The Request

The initial request was to find suitable open textbook replacements for the “Foundations of Web Development” course and two database courses, “Database Design” and “Database Management.” These are but 3 of 18 courses that make up the program, all of which have both course outlines and learning outcomes well described and existing commercial textbooks in use. Both of these are VERY handy to have as reference when looking for alternatives.

As an aside, one thing I found odd was searching for “textbooks” at all in these areas. We’ll leave aside the whole question of what, in the networked, digital and open age, constitutes a “textbook” anymore – that’s an issue I plan to pick up in my next post. But when it comes to “ICT” and specifically technologies like web development and MySQL, the furthest thing from my mind when I think of learning these is to turn to a “textbook.” The web is literally strewn with good tutorials and references in these areas, ones that aren’t static but live and grow with new releases and learning by their communities. And these were for courses delivered entirely online! And yet…

As my contact explained to me, students were themselves asking for a physical textbook to accompany their course in cases where one didn’t already exist. Fair enough. And in addition, while the instructors were well aware of the reams of materials available for free online and how they could simply point to these, increasingly they were tiring of the ever-present link-rot, finding that each term whole sections of their course would contain broken links due to the seemingly natural decay on the web. Hence – open textbooks!

The Process

I started searching specifically for materials for these 3 courses and quickly realized that I was finding candidates not only for these subjects, but for many of the related courses and topics in the program. This led me to my first insight and action, which was that while you may be searching for one specific thing, it would be foolish of me to simply discard these related quality results. So I expanded the page where I was capturing all of the candidates I’d found to include all of the courses in the ICT Program. It turns out this was a wise thing to do, as even though I hadn’t been asked to find replacements for these others, in two cases when the instructors say how well the free and open candidates fit the course, they felt these would be easy choices. Score one for the good guys!

I am not ashamed to say that one of the first places I turned to was freelearning.ca, the OER search portal I built on top of delicious and Google CSW. The first thing I learned was that it had broke (doh!) The whole delicious move had caused some things to go out of whack. Once fixed, I found a few resources, but even though we’ve tried to constrain the open textbook search to just textbook sources, I admit a fair bit of cruft still gets through.

The next obvious (to me) place to turn was College Open Textbooks. They have a large collection of open textbooks classified by Subject that is up to date and added to regularly, in my experience. This turned up some decent possibilities.

College Open Textbooks is a curated collection, and one of the sources they pull from is Connexions. But a direct search of Connexions didn’t find anything particularly different. Similarly wikieducator and wikibooks, other sources the College Open Textbooks aggregates, didn’t offer a lot more than I had found earlier.

I kept trying a bunch of individual sites, FlatWorld Knowledge, Free Technology Academy, and FLOSS Manuals. In each found a few good candidate open textbooks. But still no motherload. I decided to turn to some of the major aggregators/OER portals, the two biggest IMO being OER Commons and MERLOT. I was encouraged to see in MERLOT that “open textbooks” had become a category I could refine a search on, and did find some decent choices But the specificity of this filter is thwarted by a lack of quality control on what gets classified as such, and by the seeming desire to be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible. OER Commons suffers from a similar fate, and in each case finding duplicate upon duplicate would easily discourage most faculty.

The full set of sources I searched is available here. To that list I would add both straight-ahead Google and Bing searches, which were by and large not very productive – lots of results, very few of which were either textbooks or open.

What I Found

There are 18 courses in the ICT Program (not including the Capstone project which doesn’t use a text). In around 7 hours of search I managed to turn up 41 potential candidates for 12 of the sources. Not all of these are explicitly “textbooks”; maybe half are, the other half being courses or manuals that could serve this purpose. The informal feedback I received from my contact at the ICT Program was that in two cases the candidates seemed holus bolus like good replacements. In two others there were ones that with work might serve as the basis for a new textbook.

So let’s say, for arguments sake, that this effort results in 4 commercial texts being replaced with free and open alternatives. These courses are delivered by 4 partnering institutions. So maybe conservatively 50 students/year x 4 courses? At  $100/textbook? That’s a $20,000/year. Even if we include a $10,000 one time cost to transform 2 of these to be more suitable, that’s still a potential $10,000 savingsin the first year passed on to these students. It is of course not as simple as that, but seems very easy to illustrate the value of this exercise and approach.

What I Learned

• Google on its own won’t save you – generic Google search was nearly useless for this – using “textbook” as one of your search terms doesn’t particularly help, nor does it’s advanced search with usage rights particularly guarantee that you will actually be able to reuse the results.
• Open is as Open Does – if you want free (and open) textbooks about ICT, teach open source platforms and apps. While there was an absolute dearth of open textbooks around proprietary platforms like Microsoft, there were serveral high quality open textbooks on Linux easily available. This sounds obvious, and clearly there are proprietary softwares that people still want to get formal instruction about, but we have to remember that one of the freedoms preserved by free software is the freedom to LEARN.
• OER Portals can help… – there are a few decent OER portals, but there is definitely no single “one stop shop.” If asked to recommend to faculty only a couple of general portals (e.g. not specific to any one discipline) then I’d likely focus on OER Commons and Merlot as the two best candidates. That said, discipline-specific engines and portals will almost by definition be better at helping you find what you need, and the extent to which one exists in your specific area, you are fortunate.
• …and yet have some conflicts of their own – in their haste to bulk up their collections, repositories and other search engines have in fact done themselves a disservice as there is often now a lot of crap in them, or a lot of resources of huge heterogeniety of granluarity, usability and quality.
• The “reusability paradox” is a real thing – and its corollary is also true: the large the granularity of thing you are trying to find, the less likely you are to find an “exact match” on any of the specific items.
• It’s all about “the flow” – even if you have some subject matter expertise, if you are not the person ultimately responsible for assembling the curriculum or teaching the course, there will need to be at least one more pass by the people who are, as ultimately they are the ones who will use it. This is not to say that this “OER Librarian” role is useless, far from it, but the ideal for me remains a persistent workflow like I described in the “Open Educator as DJ” where seeking & collecting open content is not something that happens once a year for a few days but an ongoing part of the open educators workflow. Serendipity does not work to a schedule!
• But until then… – Still, what it is showing me is the possibilities of some hybrids; I can foresee a dynamic approach, supported by any number of systems (a wiki might work well) in which, say, a course description and basic outline is first shared, and various content found at that level by someone with some search expertise, and then both the course units and corresponding searches iterated by instructor/subject matter expert and “oer librarian.” If done in something that allowed for easy “clipping” and republishing of collected work into a new textbook, this iterated approach could go a long way to the creation of a new text that worked at all the levels of granularity it needed to.

Another step that seems obvious to me is to find good examples (regardless of discipline) to be inspired by. Which is where you come in – I would really appreciate links to your favourite examples of open textbooks. Of especially great interest are examples of what I think of as “hybrid” open textbooks, ones that are available in all of web, print and eBook formats. While this used to be just a dream, of writing once but reproducing in many forms, this is incresingly a reality, and one I’d like to see good examples of.

So, what are your favourite examples of Open Textbooks? – SWL

Wikipedia Device, aimed at the elderly

I know in the past people have given Stephen and others lots of grief about their stance on the Non-Commercial clause. And I admit that, while I understood the theoretical possibilities Stephen was concerned about, that commercial entities often seek to obscure or enclose free resources so that even if the original is still literally “open” it becomes effectively lost, I initially wrote that off as edge-case fear mongering.

But over the last few years I have come to see this not as an edge case at all but is actually a real practice that we see emerging over and over, whether it be in various threats to “net neutrality” or SEO practices that effectively bury the free versions of content. This post is just a brief note about yet another example that came up in conversation with a potential partner in government who wants to share openly some training resources aimed at helping immigrants to Canada have their foreign credentials accepted and become members of professional organizations in Canada.

I raised the question of “flavours” of Creative Commons license simply because the current configuration of SOL*R supports the 2.0 Attribution Share-Alike license and wanted them to realize they had a choice. This gave them some pause, and then mentioned that actually, one of the challenges faced when communicating with new immigrant populations in general is that there are certain groups (e.g. immigration lawyers and others who “facilitate” the process) who have a strong motive to short circuit official channels so that they can communicate “on behalf” of new immigrant clients (read – “charge them lots of money for things the government actually provides for free.”) Fair play to Google, the top unsponsored hits for “Immigrate to Canada” are indeed government websites, but the first one is a sponsored commercial link, and on that same first page of results are a number of commercial “immigration consulting” services pretty much masquerading as government sites.

All of which is simply to add yet another to what seems to me to be the long and ever-expanding list of examples of ways in which commercial entities, usually through legal if not totally ethical means, obscure what should be free and public resources. This is not make believe or edge case. This is in fact the modus operandi of capital. – SWL

• how do we get authors to insert these as part of their regular workflow
• how do we make sure they are all unique / at what level do they need to be unique
• how do we easily give the tracking data back to the authors.

My goal was to do all this without really altering the current workflow in SOL*R nor requiring any additional user accounts.

The solution I’ve struck upon (in conversation with folks here at the OU) is to use pwiki an open source analytics package with an extensive API to do the majority of the work, and to then work on how to insert this into the existing SOL*R workflow. So the scenario looks like this:

1a. Content owners are encouraged (as we do now) to use the BC Commons license generator to insert a license tag into their content. As part of the revised license generator, we insert an additional question – “Do you wish to enable tracking for this resource?”

1b. If they answer yes, the license code is ammended with a small html comment -

<!–insert tracking code here–>

1c. The content owner then pastes the license code and tracking placeholder into their content as they normally would. We let them know that the more places they place it into their content, the more detailed the tracking data will be. We also can note that this is *only* for web-based (e.g. html) content.

2. The content owner then uploads the finished product as they normally would.

3a. Each night a script (that I am writing now) runs on the server. It goes through the filesystem, and every time it finds the tracking placeholder:

• based on the files location in the filesystem, it deconstructs the UUID assigned it in SOL*R
• uses the UUID to get the resource name from SOL*R through the Equella web services
• re-constructs the resource home url from its UUID
• sends both of these to the piwik web service, which in return creates a new tracking site as well as the javascript to insert in the resource
• finally writes this javascript where the tracking placeholder was.

4a. Finally, in modifying the SOL*R records, we also include a link to the new tracking results for each record that has it enabled.

4b. For tracking data the main things we will get is:

• what are the new servers this content lives on
• how many time each page of content in the resource (depending on how extensively they have pasted the tracking code) has been viewed, both total and unique views
• other details about the end users of the content, for instance their location and other client details

I ran a test last week. This resource has a tracking code in it.  The “stock” reports for this resource are at http://u.nu/3q66d It should be noted: we are fully able to customize a dashboard that only shows *useful* reports (without all the cruft) as well as potentially incorporate the data from inside Equella on resource views / license acceptances. This is one of the HUGE benefits of using the SOL*R UUID in the tracking is that it is consistent both inside and outside of SOL*R.

I am pretty happy with how this is working so far; while I have expressed numerous times that I think the repository model is flawed for a host of reasons, to the extent to which it can be improved, this starts to provide content owners (and funders) details on how often resources are being used after they are downloaded, and (much like links and trackbacks in blogs) offer content owners a way to follow up with re-users, to start conversations that are currently absent.

But… I can hear the objections already. Some are easy to deal with: we plan to implement this in such a way that it will not be totally dependent on javascript. Others are much more sticky – does this infringe on the idea of “openness”? What level of disclosure is required? (This last especially given that potentially 2nd and 3rd generation re-users will be sending data back to the original server if the license retains intact.)

I do want to respect these concerns, but at the same time, I wonder how valid they are. You are reading this content right now, and it has a number of “web bugs” inserted in it to track usage yet is shared under a license that permits reuse. Even if it is seen as a “cost,” it seems like a small one to pay, with a large potential benefit in terms of reinforcing the motivations of people who have shared. But what do you think – setting aside for a second arguments about “what is OER?” and “the content’s not important,” does this seem like a problem to you? Would you be less likely to use content like this if you knew it sent usage data back? Would anonymizing the data (something piwik can easily do) ease your mind about this?

Community and Open Education

Two examples I came across my second day here really spoke to me about new ways of thinking about OER/Open Education in relationship to people and communities. The first is the iSpot project managed by Doug Clow, one of my colleagues here in the Institute of Educational Technology where the OLNet team from the OU is housed.

As Doug explained, the site allows people to post photos of they’ve taken of local species, and crowdsources their identification. The site has a sophisticated reputation system that awards participants and also identifies those with formal expertise in different fields and weighs their input accordingly. The OU have partnered with a number of BBC Television nature shows and radio programmes to popularize the site, so they are attracting an audience who then participate out of and existing passion and interest. The genius is To *then* weave OU courses into/around this community site and content, using it both as potential course content but also as a conduit for interested informal learners to find formal learning opportunities if they chose, and also interact and be supported in their informal learning community by discipline experts. When Doug described this to me my jaw dropped; it is so obvious yet really a brilliant turn. Too often in formal higher ed we have had the “build it and they will come” belief about our OER efforts, and when that hasn’t happened we’ve then shifted our focus to “building communities” around our content. But that is so wrongheaded. Communities exist already, and where they don’t, it’s not simply a matter of them forming around content, per se. By leading with a site that helped users scratch an itch they already had, however small, (“I keep spotting this bird in my back yard but I don’t know what it is”) and then building tools to support peer engagement and discussion, as well as personal identity and reputation, they’ve set the stage for community to form and share knowledge and only THEN weave formal offerings in and around this. It’s probably not perfect, but I think it offers strong suggestions as to how institutions can engage civil society in a way that leads to a permeable boundary between existing informal learning communities and formal learning institutions/scholars.

The second example was a bit different yet still inspiring. Another researcher on the OLNet project, Andreia Santos, gave a short talk on an initiative at the Brazilian university Unisul to experiment with ways to attract new learners through a mixture of Open Education, peer support and social networking. If I understood correctly (and I’m not sure I completely did, so I hope Andreia will see this and chime in with a correction or pointer to a longer write up), the university has begun offering access to a block of 10 courses, a mixture of open resources from the OU and themselves, within their own learning environment (so not just ‘content’ but a full VLE experience…). The part that tickled my fancy was that they do so during one of their “breaks” (in their case the Winter break that happens in June/July) and are in part marketing it to friends and families of existing students. This seems like a smart idea in that not only do they have stronger ties and so their message is much more convincing, but they themselves end up taking some of these courses to and because of their familiarity with the environment end up becoming a form of peer support. I understand that this year they have introduced a nominal fee but that students can take as many of the courses as they want and get a form of certificate at the end. Like I said, different than iSpot but still I think a strong example of interacting with community and existing ‘social networks.’

Repositories – some mothers do ‘ave ‘em

Another part of my experience so far has been to listen to talks on a few different repository projects that shall remain nameless. The learning here wasn’t particularly new for me, but it did continue to confirm beliefs I’ve long held about the weak points of this approach: that they typically do not tap in or reinforce individual motivations for sharing; that their model of ripping content out of its original context for download goes against the grain of the web (more on this soon, as part of my Fellowship work on “OER Tracking”); and that they are a solution begged by the questions of VLEs/LMS silos, sharing modeled on “publishing” and that is ony half-heartedly committed to sharing. But… the one good thing I guess is that it made me feel slightly better about my own work, that I’m not the only one who’d hit these problems nor had to learn the hard way that content doesn’t build networks that share, people do.

On being at the OU

If I haven’t already made it clear, it is a HUGE honour for me to be a visiting academic with the OU through the OLNet Fellowship program. This institution has been (and still is) a global leader in the field of distance learning and open education, and there is a tangible passion here for the belief that education can radically improve people’s lives for the better. The opportunity to be physically here for a month is even more special to me because on a day to day basis I work from my home office, and while I am surrounded by a global network of peers who I talk with daily, the chance to be surrounded by so many smart people passionate about open learning, as well as have access to some fantastic services on this lovely campus is one I will never forget. I’d be remiss if I did not extend a special thanks to Karen Cropper and Janet Dyson for helping me find my way in the first few days and make me feel really at home, and a special thanks to “Liam and the librarians” for broadening my social horizons.

There’s lots more to tell, especially around my specific project of tracking OERs outside of the bounds of the repository (which I think we’ve now got a plausible model of how to do) but I’ll leave that for another post. For now I’ll leave it that it is good to be back in the land of great cheese and delicious warm beer with so many rich opportunities to learn ahead of me.

• the public library
• UMW blogs
• Smarthistory
• TED or Sputnik observatory
• Khan Academy

I don’t think there is one “right” answer, but I do think it is a useful question to ask; firstly because it asks us to dig into the assumptions behind each of the terms I scare-quoted. By “successful” do you mean: most accessed/viewed? most re-used? increased the profile of the institution the most? provided the best return on investment? improved student learning the most? decreased some of the crises facing the world the most? All of the above? (good luck with that!) And what’s meant by “formal”? Or “OER” for that matter?

I’m not hoping to spark a definitional skirmish – lord knows we’ve all seen enough of those. But I am sincere in wanting examples, however you choose to define the terms. Because from where I’m sitting, the projects that fulfill the criteria of “successful” “formal” “OER” projects are few and far between, yet I remain absolutely personally committed to the causes of education and open sharing. The tension between these two seemingly contradictory statements (plus the fact that I derive my livelihood working on “formal” “OER” projects) should be plain, and seeking some examples is in a way asking for help both in how I’m approaching my work but also where I am choosing to put my efforts in this life. As The Reverend constantly reminds me, “you can’t live wrong rightly,” and I’m feeling pretty tired of struggling with round holes and square pegs, trying to convince people to let go of The Fear. – SWL

I’m still not 100% clear on whether I can tell anybody about this, but… too late now. Earlier this year I took a bit of a flyer and submitted an application for an OLNet Fellowship, which offered the chance to work with the folks at the renowned Open University in the UK on issues around Open Education. I am not a full-time Academic and don’t have an enormous publication record, but I’d like to think I’ve paid some dues in the trenches working on, and thinking and writing about, Open Education. Apparently so did they, because much to my pleasant surprise I was awarded an “Expert Fellowship,” a category seemingly designed to suit odd-balls like myself that work in the lofty heights of Academia but ain’t got no papers

But there’s a point to this post apart from saying “wohoo Scott” (wohoo!) Actually 2 points. The first is a shout out to colleagues in the UK that I will be in Milton Keynes from June 23 until July 24th. I am not clear yet the extent of my mobility will be, but I’m certainly hoping that the month offers some opportunities to visit and learn with colleagues in the UK. If you are interested, please do let me know and we’ll try to make it happen.

The second point of the post is to share a bit of what I am going to be working on. As many of you know, I run an “open educational resource” repository (cue loud groan.) In our model, and it seems far from unique, teaching resources aimed primarily at instructors are typically downloaded and reused in some other context. While it is possible to ‘point’ to content hosted in our system, in most cases this is not how it is used.

One of the problems with this model (and sheesh, don’t I wish there were only one) is that the content owners don’t get a good sense of the popularity of their resources and where else they are being used. As a blogger and long time creator of web content that has been reused, I know that getting feedback on how often your stuff is viewed and from where, whether it be in the form of Trackbacks, or services like Google Analytics, can be a big shot in the arm. Sure, it is hopefully not the only thing that motivates you, but it doesn’t hurt.

So my proposal is to research the myriad different ways this kind of usage tracking can be implemented specifically in the context of OER (with a high sensitivity to finding approaches conducive to freedom and not any sense of ‘restriction’), select one and implement it in my real world repository. It is a big fish to fry and I do not think the problem is exclusive to OERs but in general applies to digital media. While I do hope to report on general approaches I also know that having a specific context to work in will be helpful. So expect to hear more (and get more pleas of “help!”) in the coming months.

Anyways, hope I do end up getting to meet some of you conspirators who ’til now have been just URLs or avatars. And I hear the English countryside is lovely that time of year… – SWL

These are really valuable, but I also feel a bit sheepish, like I shouted out for feedback before doing enough due dilligence myself (it’s ok, I can forgive myself if you can, I no longer can keep track of the number of balls in the air, plates spinning, irons in the fire or whatever metaphor for headswimming busy-ness you might care to choose.)

Because when I did some digging of my own, I found an enormous amount of helpful material already being produced by people focused in specifically on Open Textbooks (I am but a Johnny-come-lately.) So to make amends, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found, lbeit not overly digested or analysed. Share early and often, right?

The first thing I found quite useful were two sites that laid out some criteria for assessing Open Textbooks. So from a Community College Open Textbook Collaborative page on Conexions I found the following criteria:

• Quality of content, literary merit and format
• Timeliness
• Favorable reviews
• Permanence/lasting value
• Authority: author
• Scope
• Physical quality
• Format: print, CD-ROM, online, etc.
• reading level

while from the Open Textbook project at OER Commons I found this set of review criteria:

• Clarity of course materials
• Absence of Content errors
• Appropriateness of course materials
• Interface
• Content usefulness
• Consistency of course materials
• Suggested changes
• Exemplary features

as well as

• Cultural relevance
• Reading level
• Readability in terms of logic and flow
• Accuracy
• Modularity (or the ability to take apart, mash up and remix the content)
• Universal accessibility (thus permitting all populations – no matter the physical constraint – to access content)
• Color printing and graphics as an available option, in all print materials
• Meet as many specific course articulation requirements as possible
• Ability to transport content to modalities other than print (cell phones, and other portable devices, for example)
• Content should be as interoperable on as many platforms as possible
• How does this open textbook compare with the best commercial textbook available in my discipline, and/or the commercially published textbook that I am using for my course.

The other thing that should have been obvious to me but that only became clear as I began to dig into this a bit deeper,is that in addition to providing cheaper textbooks, we can do a service to students by pointing them to free copies of original source texts that are studied in many courses, especially in the humanities. So in addition to the VAST amounts of academic content being freed by the likes of the Open Content Alliance, and the trailblazing work by the pioneering Gutenberg Project, we can now look for (and suggest to students) free eBooks and digital versions from sites like feedbooks, manybooks, and more!

This is just the start of this for me, so expect more regularly over the next year, but I wanted to give back some of what I am finding, especially since I should have done more of this to begin with. – SWL

I want to put to the side ideological and theoretical debates around OER for a second because I am driven by a specific problem – it’s *my job* to help instructors and institutions in BC share online learning resources and in general to promote awareness of OER and their reuse. So I am always thinking of ways I might help people find useful resources.

Now I often make the mistake of thinking everyone is exactly like me, and so much of my effort has been in helping people help themselves. This often takes the form of technological interventions like teaching instructors how to grow their own PLN’s, or my work around client-side augmentation.

But a couple of things have given me pause to reconsider whether there are other ‘hands-on,’ ‘high touch’ approaches I should also be considering. One is the (disappointingly stillborn) Findanoerafrica twitter account that Dave Cormier setup at the Open Ed ’09 conference. The other was the experience last night of watching a friend wonder out loud on twitter about good resources on gardening for K-4 students, and within minutes seeing a fantastic reply from another friend and OER curator-type which seemed to exactly fit the bill.

So there could be no better example of informal learning networks “just sharing” than this, and I know enough about this network stuff to know that institutionalizing it can be the kiss of death, but both of these did make me wonder if there maybe isn’t some role for an “Ask the OER Virtual Librarian” service to help faculty new to the idea of finding and reusing open resources get off to a start. Maybe a twitter account or email address that would be easy to monitor as part of one’s normal workflow but that would allow a higher touch response. I suppose this is often the role for instructional designers, but in my experience not every faculty developing a course gets the chance to work with instructional designers (and certainly students don’t, and I wonder the extent to which *real* librarians avail themselves of OER versus more traditional sources.) So…

Is this a dumb idea? Would this be tantamount to admitting that OERs (as any sort of distinct thing) are a failure? (Certainly it would seem like acknowledging the current way of developing and sharing them might be.) Is “discoverability” even actually the problem with resources getting reused, or is it possible that the whole model is so flawed, so disconnected from how educators construct course materials, that it wouldn’t make any difference (and to be fair, it is important to distinguish OER aimed at educator reuse and OER aimed at student self-study). Please let me know. I like this idea simply because when I see this happen in my networks it brings me joy to observe, but it may be trying to squash the round peg of institutional roles into the square hole of personal networks. Wouldn’t be the first time… - SWL

I am hoping that Dave Cormier will write this up fully, as it was his idea for which he deserves full credit, but the eleganceand simplicity of it, coupled with the real need it hopes to serve, compelled me to post something right away in hopes of helping it get going.

As I understand it, after Catherine Ngugi’s powerful opening keynote at Open Education ’09, Dave spent some time chatting with Catherine, in which he came to learn that there was a person tasked with locating useful open resources for faculty but that this was an overwhelming task. Dave, being Dave, immediately saw the potential for our existing networks to pitch in, sharing as we already do, and set about creating a twitter account, findanoerafrica to send out requests to the community for help finding appropriate resources. The idea was hatched on Wednesday and announced this Friday morning.

Only time will tell if it works and how effect it is. You can help, really easily. If you use twitter, then follow findanoerafrica and basically respond in the helpful way you already do. The difference being you’ll be helping someone who is in turn supporting hundreds of educators. The beauty – it isn’t asking you to do anything you’re not already doing, and the cost was essentially zero. Obviously, this is not going to solve all the worlds ills, but it’s one of those little steps to maybe make it better than it was. Dave – your energy and enthusiasm are both infectious and inspiring. Getting to hang with you this week in Vancouver has definitely been one of the highlights for me. – SWL