siyavula panel will be approached from three angles: strategy, technology, and research. Mark Horner, Siyavula’s project manager, will provide a project overview for participants, and discuss the content that has been uploaded to the Connexions platform. He will also discuss the targeted community intervention that is underway to support the formation of groups of educators that, over time, have been designed to evolve into fully-fledged communities of practice. Kathi Fletcher and Joel Thierstein of Connexions will discuss the new features that have been integrated into the Connexions experience for Siyavula, how they have been used so far, and ways in which projects and communities other than Siyavula have benefited from their use. Cynthia Jimes of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) will present research that is informing the implementation of the Siyavula model in the South African classroom, and specifically ISKME’s examination of the curriculum needs of teachers and education stakeholders unique to the South African context. She will also discuss the benefits and challenges of creating, using and implementing OER within the Siyavula model.

For more about the OpenEd Conference 2009, visit the conference website.

The South African Open Copyright Review Final Report is online

Andrew Rens — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:19:05 -0500

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

The Review closed last year, but its taken us a bit of time to produced a properly formatted downloadable version of the final Report. Now we have and its available for download, under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike South Africa 2.5 licence.

The Report includes recommendations on exceptions and limitations, Orphan Works, strengthening the Public Domain, and parallel import.

The Report comes at an interesting point in the debate about copyright. Although librarians and educators have argued for appropriate exceptions and limitations, ever since the current Copyright Act was passed in 1978 (and possibly before then), the issues of Orphan Works and the Public Domain have been largely neglected, and the prohibition on parallel imports has received far too little attention.

Basic reforms on these issues are overdue.

Focus group at Thembani Primary school

Steve Vosloo — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:31:36 -0500

What do 14 year olds living in South Africa’s townships (slums) want to read about? To help answer this question we did some research — first of the desktop kind, reading existing popular stories, magazines, etc. and then by holding focus groups with teens.

The first focus group was with 8 learners (aged 13-15 years old) at Thembani Primary school in Cape Town. The school is in Langa (map), a predominantly Black township. Read the notes from the focus group.

Thembani Primary school (License: CC-BY-NC-SA)

Learners choosing a logo font (License: CC-BY-NC-SA)

More photos on Flickr.

P2PU - learning from open source software (1)

Philipp Schmidt — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:25:31 -0500

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.

Google’s open source blog has an interesting update on their Summer of Code project. In a nutshell, SoC is an online mentored internship programme for young software developers. Developers are paired up with experienced members of the open source community and work on real-world projects. It’s like having someon who is a bit older and has some experience to help with the potential pitfalls when joining an open source community (in addition to providing feedback on the technical work).

[Photo licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND by pixieclipx]

The organisers ran a midterm mentor survey to find out what makes some participants succeed more than others. The short summary:

The earlier a student begins interacting with the mentor/mentoring organization, the more likely the project is to be on or ahead of schedule.

The higher the frequency of interaction, the more likely the project is to be on or ahead of schedule.

Projects that are on or ahead of schedule are more likely to be interacting via real time methods of communication (such as IRC).

The amount of time spend during these interactions has a less clear relationship to the project status.

If we replace “project” with “learning”, these results are useful for the design of peer-learning communities. The first point is not such an issue for P2PU, because our courses will be run in a set timetable. Points 2 and 3 are interesting and suggest that there are clear advantages in synchronous communication, and frequent interaction. Many openly taught courses to date have relied on a distributed blog structure, where participants would work by themselves and post their thoughts on individual blogs. Others would read and comment, but there was always a risk that the discussion would disagregate — and that some posts might not get read. The Google survey indicates that having (at least) weekly chat conversations would increase the level of participation and keep learners focused. We are also experimenting with something called The Wire, which will make it easier to keep track of the disaggregated discussion - and combining the two approaches makes sense.

The Google folks are a little puzzled by the last point (as am I) and we’ll need more data to understand what exactly is going on here, but I suspect it has to do with different types and quality of interaction (and would very nicely support the P2PU model of self-learner communities). Rather than focus too much on the amount of interaction as the vehicle for learning, the timing and purpose interaction might be more important for online learning communities. The most successful Google interns seem to progress well on their own, and use the interaction with their mentors to address specific challenges and questions. A similar approach is possible for education as long as learners have access to a curated set of open educational resources and good pointers to help them navigate their own learning paths. The better prepared learners are individually, the more useful their interaction with each other then becomes. It’s kind of the opposite of the traditional lecture in which new knowledge is introduced to a group with relatively little opportunity to engage and discuss, since it takes time and thinking to develop good questions. The alternative model — which we like — would be to let students watch or listen to recorded lecture by themselves (when and wherever) and organise a meaningful and focused conversation about the content afterwards.

Will Australia abolish parrallel import prohibition?

Andrew Rens — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:25:58 -0500

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

This is an important development because South Africa also has a prohibition on parallel import.

Parallel import prohibitions are legal rules which prohibit the importation of authorised copyright works sold in other countries. I’ll give a hypothetical example.

Sir Humphry Bassington-Smythe, the famous ornithologist, writes a book on migratory birds of the Indian Ocean, including South African and Indian birds. His London based publishers Empire Books sell the book in London for 7 pounds. Empire Books also sell a licence to an Indian publisher who sells the books in Indian for 15 rupees. Empire Books also sell a licence to Last Outpost publishers in South Africa who sell the book for R350.00.

Angry Native, a locally owned book shop, wants to buy the books legitimately sold in India, but the ban on parallel import in the prohibits them from doing so. Any South African could buy the book in India and bring it back with them for personal use, but bulk import is prohibited.

The effect of the ban is to prevent competition between authorised producers of a copyright work. South African and Australia have these bans as vestiges of their colonial inheritance, and its neo-colonial successor the Commonwealth Booksellers Agreement.

According to the Australian Productivity Commission:
‘One of the Commission’s concerns is that consumers pay higher prices for books, regardless of their cultural significance. A second concern is that these costs to consumers generate greater benefits for overseas authors and publishers than they do for our local writers. In effect, Australian consumers are subsidising foreign book producers.’

The Commission’s recommendation relies on an ‘extensive analysis of international book prices.’ It will be interesting to see whether empirically supported conclusions can effect a change in Australia.

Mobile Operators and Blue Gum Trees

Steve Song — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:59:09 -0500

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

Blue Gum Tree - Knysna

The Habitat Business Award for sustainable urbanization, which is organized by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), aims to recognize and publicize outstanding achievements contributing to sustainable urbanization through responsible corporate practices.

In reading this article, something pushed my buttons. If you happen to be a reader of this blog and have read Nathan and the Mobile Operators or We Need The Eggs or my rant about SMS charges, you may have already decided that I have African mobile operator “issues”. Perhaps I do. Certainly I have an issue with the apparent myopia, especially from development agencies, regarding any possible downside to the rapid growth of mobile infrastructure in Africa. Everyone is happy to celebrate their achievements without paying much attention to the effective monopolies/oligopolies that they have become. I am at a loss to explain why, with few exceptions, there is not more public comment on what mobile operators are doing to the general communications (and by extension, innovation) ecosystem in African countries.

Let me preface my rant by once again acknowledging the miracle that mobile phones are. There can’t be many people who still doubt the direct value that mobile phones provide to people. I’ll go further and say that the best is yet to come. There seems little doubt that there is a coming revolution in mobile-enabled banking and transactions. Yet all is not sweetness and light and that is because the wealth that is being generated by mobile operators in Africa is not being distributed evenly. Here are a couple of examples:

In South Africa, Sameer Dave, Chief Technology Officer for MTN, recently acknowledged that MTN were subsidising their 3G data traffic with revenue from their voice and SMS business. This means, when it comes to communication, that the poor in South Africa are effectively subsidising the wealthy.

Or consider the microeconomics of the edge cases of mobile access. Let’s pick a remote village served by a single cell tower. We know a couple of things about mobile access in Africa. One, the majority of calls are local. Two, people are spending substantial amounts of their disposable income on access. So, in a remote village if 50% of the phone calls are local and people are spending 50% of their disposable income on mobile access, that means that 25% of their disposable income is being siphoned out of that village.

Can’t we acknowledge the achievements of mobile phones on the continent while at the same time look at the larger ecosystem? Ecosystem…. the word set me thinking. Then suddenly it came to me… the Blue Gum tree. The Blue Gum tree is an excellent metaphor for understanding mobile operators on the continent. If you have spent time in Africa, you will have likely have noticed the Blue Gum trees especially in Southern and Eastern Africa, and the Horn of Africa. The Blue Gum tree (Eucalyptus) is not native to Africa but was imported to the continent in the late 19th century because it is fast growing and suitable for both timber and fuel.

However, in recent years the Blue Gum tree has gone from panacea to parasite. Not only does the Blue Gum consume 80 to 200 litres of water per day but it also attempts to kill off surrounding plant life by releasing a chemical into the soil. From South Africa to Kenya the effect of the Blue Gum tree on water scarcity is being recognised. So while no one doubts the utility of Blue Gum trees, the impact on the water table as well as the killing off of indigenous competitors needs to be taken into account.

I don’t want to get rid of Blue Gum trees or mobile operators but I would like them to stop retarding the competition and for there to be a more balanced telecoms ecosystem. The telecoms sector in Africa needs a thriving understorey that can develop new technologies and innovations that can ultimately grow up to challenge the “old growth”. Without it we all remain thirsty for innovation on the continent.

A final note. When giving out Mpesa awards, just once I would like to see Simon Batchelor of Gamos Consulting mentioned. Simon has been a tireless champion of mobile money since I have known him and I know how hard he lobbied Safaricom to take up the idea.

Rwanda – Africa’s high-tech hub

Mark Horner — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:59:45 -0500

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).

I’m visiting Kigali for all of 48 hours to participate in a meeting involving, primarily, the Open Learning Exchange (OLE), OLE Rwanda, and
the Rwandan Ministry of Education. From my perspective, the meeting is about how they can most effectively use the content that Siyavula
has made available as part of their One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiatives. Truth be told, I knew very little about Rwanda, apart from the horrific events that transpired 15 years ago, and wasn’t every excited about the trip.

Then I did a little research which has made me very very excited about the prospects for Rwanda. First I’d like to set the scene with some of Rwanda’s vital statistics. The country has a population of just over 10 million people but is quite small (26 000 km²), making it the
most densely populated country in Africa. The perimeter of the country is 893km – for the South Africans that is less than a drive from Cape Town to Kimberley. That’s the perimeter – the country is approximately 150km across at its widest point. So it’s a small country. 70% of the country is literate, despite 60% living under the breadline ($1 per day).

So what is there to be excited about? Rwanda has committed itself to moving from a subsistence- to knowledge-based economy. So has South Africa (at least moving from resource- to knowledge-based) but the thing that is exciting is they’re actually doing something about it other than just making pronouncements.

Rwanda is committed to deploying fibre-optic infrastructure so that schools, universities, government offices and institutions have direct access to fibre. Not only that, they’ve already laid more than 2000km (~2300km) of fibre! Now go back to my earlier comments and think about what that really means given the size of Rwanda. If Rwanda put down a star-network of fibre emanating from Kigali then it would have 24 spokes with about 400km of fibre to spare, and each spoke would arrive at the border of the country less than 40km away from the adjacent spokes. You’d need to lay at most 20km of fibre to connect to a comprehensive backbone. I have no idea what their network actually looks like but no matter how you slice it, 2300km of fibre in a country that is 150km across is incredible.

The government intends to connect to the Seacom cable before the end of this year. If you have broadband in Rwanda in December this year, you may have the best broadband in Africa! I’ll ask Steve Song to correct me on this one but you’d be MUCH better off than having broadband in South Africa.

Just laying fibre doesn’t solve any of the countries problems but it opens up amazing opportunities for innovative solutions to solve those problems. Fibre is the ultimate foundation for communications infrastructure. The Rwandan government teamed up with one of the most wired countries in the world to roll out their fibre, Korea. Korean Telecom (KT) is doing a lot of the implementation.

Now all of sudden my meeting to discuss putting content on laptops in a Rwandan school is a lot more exciting. I’m starting to imagine all the things I wish we could try in SA:

a class of African school children that can actually stream video from open courseware sites or teacher tube
run simulations online
communicate with learners elsewhere in Rwanda and the world
teachers video conferencing across the country forming lots of niche communities of practice
extensive, rapid development and deployment of OERs ensuring content used in Rwanda is as up to date as possible
effective use of national databases for learners and their assessments
on-demand one-on-one tutoring for learners online
learners really embracing content creation and their own creativity
and so much more!

Thats a far from comprehensive list and each item requires a little more than just fibre but none of them works well without fibre, something else that Rwanda probably tops the density list for.

Just browse the projects they’ve got listed on the Rwanda Information Technology Authority – they’re embracing e-government, e-health (OpenMRS for example), etc. and I think that they will leap frog many other developing countries. The full benefits will still take years to appear, as the benefits of education for example always do, but I am convinced that if the Rwandan government sees this through, and embraces openness and innovation, then the sky is the limit not only for education but for the country as a whole!

Despite always being a proud South African, I’ll be forever jealous that SA has spent years suppressing our telecoms industry and hasn’t adopted a comprehensive broadband strategy like Rwanda. The silver lining is that at least we’ll have a shining example in a year or two of what is actually possible. Lets just hope Rwanda manage to pull it off.

Harvard Professor: Abolish Copyright for Academic Works

Andrew Rens — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:16:42 -0500

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.

More on public lending rights lobbying in South Africa

Andrew Rens — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:41:57 -0500

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

There is also a somewhat misleading article from the otherwise excellent publication IP Watch. Why misleading? Because it describes the lobbying in these terms: “South Africa could become the first developing country to permit authors to be paid when libraries lend their books permit authors to be paid when libraries lend their books. The use of the word permit suggests, wrongly, that there is a prohibition which could be repealed rather than a monopoly which is being sought. The article also fails to interrogate the claim that ANFASA represents the interests of all non fiction and academic authors in South Africa.

The Library and Information Association of South Africa explains the conditional grant system for funding libraries.

Charles Masango and Denise Nicholson, librarians at UCT and Wits University respectively, have co-authored an academic article on the issue: ‘Public lending right : prospects in South Africa’s public libraries?’ Unfortunately its locked down on SABINET.

Explanation of Rent Seeking with example: public lending rights in South Africa

Andrew Rens — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:16:49 -0500

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

“Rent-seeking

Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers. Classic examples of rent-seeking, a phrase coined by an economist, Gordon Tullock, include:

• a protection racket, in which the gang takes a cut from the shopkeeper’s PROFIT;

• a CARTEL of FIRMS agreeing to raise PRICES;

• a UNION demanding higher WAGES without offering any increase in PRODUCTIVITY;

• lobbying the GOVERNMENT for tax, spending or regulatory policies that benefit the lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers or consumers or some other rivals.

Whether legal or illegal, as they do not create any value, rent-seeking activities can impose large costs on an economy.”

The term has been more formally defined by Gordon Tullock as “the use of resources for the purpose of obtaining rents for people where the rents themselves come from some activity that has some negative social value.”(1)

What concerns economists about rent seeking behaviour is that resources are not used to produce more or better goods or services but instead to alter the structure of the economy so that the rent seeker is able to charge higher prices, in other words to reduce competition.

All of this may seem somewhat theoretical, so I will illustrate it with an example. The Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA) is lobbying the Department of Arts and Culture to spend its slender budget which has already been depleted to pay publishers for the books in public libraries to pay again for every time that public libraries lends the books out. In other words ANFASA want Arts and Culture to pay multiple times, to mulitple intermediaries (publishers and collecting agencies) for public library books, once when they buy them, and then annually for as long as they own them.

This is contrary to the idea that once one has purchased something, like a book, that one owns the book, and as a result one can do what one likes with it. According to the economic literature it is a characteristic trait of rent seeking that it often interferes with property rights. This is an issue long ago resolved in the utilitarian tradition of copyright law, a tradition which includes South Africa, by the doctrine of first sale. The doctrine of first sale, first articulated by the United States Supreme Court in 1908 states that once a publisher has sold a book the publisher cannot make claims about what happens to that book. This probably seems like common sense to most readers of this blog, if Ford sold you a ‘bakkie’ (3) you would be astonished if Ford subsequently claimed that it is entitled to charge you each time you drive it, or even (if you ran a rental car business) every time you lent it.
However one of the pernicious effects of rent seeking according to economists is that it undermines the ‘common’ sense of a society that profit is the appropriate return for socially productive activity, and not due to manipulation of regulatory processes.

Its important at this point not to become confused by the term ‘intellectual property’. You couldn’t use your ownership of your Ford bakkie to justify making many replica Ford bakkies. Ford holds copyright, design and patents in the design of the bakkie. However that Ford holds those statutory rights doesn’t permit it to claim a rent every time you use the bakkie or even every time you use your bakkie for a particular purpose.

In this example the resources devoted to seeking monopoly rents are not only those devoted by ANFASA to lobbying but also those devoted to responses to ANFASA’s lobbying, primarily by libraries and associations of librarians, and also the resources which the state, specifically the Department of Arts and Culture will devote responding to the lobbying. The resources of ANFASA, libraries and DAC would better used to challenge the far more urgent issue of the oligopolistic conditions prevailing in South Africa’s publishing industry, and the remittance of a majority of copyright royalties to the global North.

The resources used for rent seeking are referred to as input costs. Economists are concerned the resources are used inefficiently as well as with consequent effects of the monopoly on the efficiency of the economy as a whole.

Why focus on the input costs? Because it seems unlikely that a government committed to development will agree to a scheme in which it pays more money for the same number of books. According to reports on libraries commissioned for the Department of Arts and Culture the libraries are severely under-resourced, and most libraries do not have the funds to buy new books, the Status Quo Report states:

“Municipal expenditure on public libraries is mainly for staff and general operating costs. Staffing accounts for about 60% of the municipal funding of public libraries. The bulk of the spending burden on libraries has been carried by the six metros, and capital expenditure has been almost non-existent outside the six metro’s” (4)

A permanent statutory monopoly rent from publicly libraries would run contrary to the recommendation of the Funding Model Report for public libraries in South Africa:

“It is important for long-term sustainability that no model, or even allocation of functions, be regarded as cast in stone. Development with regard to a sustainable public library model for South Africa is a relatively new concept, and changes such as technological renewal occur with increasing frequency. Conditions and requirements change from time to time and therefore there should always be flexibility and a willingness to improve or adjust.“(5)

In other words a sustainability model for public libraries is still being developed in South Africa. Increasing the overhead costs of libraries forever without increasing the holdings or offerings of libraries is likely to prevent the development of a sustainability model, thus rendering public libraries unsustainable outside of the six metro’s referred to in the report. Economists refer to such outcomes as Net Negative Effects. Net Negative Effects occur when the Net Effect from the Rent Outcome is negative, either because the Costs of Rent seeking outweigh the net social benefits, or when the net social benefits are themselves negative. In the example the net social benefits claimed for the rent seeking, increased income for authors, is not just outweighed by failure of ANFASA to address the monopolistic competition prevalent in the industry but the social outcome is negative.

A rational government in a developing country would resist rent seeking. A few authors possibly receiving more money (after intermediaries such as collecting agencies have been paid) is outweighed by the failure to challenge the failure of the publishing industry in South Africa to massify, but is far more outweighed by depriving millions of children of access to books.

What is at stake is set out in the Funding Model Report to Arts and Culture:
“Goal 2 of the millennium development goals says that by 2015 all boys and girls should complete their primary education. In South Africa public libraries can be seen to be making a contribution to this ideal by providing the relevant information in an appropriate environment to help boys and girls complete their primary education.”(6)

1. (Gordon Tullock, Gordon Brady, and Arthur Seldon, Government Failure (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2002), p. 43.).
2. The First Sale doctrine was first enunciated in Harrison v. Maynard, Merrill & Co., 61 F. 689, 691 (2 Cir. 1894), and confirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Bobbs-Merril Co v Straus 210 U. S. 339 (1908) and subsequently codified in § 109(a) of the Unites States Copyright Act of 1976.
3. For readers from outside South Africa, the vernacular term ‘bakkie’ refers to a light pick up truck (LUV/LDV), it stems from the Afrikaans “bak” a box, pronounced “buck-ee”.
4. p2, Status Quo Report.
It is worth pointing out that the Reports, produced with taxpayer funds, bears the following notice on front page:
“This report has been compiled by KPMG for the sole and exclusive use of the Department and should not be quoted in whole or in part without our prior written consent.”
This raises the interesting question of what legal basis there could be for such a claim by KPMG. I confess that I can find none. Section 12 (8) of the Copyright Act states that there is no copyright in official texts of a legislative, administrative or legal nature. Since the reports in question were commissioned by the Department of Arts and Culture, and subsequently published on its website it seems that if the texts are not official texts then at least the copyright of the texts subsist in the Department of Arts and Culture. In any event if copyright does subsist in the reports how could a mere notice do away with the provisions of section 12 (1) of the Copyright Act which permits reproduction for the purposes of fair dealing for criticism, review, reporting, as well section 12 (3) of the Copyright Act which permits quotation.
5. p49 of the Funding Model Report
6. p3 of the Funding Model Report