commonspace

Shoelacing open education

Last Friday, we held a small roundtable on open education at the Shuttleworth Foundation. The idea was to do some 'shoelacing' (Rich Fuchs' term for threading things together) between South African and international projects working on open education. Highlights and notes ...

Mark Horner, who leads the Free High School Science Textbook project, talked about the opportunity to get text books into the hands of South African kids who don't have them. He's doing this by producing volunteer written physics and maths texts that will be released royalty free. These will be printable at a fraction of the cost of traditional commercial texts. Oh, and, the whole thing is written using an open source-y online peer production process that involves physics and maths teachers.

Also, Mark really hammered home the idea that we need to “... stop talking about open curriculum and just do it! We need create teacher evangelists and get them out there recruiting other teachers.” I am in 100% solidarity with his idea that the community building we need to be doing is amongst teachers and grad students who actually want to get involved in this stuff. He is doing a small gig on May 5^th at University of Cape Town to doing something along these lines, telling the story of the FHSST and doing a hands on barn raising to move the project closer to completion. Also, other people wanting to lead text projects in other subjects will be there. This guy rocks!

Trudi Van Wyk from the Ministry of Education talked about making making open and collaborative curriculum a core part of how educational materials are produced in South Africa. The cool thing is that their Thutong portal already has a workflow for getting textbooks approved by the DoE. So, if people like Mark wanted to get their textbooks accredited, they could just push it through the portal. Trudi is a real advocate for scaling the collaborative curriculum idea here in South Africa and plugging it into the official education system exactly this way. Super visionary.

The Shuttleworth Foundation has committed to this idea of building a mix of real resources that teachers can use (Thutong portal with more stuff) and building up a culture of collaborative curriculum production in South Africa (creating real text books). Karien Bezuidenhout, who quietly and passionately leads the Foundations open ed efforts, talked about this commitment. She also said: “We want to fill the gaps and link all this together. That's why we're having this meeting. We need to link these things together.” I suspect Karien will become a key shoelacer in this space.

Bobbi Kurshan provided an overview of Curriki, a project to create a huge wiki like platform for collaborative curriculum. There are at least two things that inspire me about Curriki. One: it is jumping straight into all the tough questions around teacher motivation, trust, quality, accreditation and licensing right from the start. Two: it is driving ahead quickly and fearlessly. It could be a leverage point for a lot of people who don't want their own platform, they just want to get on with creating open curriculum.

Larry Lessig introduced the emerging CC Learn initiative. The two aims of this project are to: 1) promote license interoperability for curriculum (boring but important); and 2) lend capacity to other open curriculum projects that want to leverage lessons and projects from the broader Creative Commons community (e.g. CC Mixster). The second part part is especially interesting, especially as Creative Commons is very good making complex licensing and peer production concepts easy to understand.

Last up, iCommons' Heather Ford talked about the need to connect and organize people working in this space. With backing from Shuttleworth, Hewlitt, Curriki and IDRC, iCommons is going in the right direction by producing a series of critical case studies about collaborative curriculum development projects. They are also convening a kick ass open education track at this year's iSummit (that Karien, Gunner and I are helping to organize).

All in all, a great conversation that more than met it's goals of putting these projects on the radar for each other. Mark and Trudi swapped business cards, which should get FHSST on the fast track to Thutong. Trudi and Bobbi are having dinner (could Curriki become the collaborative backend that eventually feed Thutong?). Larry has offered to help Curriki tap into CC wisdom and CC Learn. And, iCommons now as connections with all the people it wants to connect.

A personal reflection: it's good to doing these international shoelacing exercises, including the one coming up at iSummit in Dubrovnik. However, we also need to get our nose to the grindstone in terms of community building amongst teachers who want to produce real curriculum. Mark says he knows of at least five budding projects with real people ready to move. This is where the juice is.

Regrets: No enough teachers or real content producers like Mark. We need more. Oh, and we should have recorded the conversation and sent it out as a podcast. 

A groovy new family

Starting in July, I will be working part time as an open philanthropy fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town. I am psyched totally psyched by the opportunity to both experiment with the open sourcing of social investment.

This past week, I had the chance to meet my groovy new family at the Foundation (amazing people) and talk through some of the things that I will be doing. Here are the quick notes that I wrote up and posted to the Foundation's internal wiki:

** First scoping trip to TSF ...

Here are some things that I likely want and need to work on:

* Open philanthropy

1. Document existing open practices used by the foundation (wiki, CC license in standard MOU, etc.). Turn this into a think piece article on open philanthropy looking at the simple things TSF is already doing, and looking at what else it might do.
2. Design 'one big experiment' that takes what Canonical / Ubuntu has learned about creating a successful Linux distribution and apply it to a social change domain like open education (community, release cycles, leadership, planning sprints). May work for Kusasa or the 'community piece' behind Thutong.
3. Work with Helen and team on a strategy to leverage leadership and velocity in the same way that a Linux distribution might. So: how do we look for leaders who are already going somewhere we want to go (beyond the fellowships), and then thread them into something bigger.

* Open content

1. Continue to work with Karien on 'shoelacing' (connecting and leveraging) people working in the open education space globally with Foundaiton partners like the FHSST and Thutong. iSummit is a part of this.
2. Spend time with Mark Horner in Dubrovnik to figure how we leverage his very practical approach to building teacher communities for content creation. How do we take what he has learned and build up the next communities that grab Thutong low hanging fruit? We need to do it.
3. Come up with the papers and podiums plan on open educational content. Probably includes short vision articles about Thutong community piece and FHST at some point.
4. See above about 'big experiment' -> see what we can do to learn from Ubuntu and feed into open ed.

* Other big stuff

1. Work with Helen and team on a 'theory of change' that offers a clear, easy to understand picture of what TSF wants to achieve in the world.
2. Turn the theory of change into a joint paper by Mark and Helen that explains where TSF is going. Sort of like a public manifesto. Can be used as part of the papers and podiums strategy.
3. Find ways to help themes other than content add stronger networking and collaboration component into how they work. Especially Double Up and Kusasa with Jason.

* Other small stuff

1. Figure out plan for Foundation presence at Ubuntu Live in July. What are our objectives? What are we messaging to who?
2. Follow up with Rushnara at Young Foundation SIX event on social innovation and education in Cape Town. Maybe January 2008.
3. Also suggest that we present paper on 'open philanthropy' practices (see above) at a Young Foundation lunch later this year or early 2008.
4. Do more little events like we did with Jimmy and Larry, but as casual brown bags when people happen to be in town. Also with local leaders and activists talking to each other (people really said they appreciated this aspect).
5. Buy iRivers so that we can easily record and podcast meetings like the ones we did with Jimmy and Larry (we really lost a good sharing opportunity).

While this is just a quick and very initial brainstorm, it's clear that it is going to be fun. My first real gig with the Foundation is participating in the open education track at the iSummit in Dubrovnik. Very much looking forward to it.

The entire project is one of love

I had the chance to meet Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales over the past couple of days. Nice guy, humble and pretty wise. Sometimes the wisdom can sneak across the into online community building dogma. I guess you're entitled if you helped become the most used encyclopedia in the world on almost no budget. And, of course, I've been caught spouting a lot of the same dogma over the years.

Jimmy was talking at the University of the Western Cape's Digital Freedom event. He said two things I will carry with me for a while:

Thing one: “The entire project is one of love.” Sounds corny to describe wikipedia this way, but also explains at some quintessential level why it works. Quality control, scale, trustability, cost, languages and the like are all important bits and pieces of the engine. However, the human spirit – love, passion, ego, hatred and, over time, understanding – are the real fuel.

Thing two: “wikipedia is 10% technology and 90% community.” This is a total no brainer statement for anyone who thinks about these things. However, it's nice to have it laid out in simple(istic) math. Most ideas / projects / companies that start out with community in mind spend 95% of their up front energy thinking and arguing about technology, data models and structure. Being able to whip out a pithy little Jimmy Wales quote and then say “hey, really, you are putting your energy in the wrong place” is very useful when being asked to advise people like this. I've already done it once (and to good end) in the last 24 hours.

All in all, a good talk ... and I am a guy who hates 'talks'. Dinner with Jimmy, Bobbi Kurshan from Curriki and others was also interesting. There was a debate about incentives in online community, with Jimmy arguing for peer cred, personal passion, etc. and Bobbi arguing that you need more substantial and traditional incentives if you are going to work with audiences like teachers. I suspect they are both right: you need think differently for different audiences (teachers vs. geeks), but you also need make sure that it's still all about love.

PS. I think you can find a raw version of all the talks from Digital Freedom on their web site.