Please join us for an information evening on Wednesday 21 September, and find out more about the free Life Sciences textbook we are collaborating on for Grade 10, 2012!

Time: 18h30 - 20h30

Place: The Open Innovation Studio, 27 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town (see map on right). We are the red doors opposite the police station, next door to the District 6 Museum (corner of Buitenkant and Albertus Streets). Should you not be able to find parking in the street, you can try around the corner in the Charly's Bakery parking lot.

Cost: Free!

Drinks and delicious snacks will be on offer on arrival.

For further information, please visit our Q and A page!

Join Siyavula in our quest to compile a free Life Sciences textbook from educators' teaching resources, to be used in 2012 and beyond!

As you are aware, the Life Sciences curriculum is changing again. With CAPS coming into effect in 2012, it means adapting your teaching and your resources to accommodate this change. Wouldn't it be fantastic to have a teaching resource contributed by top South African Life Sciences educators, that covers the full new curriculum for Grade 10?

We would like to collaborate with dedicated Life Sciences educators, where over the course of a long weekend we will facilitate the creation of a Life Sciences textbook. This will be made possible through educators contributing their own teaching resources, and based on the new curriculum, combining them to create a new textbook for 2012. In addition to this, Mindset have committed to providing all their revision content for Life Sciences for us to use in the textbook, plus they will edit any of the videos as necessary for their inclusion as rich-media resources. This textbook will be free and open for all educators across the country to use for their teaching, and will be accessible via the web, in PDF and via mobile phone.

Siyavula believes in sharing, community, collaboration and openness, and through the use of technology we strive to produce the best quality free educational resources out there. We are currently in serious talks with the Department of Basic Education (DBE) to get our Grade 10 Maths and Physical Science textbooks on the desk of every learner in South Africa - imagine if the same could be done for a Life Sciences textbook! By adding a Grade 10 Life Sciences resource to our list of free and open textbooks, we are adding to the pool of open educational resources available to all South African educators, and with your Life Sciences contribution we can transform learning in our country!

We know it won't be easy, we know it is a lot to ask, but we know that it will be worth it!

Collaboration Weekend:

The Life Sciences collaboration weekend will take place from Friday 14 October – Sunday 16 October at our office in Cape Town. The times will be as follows:

• Friday 14 October, starting at 14h00, going on into the evening, until 20h00 (includes afternoon tea, supper and drinks)

• Saturday 15 October, 09h00 – 20h00 (includes breakfast, lunch, supper and drinks)

• Sunday 16 October, 09h00 - 12h00 (includes breakfast)

***Please note that when you commit to this you are committing yourself to all the sessions over the weekend

What we need from you:

• Your own teaching notes that you have created and are prepared to make available online for others to use, share and adapt, under a Creative Commons licence.

• Your own laptop, with your notes in MS Word or the equivalent editable format (no PDF's please!). If you do not have your own laptop we may be able to accommodate you.

• An evening for an introductory talk, plus a weekend of your time to create the textbook.

   

What we will provide:

• A style guide for the authoring process;

• A curriculum framework from which to work;

• Rich-media resources for inclusion in the material, such as Mindset videos and simulations, citizen cyberscience projects and fun educational websites for learners to visit;

• Full access to the final textbook;

• Full catering (tea, coffee, snacks, lunch, supper, drinks); and

• Tech support.

What you can rely on from us:

• To ensure you are appropriately acknowledged in the Life Sciences textbook;

• To make the textbook available online for all Life Sciences educators to access and use;

• To make the product available via mobile front-end (m.siyavula.cnx.org);

• To ensure you will have a PDF document to take away with you at the end of the weekend, as well as a printed first draft;

• To provide an annotation platform for the textbook, to ensure its constant evolution and adaptation to everyone's needs.

Rich-media and the Siyavula Textbooks

For an example of the rich-media we have embedded in our current textbooks, please click here and see Khan Academy videos embedded in Grade 10 Maths Exponentials. You can also view all our resources on your mobile phone, by pointing your phone's browser at m.siyavula.cnx.org. Our books are available in print through us (WebBooks), but which can also be downloaded in PDF from http://www.siyavula.com/books

Imagine the possibilities for Life Sciences!

Contact us:

For any further information please do not hesitate to contact us.

Further information:

Our Physical Sciences and Mathematics Textbooks

The 'Physical Sciences for Grades 10, 11 and 12' and 'Mathematics for Grade 10, 11 and 12' series of textbooks were collaboratively authored by a community of volunteer educators, academics and professionals. These inspired volunteers seek to make this scientific knowledge freely and openly available to all learners and educators in South Africa. They are released under an open copyright licence, which allows others to legally distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon our work, even commercially, as long as they credit us for the original creation. This is similar to open source software, in that learners and educators are encouraged to download, copy, share and distribute our books legally at no cost. It also gives educators the freedom to edit, adapt, translate and contextualise them.

Who are we?

Siyavula is the umbrella under which we run our initiatives, which includes our Siyavula textbooks. Siyavula is a Shuttleworth Foundation seeded project which supports the development of local curriculum-aligned Open Education Resources (OERs) and communities of educators sharing and collaborating. All our activities focus on the open sharing of educational resources, and include a selection of free and open FET Science and Mathematics textbooks (http://www.siyavula.com/books), openly licensed GET learner workbooks (http://siyavula.cnx.org/lenses/siyavula) and an open assessment bank called FullMarks (www.fullmarks.org.za), for the sharing and accessing of test and exam questions with answers. We have recently launched our mobile front-end, making access to these free resources on-line even easier - point your phone at m.siyavula.cnx.org