PROJECTS

Cape Town Declaration

froggy — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:07:51 +0200

The Shuttleworth Foundation in partnership with the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Hewlett Foundation hosted a physical meeting of a group of informed and involved individuals from the broader open education community in Cape Town, South Africa, on 14 and 15 September 2007 as a first step towards developing a shared understanding of what the term 'open education' may entail and devising core strategies of how it may be achieved.

Both current and aspirant members of the open education community expressed a need for the clear articulation of the concepts and strategies relating to open education. It was decided to develop a declaration on open education to promote cooperation, synergies and movement building without requiring everyone to coordinate or sign up to a single umbrella organisation. The declaration will be modeled on the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which served this purpose for the open access movement, It is intended that the Cape Town Open Education Initiative become a similar movement, building initiative to be shared widely by those active and interested in openness in education.

The physical meeting is followed by a round of online consultation with a broader group before the final release of the findings.

The notes from the physical meeting and the current draft of the declaration can be found on the OpenEd wiki.

Free High School Science Texts

froggy — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:22:54 +0200

The Free High School Science Texts project is funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation and run by a committed team of volunteers. It is aimed at developing and disseminating free and open textbooks and supporting materials for use in the teaching of Science and Maths for grades 10-12, based on the South African school curriculum.

The project was founded by a group of students and young scientists who wanted to make a contribution to the development of future scientists, mathematicians and engineers by sharing their knowledge in an accessible way. Their intention is to collaboratively create easy to understand, curriculum aligned texts and use free and open licenses to increase access to educational resources.

A set of complete textbooks for Maths, Physics and Chemistry for grades 10-12 will be completed by early 2008. The use of the GNU Free Documentation License will allow the materials to be both freely available and legally modifiable by anyone, ensuring that the information they contain is kept up to date and that the texts can be translated or modified according to the needs of particular groups of learners.

iCommons iSummit '07

froggy — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:56:57 +0200

The iCommons iSummit is the annual gathering of the broader Creative Commons community and is coordinated by iCommons. The summit is attended by members of the community to discuss, devise and celebrate all things open and collaborative. The summit is held in a different location every year and brings people together both physically and via the 'virtual summit' held simultaneously in Second Life.

In 2007 the Shuttleworth Foundation expanded its involvement in the iSummit from participant to partner by spearheading the inclusion of a track dedicated to education at the 2007 iSummit held in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The track aimed to provide a focused platform for the exchange of ideas and other interactions through a process of participatory event facilitation. This event format allows all participants to share their thoughts, experiences and plans with others as opposed to only hearing from panelists, so doing strengthening and broadening individual and institutional networks.

One output of the event was the paper 'Open Sourcing Education: Learning and Wisdom from iSummit 2007'.

There were also some blog posts and discussion on the iCommons website during and after the event on both the content of the education track and the facilitation approach employed:

ISKME Case Studies

froggy — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:04:30 +0200

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) Case Study project is aimed at building and supporting a participatory model of case study development. It seeks to build capacity for data gathering and critical inquiry at the programme level and share that information and the resulting findings across programmatic and other boundaries to advance local knowledge, opportunities, and the field of open education resources at large.

ISKME is currently developing a case study framework and gathering data for an initial set of case studies.

This project driven by ISKME in partnership with the Shuttleworth Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, Telecentre.org and Curriki.

OpeningScholarship

froggy — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:05:53 +0200

The OpeningScholarship project is a practical research initiative that explores ways of better using ICT for scholarly communication and the exchange of knowledge between academics, students and the community. The project is being lead by Eve Gray and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams within the University of Cape Town (UCT) and is funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation.

A specific focus of the project is on providing access to knowledge generated by scholars to students and the community. Some of the possibilities being explored are open access publishing as a standard practice and reviewing the institution's policy on intellectual property rights from all scholarly outputs.

It is expected that this project will yield a model that will not only drive change within the policies and practices at UCT, but also provide a starting block for other higher education institutions that are interested in doing the same.