Introducing Mark Horner

“I am pleased to introduce Consortium technology committee member, Mark Horner of the Shuttleworth Foundation. Mark and the Siyavula Project have been incredible partners with Connexions in education and Open Education Resources (OER). Siyavula has contributed an entire curriculum for K-9th grade and science and math for 10th-12th to Connexions. Siyavula works directly with teachers in South Africa to effectively use Connexions and when they identify critical new features for Connexions, they help to design, fund and develop them. This combination of vision, real world experience, and technical problem solving is what makes Mark so valuable to the Consortium and the Technology Committee. Mark's vision extends to the entire teaching and learning process as you will read below."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

I am the Open and Collaborative Resources Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, where I am responsible for a suite of projects aimed at supporting the full teaching value chain through the creation of an enabling environment for communities of practice of educators to thrive.

I ended up in Open Educational Resources by accident, coming from a background in high-energy nuclear physics. During my graduate school years, I co-founded the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project in my “spare” time, a project that has successfully used a global network of volunteers, collaborating online, to write free, openly licensed textbooks for Grade 10-12 Physical Science (a mixture of Physics and Chemistry taught in South Africa) and Mathematics. This was to address the fact that many learners in South Africa just didn't have access to textbooks.

The success of FHSST helped me get a job at the Shuttleworth Foundation, originally as a project manager and then later as a Fellow, where I started the Siyavula project. The original vision for Siyavula was to extend the FHSST work to all grades and subjects. The Siyavula project has successfully released a set of English and Afrikaans workbooks for all learning areas for Grades R-9 in an open format under an open copyright license. Siyavula has since extended its role to become the umbrella under which
FHSST, and my other projects, exist.

The Siyavula project partnered with Connexions to house the workbooks and allow educators easy access as well as the opportunity to adapt, enhance and contextualise the materials. In collaboration with Upfront Systems and the Connexions team we've also dabbled in the development of Rhaptos.

Access to these resources online alone won't support teachers delivering the content effectively in the classroom and so, in collaboration with Steve Song, Interconnectedness Fellow and Roché Compaan, Upfront Systems, we have founded OpenPress, a project to deploy a print aggregation service to support teachers and give under-resourced schools access to cost-effective open educational resources through the power of collaborative purchasing. This will allow high quality hard-copy resources to be delivered to schools.

Teachers are also required to do assessment, a crucial piece of the puzzle if learning and material effectiveness is to be gauged and fed back into further improvements of material and teaching process. My most recent project, under the Siyavula banner, is FullMarks, an openly licensed, open-source assessment bank designed to be extremely simple to use and allow educators to rapidly share questions, create tests and analyse learners results.

There are a number of additional projects in the pipeline, most notably the development of a mobile front-end for the Connexions platform which will allow learners with access to a cellular telephone the ability to browse the full Connexions repository without requiring access to an internet connection through a PC. In contrast to developed countries where the mobile focus is on smartphone applications, we are focused on simpler devices to allow the vast majority of South Africans access to the content via their phones. This will ensure that the 85%+ of South Africans with mobile phones can access Connexions in contrast to the 10% of South Africans with internet access via a PC.

I sincerely believe that education is the only route to long-term, sustainable, peaceful and prosperous future for all South Africans. I blog about all of my projects and my fellowship at markhorner.net.

By participating as a member of the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee I hope to support the platform's development and reach into the K-12 (R-12 in SA) sector. Connexions' forward thinking use of XML, homogeneous repository and typesetting capability make it an ideal place to build a critical mass of K-12 content that will benefit a global community of educators.