We held our first teachers’ workshop on the 21st and 22nd 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.
Conference was a resounding success.
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