Connexions separates the content viewing aspect of the site from the editing side. If you find a resource you like and would like to edit your current options are:

• add the content to a lens (your favourites for example) and then from the lens listing add the content to your personal workspace or a workgrouph, or
• go to the workspace or workgroup where you would like to work on the new version and then use the search functionality to locate the resource and add it.

Both of these require an intermediate step which is non-intuitive and slows the process down.

Here is a screen capture of the content header of a typical module on Connexions.

This image is small but the list of links on the top right are actions for the user, Add to a lens, Download PDF etc. Why can’t there just be an allow-me-to-immediately-edit-my-own-version-of-this-resource button? Of course there can, with a slightly different name of course.

In partnership with the Connexions team, Upfront Systems have been developing this functionality for us. I was visiting Upfront yesterday to do some beta-testing and captured a few quick screenshots along the way to give you a preview of what is coming.

The new option will be called Reuse / Edit. Reuse is applicable if you are not currently an author of the module and are making your own version whereas editing is applicable if you are the author or have editing privileges on the resource. The option will be added to the actions listed at the top of the module with the new list looking like this (without the shading of course):

Selecting this option will expand a drop-down menu. This menu will be sensitive to whether your on a module in isolation or browsing a collection. If the latter is true then it will ask which of the two items, the module or the collection, you want to work on as shown on the right.

Once you’ve selected which resource you’re interested in you just need to select the relevant options in the dialog boxes that follow.

The options that you can select cover:

• where you want the resource located, allowing you to move it to a collaborative workgroup or your personal space,
• decide whether you’d like to jump straight into editing it or come back and browse for more content, and
• whether or not you agree to the licence (a necessity to ensure the integrity of the repository content).

That’s it. Conflicts with existing versions in the target location will be checked and the user will be warned and given a choice of actions depending on the specific circumstances. This will be much faster than the old process and a lot more transparent and intuitive to users.

No definitive release date yet but it’ll be out as soon as we can get it out.

Part 1 – Introduction

Part 1 of the manual deals with the Siyavula project in general and explains how Siyavula, Connexions and all the other partners fit together. It also covers our suggestions for starting to form your own workgroups, for support and the sharing of resources.

The first part of the manual can be downloaded from the papers section or directly here.

Part 2 – Casual Browsing

The second part deals with what you can do on the Connexions site as a passive consumer of material, without needing to create an account, login or register in any way.

The second part of the manual can be downloaded directly here.

Part 3 – Registered User

The benefits of registering for an account and logging in are explained in Part 3 of the manual with step-by-step instructions on how to get going.

The third part of the manual can be downloaded directly here.

Part 4 – Workgroups

In the final part we link back to the idea of creating workgroups and how you can use the Connexions platform as a tool to support real-world or virtual workgroup activities.

The final part of the manual can be downloaded directly here.

Feedback on Connexions collection: Natuurwetenskappe Graad 7 (http://cnx.org/content/col11078/1.1)

Baie dankie vir die artikel wat u op sure en basisse wat op die internet gepos was, dit het my gehelp met al my natuurwetenskap wer en oor 3 weke sal ons die grad sewe eksamen op dit skryf. Dus is die informasie van ‘n groot hul en ek wou net laat u weet dat alle inligting wat u op die webblad gepos het nie net deur ek en my twee susters gebruik word ne, maar ook deur ander kinders by ons skool.

Groete en alle voorspoed!

Please download your subject’s complete workbook!

We invite you to search for the workbook which relates to your grade and subject and download it as a .pdf. Try printing it out as a reference in class or source of alternative examples and exercises.

Join a workgroup and collaborate on adapting it.

If you are not yet part of a workgroup, please join a workgroup where you can post questions or ask for help. You can discuss changes to the workbook or share your own material. One person make a copy of the collection for your learning area/grade and add it to the workgroup. Send out an email to all group members asking them to take a look at it and post in the forum their likes and dislikes about the workbook. Have a meeting to discuss how you’d like to change it / improve it / contextualise it and then work as a team to make a better workbook you can all use next year!

Example 1: Collection in Connexions

See the Table to Contents on the Grade 4 maths workbook below. The workbook is split into four terms and each term has a number of sections or topics.

Example 2: Collection downloaded as a .pdf

See the Table to Contents on the Grade 4 maths workbook below. This .pdf file contains all the pages in the collection in a single file, ready for print.

How to find the workbook for your subject and grade

Go to the Siyavula lenses at http://siyavula.cnx.org/lenses/siyavula and open the learning area you fall under. In this case it would be Siyavula: Mathematics (Gr. 4-6).

Search for it like you normally do, but as a search ‘CRITERIA’ use ‘COURSE’ and the ‘RESOURCE TYPE’. See example below:

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

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.

Recovering after a long days work.

If it sounds like I am using Rhaptos and Connexions interchangeably you are on to something. The Connexions website is an installation of the Rhaptos software so developments for the Connexions site must be made to Rhaptos. Rhaptos is run as an open-source project and the details of all our development can be found on the Trac page.

Roché Compaan and I spent the 3^rd – 6^th Feb in Houston visiting Connexions. We were there to wrap up some work on the Phase 1 and 2 development and ensure that everyone was happy with the functionality, UI and roll-out process. We also participated in a meeting to discuss an assessment bank and attended the Connexions Conference.

The functionality that is being added to Connexions includes:

• module templates
• new lens type that allows anyone to add to it but adds a review queue
• lens organisers
• forum functionality at the lens and workgroup level
• ratings

We’re going to be testing this is a closed workgroup on Connexions for a while but everything will be generally available as soon as we’ve stress tested it all. I’ll capture some screenshots and blog about the functionality in the next few weeks so you know what you are in for.

The conversation included a number of the Connexions team, Kathi Fletcher, Manpreet Kaur, Philip Schatz, and Vickie Nguyen, as well as Michelle Smith from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Margaret Beier from Rice University, and Roché Compaan from Upfront Systems. This diverse group ensured that we discussed issues from the technical implementation through to the research aspects of creating assessment items which are effective and useful. Specific use cases differ but collectively we want to build an assessment bank tool that can be used stand-alone or plug seamlessly into Connexions.

From the Siyavula side, our initial interest was in a question bank that:

• allows teachers to integrate questions into their Connexions modules,
• allows for the creation of random exercise sheets/tests quickly and easily that meet a set of criteria (subject, topic, difficulty, etc.),
• allows teachers to add questions to the bank, and
• accepts feedback on specific questions.

Once a critical mass of questions has been achieved, this assessment bank would allow a teacher to create a test or exercise sheet with separate memorandum in a few seconds, saving teachers a lot of time. A simple interface covering:

• subject
• grade
• topic
• number of question for each cognitive level
• and many optional refinements ex. total marks etc.

would allow us to sample the bank of questions and produce a question paper and memorandum which the teacher could download.

This also allows the teacher to make a custom exercise sheet for learners with special needs quickly and easily, be those more advanced or weaker learners.

Given that the alleviation of time pressure on teachers our focus would be on encouraging teachers to add new questions with a focus on originality and quality as well as to provide feedback on questions.

For a tool like this to be useful the questions need to be stored in such a way that we can extract the questions and solutions easily. More sophisticated use requires even more markup. We are currently leaning towards implementing the most common set of question types from the QTI-specification. Examples of the question types can be found here.

If built exposing an API the assessment bank could be integrated into other tools. One example of such a tool has emerged in discussions with Anil Kanjee of the Human Sciences Research Council (HRSC). The HSRC plans to build a diagnostic tool which couples to an assessment bank. With the correct meta-data stored for every question their tool will capture learners performance, like a Learning Management System, and provide feedback to the teacher on learner’s weaknesses and strengths. It will also allow comparison on a class-, school-, district- or national level with additional restrictions based on other relevant meta-data. The tool can then also provide teachers with recommended strategies to address learner’s shortcomings.

The HSRC has been developing questions and the required meta-data and is now busy with development of the assessment bank. The diagnostic tool will be built and trialled over the next few years.

I think that this is a very exciting extension to Connexions and will save teachers a lot of time. Alleviating some of the time pressure on teachers should have knock-on benefits in all areas as an added bonus.

Connect with others involved in Connexions

In Connexions, over 900 authors are developing, publishing, and sharing educational content which is used by around 1 million people in over 200 countries every month. Connexions promotes communication among the educational community by various means of collaboration, which helps knowledge to grow more quickly.

This event is a great opportunity for the Connexions user community to come together and discuss, debate, deliberate, and dream about what is to come for Connexions.