Yacapaca

Around the end of last term I came across Mike Highfield’s excellent SPB Helper for DiDA (here’s his demo). I was so impressed with the quality of Mike’s screencasts that I immediately approached him to produce a short series of screencasts explaining Yacapaca.

The original plan was that these would simply be freebies would help promote the system but, one thing led to another and what we ended up with was a massive project containing no fewer than 74 separate little movies talking you through every detail of the system (example 1, example 2).

What I’m hoping is that people will use it to introduce Yacapaca across a whole school. From experience of running Yacapaca INSET days, I think there’s about three days-worth of material here, if you are starting with novices. It will be interesting to see who uses it in formal day trainings, and who puts it on a school network so teachers can access it as and when they need.

By the time we’d done all this, the project had cost too much to just give away. Actually, this solved a problem. I want as many people as possible to be able to use Yacapaca, and charging money for using it gets in the way of this. At the same time, we have to do something to keep a roof over hour heads. The solution was to make using the system entirely free, bundle the screencasts with a support contract and sell that to schools. Give away the product, but sell training & support to those who want it. It’s the classic ‘open source’ model.

In the nature of projects that grow beyond their original scope, this one also grew beyond its original schedule. Finally, I’m pleased to say, it’s ready, and the first disks are going out this week to customers who pre-ordered it.

If you’re interested, there’s a downloadable demo here, and more information here.

Most teachers regularly write resources for their classes, but very few make the leap unaided to producing resources that colleagues in other schools will use. The difference is that, with a resource you wrote yourself, you completely understand the original intention and can teach over the gaps where the resource fails to deliver.

Traditionally, this is great news for us educational publishers. Our job is to take your ideas, format them, edit them and stress-test them until they are next to bomb-proof.

I say ‘traditionally’, because since the advent of Wikipedia, there is a new, more democratic model: online collaborative authoring. Anyone is free to write a Wikipedia article, and anyone is free to edit it, too. This anarchistic arrangement has proven hugely successful in building the world’s largest encyclopedia by a factor of ten. What’s more, according to recent research published in Nature, the quality is the same as the very professionally published Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What happens if we try to apply the Wikipedia model to educational content? My first brush with this idea came when my old friend Steve Margetts asked Chalkface to support his new project Wikitextbook. That’s still ongoing and reasonably, but not hugely, successful.

The next step is to apply the model to assessment content, always the hardest to write. This is where Guy Fawkes comes in. I took the opportunity of the upcoming festival to launch a collaborative authoring experiment inside Yacapaca. In fact there are two, the other is for Halloween.

Here is how it works. About a week ago, we created two author groups – online clubs where you can come and create questions, edit and improve existing questions or compile your own tests from them. I wrote to some of our teacher-members, and invited them to join, and to contribute just one question. So far, we have 52 questions from 69 teachers.

Now comes the acid test. I have asked those same teachers to come and edit each others’ questions. The questions certainly need it; many of the authors are novices writing their first Yacapaca questions. The ideas are great, but there is plenty of scope for improvement.

But… will teachers be willing to edit each others’ work, even with the reassurance that we have Wikipedia-style question histories, and can easily roll back inappropriate edits? If so, we shall have demonstrated that real online collaborative editing is possible in education. And if not, then perhaps there is still a role for us publishers after all.

I will update you as the experiment progresses.