My answer is YES!!!! And I am hoping Mozilla will build this teaching/learning/doing tool into WordPress so that two of my favorite ideas (other people’s that is) can come together. Earlier I blogged (One webserver per child) about Gardner Campbell’s call to action to give students control over their own web persona and information and I suggested that a simple starting point is a blog site that you control yourself.

So, why do I think these two ideas are related? A wordpress site, especially one that you know how to control and manipulate yourself, can be your resume, your portfolio, the place you show off your credentials formal and informal (badges!), the place you control what parts of your online social media you share and display, etc. So lets teach HTML5 right there. Where the code you create can immediately become a part of your portfolio. Where others can engage directly with you and your ideas.

The web development skills become relevant for everyone, not just future computer scientists. Artists and writers and managers and politicians and engineers all have resumes and portfolios and will need the skills to articulate their talents and ideas. Game designers can build simple demos right on their site. Want to collect some data and analyze it? Use your web skills to collect and analyze, and then display the results as part of your blog. Collect badges from various online classes and code academies and display them on your blog. Show off some fun math tricks with MathJax. The possibilities seem endless.

read original post on Kathi Fletcher's Site

Today was mesh day! Finally we had a few hours free to all get together and do some long distance mesh potato testing. There was a lot going on during the day, and we did some different tests so let me setup things by giving you details of the test environment and what we looked to get out of it.

The test we had in mind was to see how far we can throw decent signals with our stock mesh potato units. We have been playing with them in the confines of a single room for a while now and have them singing and dancing but out in the real world what kind of distances can we get. The ideal way for us to start was to challenge the god’s of wifi and set up our 3 units in a way where they had good spacing apart, and only two units could see each other at a time.

Site A was in Dee Why, being manned by Glen and Dave. This is where we started in the morning to do our testing. Site B was at Long Reef headland, manned by Geoff. Site C was in Collaroy, manned by Carlo. The idea was to get fairly equal spacing between us, but have site B as the man in the middle to mesh Collaroy and Dee Why together. We had 2meter amateur radio handhelds to use for comm’s (with Geoff acting as relay) until we had the mesh up and running for voice.

The setup was the same at each site, a Mesh Potato on a stick of some kind (Squid Poles), Analogue phones for voice and laptops for running network performance testing (iperf / jperf).

Setup

Getting setup wasn’t too painful. All three units are using slightly different methods of power connection which is good for experimentation. The only hiccup was one mesh (the one I was holding onto) had a slightly different firmware to the other units, which may or may not be the reason why it didn’t want to mesh with the other two units. Glen re-flashed my unit with the same software and that resolved the issue. In field use it would be likely that we would all have the same code so no biggie on that one. One thing that we have noticed is flashing the units from a ubuntu virtual machine (with vmware fusion) can throw some funny errors, this time around it didn’t slow us down but it seems a switch in the middle of the equation may see the flashing process work better.)

Glen and Dave had site A up and running very quick. Located at the headland car park it was also one of our most visible sites. The guys got asked a few questions by the locals, some of which jokingly asked if we were installing the NBN. We of course answered yes whilst poorly attempting to hold a deadpan face (We recently found out our suburb’s are not included in the 3 year roll out plan…).

Testing & Results

So the plan was to get the mesh up and running, and once we could ping each other run some tests. Site A and Site B were around 2.1 km apart and connected up. Site B and Site C never connected even after the power was bumped up.

Site A and Site B were able to chat away on the analogue phones with a little crackle and line quality issues. Glen being the resident voice comms guru tried a few different codec’s to see if he could improve the voice quality, but it seems most of the issue was the underlying link quality.

The link speed bounced around a little too. It didn’t like TCP packets much, but could handle UDP packets much nicer.

Between Site A and Site B the maximum throughput was around 1Meg, but as you can see with the first image below it was short lived. The average generally was closer to between 250 – 500 KBit’s. Remember this is over a 2.1KM link with 2 standard mesh potatos with no external antennas etc etc. For the test Site A was connected to the Mesh Potato via Ethernet, but Site B was connected via wifi.

Dave did some other testing, here you can see ping results from his mac to Geoff’s PC. Not a bad response time when both computers where connected to their respective Mesh Potato’s via wifi. Dave’s Mac could also see Site B’s Mesh Potato in its wireless list, but he couldn’t connect to it.

Glen noticed a failure of the link at one stage during the testing, after looking up he quickly established a potential cause. This little guy really wasn’t too interested in giving up his vantage point.

So what did we learn?

That these things are great radios, and we took them to the edge of their performance today. 2.1km out of a little wifi AP is a great result, and we are very happy with the results. The main lessons learned could be summarised as

1. When operating in the field make sure all your units are on the same code.
2. 2.1KM is a great result, but ideally these units would be placed closer together or have external antenna’s to improve gain.
3. Field operation probably takes a little more preparation on the testing we where going to run. Next time we do a prep hour or so indoors in ideal conditions testing the commands we are going to run and how we are going to record the results.

Things to try / improve

1. Run some more controlled area tests to figure out the max throughput of these units.
2. Make a prepared list of commands to run directly from the mesh. (Ie, Horst for wifi noise and wlan connection speeds between mesh units)
3. Same test as last time, but place Site C in the middle of Site A and Site B. That way we can see how the units mesh, and if they choose the faster path correctly.
4. Create a cheat sheet of commands, numbers, IP’s and passwords.
5. Figure out if we can write some scripts to query the units and dump results.
6. Do a debrief immediately after the tests to get it all down.

Lab Results

Glen ran some tests between his two units across his apartment and found that he could move 15mbit of traffic, so the hardware it self is great.

Here you can see the results Glen got when he did some two way tests between two computers connected to individual mesh potatos that had meshed together. As you can see they can get a very decent throughput, this is 15MBits both way with minimal jitter. Obviously they are in the same room but it shows the hardware is capable of nice things.

Anyway it was a great day out, we had a lot of fun and it was great to nerd it up in the sun.

http://nerdpolytechnic.org/2012/04/meshed-potatoes/

read original post on Steve's Site

Flash Grants:

The rationale behind these grants is that there appears to be some voices that are not heard, ideas not seen and Fellows that are not yet ready to be Fellows, bubbling around the periphery of our funding model.  We wanted to pay attention to that, and see if we can find a way to tap into some of the people/ideas and extend our networks.

Grants of $5,000 are nominated by each Fellow (including Fellows emeritus) to someone who they thinks are an impressive change agent and could be a potential Fellow (i.e. work in the field of open/education/tech).  We have given awarded to the 1st recipients and I will report back on how they faired in 6 months time!

Brand/Website:

Using the website crowd sourcing service from 99 Designs, we have updated our brand.  The process was surprisingly fun, cost effective, quick and far more challenging than I imagined it would be.  The winning design  is, imo,  far better than we would have achieved if we had briefed worked with an agency.

We also bought the Information Architects WordPress theme for $49.95  and have customised it somewhat to reflect us.  It is clean and simple to navigate – plus seriously easy to keep up to date!  Highly recommended.

Fellows 6 months highlights and reports:

Mark Horner

Full report back and summary:

• Department of Basic Education printing and distributing the Siyavula Maths and Physical Science for every learner in Grade 10 – 1.8million books
• Life Sciences book started and making good progress

Rufus Pollock

Full report back and summary:

• Estimated 30-50 *public* operational deployments of CKAN, of which RP runs about 20
• Finalised separation of software and site: CKAN = data hub software, theDataHub.org = community data hub site
• Community has grown significantly with now almost 50 OpenSpending datasets on theDataHub.org and growing group of core “data wranglers”
• Spending Stories was a winner of the Knight News Challenge. Spending Stories will build on and extend OpenSpending.

Philipp Schmidt

Full report back and summary:

• More disruptive in methodology – challenge based learning
• More ”schools” with expert entities (school of citizen cyber science, school of openness with creative commons etc…)
• P2PU were on track to be a product the big change is that it is a lab and a methodology working with rather than for organisations.

Kabir Bavikatte

Summary:

• Since BCP’s were recognised by WIPO in 2010, SA, Namibia, India, Malaysia and Bhutan have adopted (or are in the process of being ratified) them in national law.
• 13 BCP’s have been completed and implemented and a further 14 are in progress
• Idea has now gone viral, there are a lot of communities developing BCPs but calling them by other names
• Move to India – has the opportunity to directly influence their indigenous knowledge policy and implementation

Gavin Weale
Full report back and summary:

• 50,000 copies of a magazine produced and distributed 100% by young people
• Covered 80% of costs in 1st issue through advertising and design
• Y2 will expand from just advert dependent to internships, work placement, and opening up the minds of SA commerce to things like letting the kids play around with their brand

Kathi Fletcher

Full report back and summary:

• Created Open API (OERPub) based on SWORD for OER’s.
• Implemented in Connexions.
• Massive content enabler, an importer that takes documents (Word, Open Office/ Libre Office, Google Docs, and some HTML and blog entries and transforms them into a remixable XML format – then lets authors upload and publish to OER repositories (currently Connexions).

Arthur Attwell

Full report back and summary:

• Prototype of site
• Rights agreements drawn up
• In negotiation with copy shops and large copy chains
• In principle commitment from publishers (i.e. Bloomsbury, UNISA, News Corp International, etc…)  to use service

Paul Gardner-Stephen

Full report back and summary:

• MeshMS (Mesh SMS service), interactive mapping,  Rhizome file distribution or store-and-forward SMS working
• Recognised as the leaders internationally in this space: finals of the World Embedded Software Competition for University students (South Korea), strong engagement by and with the IEEE 802.11 standards process (USA and international), presenting at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas and TEDx Adelaide (Australia), and also reaching the finals of the Ashoka Foundation World Changer’s Citizen Media competition (international) from a field of more than 400 entrants.
• Next steps: add in the missing pieces, primarily the security and authenticity, appropriate trails with 3rd parties

read original post on Helen Turvey's Site

This is not an overview of all the things that have happened at P2PU in the last year, but rather it’s a reflection on along three broad themes: (1) building a social learning platform and community, (2) laying the groundwork, and building the partnerships necessary for hacking certification, (3) and making P2PU run like a well-oiled machine, that is fast and nimble, but remains committed to openness and transparency.

It’s long. You were warned. Photos thrown in for entertainment.

Building a Social Learning Platform and Community

• We ran two rounds of courses, and continued to double the number of courses and size of our community each time (as we have done in every round so far). More than 3300 users signed up for 54 courses and the community has grown to almost 20,000 registered users by June 2011. A significant part of this growth has been driven by School of Webcraft, and together with partners we are developing a number of other schools (including schools for social innovation, maths education, and we are currently preparing the first courses of a planned school of education / teacher training).
• A major milestone was the complete re-design and migration to our new web site which we just launched on June 17th (old site: archive.p2pu.org). The development work was led by Zuzel Vera, our fantastic technology lead who came onboard full-time earlier this year. She rolls out updates to the site every 2 weeks, which means things are getting better all the time and we are super excited to see a small, but active open source community starting to contribute code. The idea has always been to get people who are using P2PU involved in the process of improving the platform – and we are now offering a P2PU course for developers to help them get started (one for for UX designers is coming soon.) If you want to geek out on the technical details (Python/Django mainly) check out our github page and development task tracker.
• As part of the redesign, we decided to make some adjustments to our model and added support for more flexible courses and study groups. Requiring all courses to be more or less the same length, and setting a coordinated start date, didn’t work for everyone. And in between the course cycles, there were no courses new users could sign-up for. That’s why the new site adds support for self-organized study groups that can run perpetually and encourage users to start courses and study groups at any point, and not confined to a small number of cycles each year.

Hacking Certification

One of my main interests has always been the idea of “hacking certification” and how we can recognize or certify achievements that take place in informal communities like P2PU.

• We worked hard to establish the concept of badges as part of an alternative accreditation system. P2PU co-hosted the “Badge Lab” (agenda, blog post from a participant) which ended up growing into one of the most influential streams of the event, and has since evolved into its own project, hosted by Mozilla, to create an open badges infrastructure. We are also building more support around the idea of badges, by organizing a badges working group for the MacArthur Foundation (second workshop coming up).
• Since some of these ideas are fairly new (and controversial) and I also spent a fair amount of time thinking out loud and spreading the word. Vijay Kumar invited me to speak about “hacking certification” in his “open education” course at the Harvard Extension School and I wrote a longer blog post about it afterwards (has links to recording). I presented similar ideas as part of a joint session on certification in open education with Sir John Daniel (ex Commonwealth of Learning) at the OpenCourseWare Global Conference at MIT (slides at slideshare), and discussed the implications of all this for the “Future of the University” at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. And I was recently invited to give a keynote on the topic at Open Ed 2011, which will take place later this year.
• Another focus has been to build partnerships with organizations and people that have a shared interest in providing certification for open learning. We continue to work with Mozilla on badges, and the School of Webcraft. The University of California Irvine has been a great supporter and partners since the early days, and we hope to issue professional development unites through UCI Extension very soon. And we are strengthening our relationship with MIT. Steve Carson from the OpenCourseWare project has been an advisor to P2PU, and Joi Ito whom I consider a mentor and who ran the Digital Journalism course at P2PU last year recently took over as director of the MIT Media Lab. Lots of opportunities there! Another great source of inspiration has come from Hal Plotkin, the senior policy advisor to the under-secretary of education, who has helped us think through a lot of these issues with a view on connecting them into the formal education system in the US.

The Machine that runs P2PU

• Made lots of progress, building an organization to support P2PU. I wrote this summary blog post that gives a lot more detail, but in a nutshell: We incorporated as a 501(c) non profit organization in the US, and obtained our tax exempt status. We appointed a really fantastic board of directors that consists of the founders, community members, and two long term strategic partners (Cathy Casserly, Creative Commons; and Mark Surman, Mozilla). For more detail on the board see this post. We are also revamping our advisory group and are specifically looking to add more business expertise and experience. And we started hiring a few great people to add to the team. P2PU is still entirely grant funded today, which is something we intend to change (see below) but we received a Hewlett grant which allows us to diversify our core funding (and we are waiting to hear back about two other large proposals.)
• While building an organization that can accept funds and provides a legal structure is important, the open P2PU community continues to be our foundation and greatest success. We ran another great community workshop in Barcelona, October 2010 to set the strategy for 2011. We are navigating how to be open and transparent to allow a wide variety of opinions and encourage participation, while at the same time being able to move fast like a start-up company (and fulfill the legal obligations of a non-profit organization). It’s a balance act, but it’s fun. For example, as we are increasing the number of paid staff, we are designing processes that involve the community – by sharing job descriptions for review and feedback, asking for nominations from the community, involving community members in the interviews, and discussing our compensation principles publicly. While we are nowhere done, we are getting better at keeping people in the loop, through our weekly community calls that are open to anyone, a shared P2PU calendar, and regular email and blog announcements about new developments and courses.

What’s next?

This post is intended as reflection of the past, but our trajectory over the last 12 months, says something about where we are going in the next year. At least two big goals: build out certification opportunities for our users, and start generating revenue. We have been successful obtaining grants, and there continues to be donor interest in supporting open learning projects, but I am particularly excited to work on opportunities for revenue generation in order to make us independently sustainable in the future.

Enough already. Thanks for reading all the way through. If any of this resonates, feel free to drop me a line, mention @sharingnicely on twitter, or leave a comment below.

read original post on Philipp Schmidt's Site

Kathi has started her phased implementation strategy for the OER roadmap.  In May, she attended the IMS Learning Impact conference to get advice from leaders in learning software that have experience creating interoperable pathways between software and developing API’s. They recommended a phased implementation of the publishing API in Connexions (sooner is better than complete) and get started building demonstration tools that use the API right away to generate interest and create software that others can build on.

SWORD chosen for publishing API: They settled on SWORD and AtomPub to use for publishing OER (with extensions) and this was validated as a good approach through discussions at Learning Impact and subsequently at the Open Repositories 2011 conference (in June). SWORD is implemented in many institutional educational repositories (DSpace, Fedora, ePrints, arXiv, Zentity), which makes clients that can publish to multiple repositories much more likely and which provides a strong developer community.

Sprinting at the Plone East Symposium: They sprinted (communal coding) to extend an existing partial Connexions SWORD implementation to allow creation of modules from deposited Word files or CNXML (Connexions semantic document format) files and improve the handling of metadata (title, language, etc). With the help of fellow fellow, Mark Horner, we found and invited Carl Scheffler, whose background is in machine learning, and whose interests include improving education, to participate in the sprint, along with Connexions, and Penn State (advising).

Starting to expand the team: Carl will continue as a team member and began working on an editor that will make it easier to translate existing Connexions content and publish the translations. Also found was a team member to help with User Experience design for tools and services and with community engagement.

Philipp has a new website – P2PU launched their beta site at http://new.p2pu.org in late April, but started moving users onto it during this month. It’s a slight reboot of the learning model to allow more flexibility – not all courses have to start at the same time, and also hopefully encourage creation of more self-organised study groups in addition to courses. Also changed is some of the terminology, and are pushing the peer learning angle more strongly, so that users don’t fall into the old model of expecting to teach or be taught. They put in some groundwork to prepare the migration in June, but more on that next time…

Better support – Also did a lot of thinking about how to better support users. It is not perfect, but the combination of redesigned P2PU Handbook, and Q&A site, works much better than before. The new P2PU Handbook is part resources (screencasts, tutorials) and part community support forum. They set up an open Q&A site for any question that might come up at http://qa.p2pu.org. Both are monitored by the core community. And the newsletter now focuses on promotion of new courses and study groups as they are created.

Badges grow up – The interest in an open badges infrastructure has been overwhelming, and the project is transitioning to sit more within Mozilla. P2PU will be the pilot implementation for the badge issuer functionality. They also continue to help drive and
promote the ideas and are part of the advisory group, but it frees up some of resources to focus back on our core challenges at P2PU.

Hiring an army – a touch of an exaggeration – but not much!. They are growing and hiring, and the interview process is taking up a lot of time. The positions we are filling are a P2PU product manager, who will take over much of the platform development work from me; a product manager for School of Webcraft (which is a Mozilla position, but will co-report to Mozilla and P2PU), and two assessment related position (an assessment specialist and an assessment developer) to drive the Hewlett work forward.

Mark Horner has been extremely busy in May!  He completed an extremely successful translation hackathon on the 7th of May at Stellenbosch University’s Elec. Eng. Dept. (summary video still to come), presented at 3 of the 4 Tshikululu trust’s Maths educators’ meetings (Cape Town, Johannesburg and Limpopo (4th meeting is in June)) and this represents a partnership that could result in demand for Siyavula’s products, advice and support from 105 schools.

Both Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg hosted a week of evening events each. Both were very successful and established good connections with many schools. A number of interviews of educators using OERs/technology were filmed and these will begin appearing on the Siyavula site soon.  St Johns School for Boys in Johannesburg also expressed interest in uploading all of their science content (Effectively their own textbook for Physical Science Grade 10-12) onto Connexions

Siyavula registered as a member of the Publishers’ Association of South Africa (PASA) which is trivial to do but PASA has always been the organisation journalists have gone to to challenge what we do!

Citizen Cyberscience

Francois Grey’s Brasil@home  was the main highlight of the month, with a group of eight researchers touring Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, giving a lecture series on citizen cyberscience, running a two-day hackfest (in Rio) and having meetings with specific institutes, in particular INPE, the Brasilian space agency.

The main outcomes of the event are a series of new projects in the pipeline: volunteer digitization of archival documents about the Brazilian economy with the Brazilian think-tank IPEA; volunteer mapping of deforestation with INPE and two Brazilian Universities; drug design for parasite borne diseases with researchers from the Fiocruz institute. Plus several other areas of future collaboration defined in climate science and particle physics research.

Another important outcome of this event was the establishment of a Brazilian sister site to the Citizen Cyberscience Centre,  by several of the local organisers.

Access to knowledge

Together with the Centre for International Environmental Law, the International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests, Kenya Young Greens, the Rainforest Foundation Norway, and BirdLife International, Kabir and the Natural Justice team developed a submission on REDD+ safeguards for the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. It was stressed that “In the discussion of biodiversity and social safeguards relating to REDD, … Articles 8j and 10c suggest that the most fundamental ‘biocultural safeguard’ is the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC).”

They co-facilitated the first Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Capacity Development Workshop for African lusophone countries in Maputo, Mozambique. Approximately 35 participants from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique included the ABS focal points of each country and other government officials, as well as representatives from the scientific community, civil society organizations, traditional healers, NGOs, and the private sector.

Also in Paris, the Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT) hosted a back-to-back experts meeting on access and benefit sharing (ABS) and biotrade and a conference on “The Strategic Importance of Biodiversity: The Beauty of Sourcing with Respect”. They explored the links between ABS and biotrade, particularly cross-cutting issues such as traditional knowledge, fair trade, and corporate social responsibility.The conference was directed primarily towards companies engaged in “ethical biotrade practices” and included some discussion of the Nagoya Protocol on ABS. UEBT also launched the latest version of its “Biodiversity Barometer”, which helps track awareness of biodiversity issues among consumers and the business sector.

Participated in the launching workshop of the Open AIR (African Innovation Research and Training: Exploring the Role of Intellectual Property in Open Development). The workshop sought to kick off the 3-year Open AIR project, which is supported by IDRC and GIZ. It seeks to address the questions, “What is the relationship between innovation, development and “openess”? What are the enabling conditions, and how do they interact?

Also participated in the information and preparatory meeting for Indigenous peoples and local communities on access and benefit sharing (ABS) and traditional knowledge entitled, “The Nagoya Protocol and the Way Ahead”. The meeting, which took place from May 21-22, is organized and supported by the ABS Capacity Development Initiative for Africa, the Indigenous Information Network (IIN), Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-ordinating Committee (IPACC), Conservation International, GIZ, and the Equator Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme.

Youth publishing

Gavin did some ‘youth employability in SA’ research fieldwork with partner agency the Consumer Insight Agency, including a 24-hour overnight immersion for me with them in the field, in Mxenge, Phillippi.

This process is proving crucial in developing an increasingly detailed understanding of the beneficiary group, their needs and the approach needed to tailor the project to make the most impact based on the model of Live magazine UK is trying to replicate… Research will be complete by mid-July.

Gavin had an intensive three weeks of meetings, networking and doing ‘creds’ presentations: notably Nike, Google, Red Bull, Ikamva youth, Big Issue, RLabs, Equal Education, British Council, Mahala magazine, Young in Prison, Children’s radio Foundation, and fellows past and present… creating foundations for potential partnerships and collaboration.

Agreeing and creating the plan for Ikamva Live – a one-week mini-mag production sprint taking place in early July, taking a group of 20 young people through the process of creating a publication… giving the chance to make a mentor call-out for volunteers.

As part of walking the talk, Gavin began mentoring two young people for a two-way learning process for me and them: a young publishing entrepreneur from Langa, an aspiring journalist from Phillippi.

Lastly, and perhaps most pleasingly, final figures show that Live Mag UK 10th birthday issue beat its £38K quarterly ad revenue target by £10,000… a significant marker in the push for full sustainability. read it online:

read original post on Helen Turvey's Site

read original post on mLearning Africa's Site

Today the FullMarks website achieved a significant milestone. The numbers may appear modest in the context of huge sites like Facebook and Flickr but in the South African context I think they are significant. Within a 12 hour period we passed both 500 users and 5000 items on FullMarks and I’m excluding demo users and content in that count so it represents real usage.

In South Africa approximately 12% of people have internet access and we are targeting educators (a pool of about 400 000 people in total). The total pool means that there is massive potential for FullMarks if we can tap into a the 40 000 that currently have internet access. There are many initiatives to give more educators access so this number should grow relatively rapidly, especially with the costs of bandwidth coming down and the low price of entry-level laptops and netbooks. Content consumption isn’t really the interesting part and I think that many will look and use but even if only 1% can be convinced to contribute back the site will do well. 400 active contributors would be significant.

We don’t know at what point the community will really take off and content production will not require any further work on our part. We are still running workshops and training new people on how the site works. However, we do not run workshops every day and we do get new users every day. We are still supporting some content uploading so content is not entirely from the community yet.

Here is an animation made from our Google Analytics for the site that shows where in South Africa traffic is coming from:

I think that this is the first indication of some viral spread. The key for us now is to create an environment where this distributed group feel that participation is worthwhile and that they spread the word.

read original post on Mark Horner's Site

Much excitement surrounded the launch of the FullMarks website which took place on the morning of Friday 27 August, at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town.

The Siyavula team has spent weeks uploading content to this Open Education Resource (OER) platform, with content that has been contributed by Bishops Diocesan College, Pinelands High School, Pinelands North Primary School and Wynberg Girls High School. We have also previously had a workshop with AMESA KZN – see the blog post here – to empower teachers to upload and maintain their own content on the FullMarks website. At the breakfast we had reached over 3000 questions with solutions, and we watched this number ticking over, as Mark demonstrated how to use the live website.

We had a good turnout of people at the breakfast launch, despite the majority of the local principals not being able to attend due to the teachers’ strike. Over the amazing spread that constituted the breakfast buffet, everyone was given the chance to get to know each other and chat amongst themselves at their table. The conversation ranged from teaching in London, to the difficulties in South African schools with keeping up to date with current technological advancements. And that was only at one table!

Mark talked everyone through the simple registration process on FullMarks, and then demonstrated how easily one can navigate around the site, and the various functions it has to make teachers’ lives that much easier. Aside from the website having numerous questions and answers on hand just waiting to become part of a teacher’s test, a teacher is also able to generate useful statistics on learners’ performance, on a per test/topic basis. How cool is that? We have visions of many an impressed principal in the not too distant future!

The Siyavula team also brought along the first printed copies of the FHSST books, to demonstrate what is possible at R30 a copy. Everyone was suitably impressed (and we are suitably proud of them too!), and many a person asked to take a copy away with them. Unfortunately we could not oblige at this stage, but we were pleased at the response.

Joy Rosario from the DoE attended the FullMarks launch, and is very enthusiastic about the FullMarks website. Gauging the response from the audience at question time, it looks like a few other people are keen to integrate the website into their schools too. (Another) great thing about FullMarks, is that as we get more and more content from the “privileged”schools in the bank, it means that teachers from under-resourced schools will be able to use materials that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, which we hope will help raise the level of education in South Africa. But FullMarks is not just limited to South African users because, as Mark explained, the site software is opensource and available under the Gnu Public License so it can be used anywhere and privately to manage an individual school’s database of teacher resources. All the content on the site is available under a Creative Commons License (by attribution license to be exact!), and it can be copied and tweaked to apply to whatever other need may exist.

Overall, the launch was a success, and we have seen some principals now approaching Mark to run FullMarks training sessions at their schools, or to speak at meetings about bringing technology into the classroom. This is great for the FullMarks project, as it means it is being accepted by schools, and assimilated as a new resource for the classroom. We look forward to seeing the growth that will take place over the next few months as more people become aware of the project, and start uploading content and actually using the website.

read original post on bridget's Site

I’ve just completed an updated, and hopefully, improved presentation on the functionality of the FullMarks website. It takes the form of a walk-through tutorial demonstrating how simple the site is to use. I don’t think any further explanation is required, please take a look and if you like it spread the word about the existence of FullMarks:

read original post on Mark Horner's Site

read original post on Davis Quinton's Site