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.

read original post on Cynthia Jimes's Site