Chalkface Blog

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.

I’ve mentioned Danah Boyd before as one of the people I turn to when I want to understand how young people perceive the online world.

Here she is (video, needs broadband) talking off-the-cuff to a group of students. Most interesting to me is the home truths she has to tell about the historical function of formal education. Her context is the USA; I will leave it to you to decide how much that parallels the British experience.

Like most publishing companies, Chalkface has long been nurtured by a diaspora of authors, editors and illustrators whom we rarely if ever actually meet.

Over the past few years, we steadily extended this principle, until only two members of staff were working permanently from our office in Milton Keynes. What kept them there was the need to answer the phones, and to work with our venerable pre-Internet corporate database.

But the phone calls themselves have declined as teachers turned to email for communication, and the web for information. The old database is increasingly an adjunct to the website, where most orders are now placed. The workload has fallen considerably – but it’s impossible to cover the phones with fewer than two people.

Over the summer break, I decided it was time to contract out the customer service work and close the office altogether. Financially, it was an easy decision, but emotionally I found it very difficult. Not only would I be handing out redundancy notices, but I’d be letting go one of the symbols of company-hood; the corporate headquarters.

I found solace in a new label; we are now a “virtual corporation” with no particular geographic location. If you phone us (and thank heavens we invested in a transferrable 0800 number), it will actually be answered in Corby; some emails will be answered in Kharkov. But it no longer matters; we are here for you – wherever ‘here’ happens to be at the time.

There have been teething troubles; we still don’t have the procedures in place to make sure the phone is answered exactly as we would like it, for example. But overall, it’s working. And it’s holding costs down enough that we can keep book prices pegged for another year, and Yacapaca completely free.

Sometime over the weekend Yacapaca passed 150,000 registered students. I’ve got my fingers crossed for quarter of a million by the end of term. Time to buy some more servers, I think!

Yep, it’s true. No more charges for using any part of Yacapaca. Not even the brand-new ePortfolios.

Over the summer, I decided it would be fairer and more logical to charge for the bit that really costs us money. That’s training and support. Early-adopting users tend to just muck in and work Yacapaca out for themselves, but as schools are starting to use Yacapaca school-wide, that’s changing.

So, we’re introducing a training and support package and what I think is a fantastic price – £295.00 per year for the whole school. It includes:

• a great CD-ROM of training videos that you can use to induct fellow teachers in sensible bite-sized chunks,
• online tests so you can diagnose other teachers’ (or your own) competency levels,
• one year of unlimited support by email, and up to 500 minutes of support by phone from our new tech support centre.

But – I want to emphasise that everyone has full access to the system with or without a training & support contract.