[Fhsst-bio] Getting started

[Mark Horner]

Hi everyone

Firstly, I didn't take Biology beyond std. 7 so I am only going to help 
administrative issues and organisation. I'll start with planning and end 
with some general information to help everyone get started.

There are 5 authors on this list and I ask that you use the list for 
discussion so that any new
member can look over the list history to get up to speed, it also keeps 
all current members up to speed on decisions and developments. The list 
archives form a useful record of activities.

I'll break the ice for everyone, the 5 authors signed up to the list at 
the moment are:

Nicola Kalk           (Doctor, just finishing off Rhodes Scholarship at 
Oxford)
Joanne Boulle      (Biology teacher, working at a school in Natal)
Nicole Masureik  (Biology teacher, working in the UK)
Ronell Selzer       (Biology teacher, working in the UK)
Deeya Ballim       (just finished her BSc. Hons. in Cell Biology at UCT)

The "life sciences" curriculum has been made available on the internet 
by the Shuttleworth Foundation. We are collaborating with them to slowly 
move our content online as well. All the online content is part of the
Wikibooks project. The curriculum is:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/South_African_Curriculum

I asked Joanne to start drawing up a draft outline for the book 
recently. My plan was to break the outline up into manageable 
assignments and then give those to volunteers. I do not think that 
Joanne has had time
to finish it yet but with 3 teachers who understand reading syllabus 
documents we might be able to speed up the process by breaking it up 
into 3 sections.

Jo - could you please send what you have so far to the list and then 
Ronell and Nicole can help finish off the outline? If you haven't had 
time to start thats fine - then its easier to split into 3.

Then we would need to agree on the guidelines for writing to make it as 
coherent and consistent as possible given that there will be many 
authors. This basically just reduces the load on the editors. The two 
most important things, in my opinion, are:
- the book must be accessible to second language speakers
- must cover all the material in the syllabus and enough material to 
make sure the student is able to
survive at university

Once thats done we (you :) can start working through all the sections

I will try to recruit more people once we have an outline because we 
have found that small well-defined assignments are the best way to 
handle volunteers. Just asking people to contribute where they thinks 
its necessary is a guarantee that nothing will happen.

Now some important more general information. We use a free licence 
called the Gnu Free Documentation Licence. The Gnu part of the name 
comes from Richard Stallman and his opensource software movement, just 
in case you were wondering, and his organisation wrote the licence. This 
very nice because most of (99.9%+) the content on the wikibooks website 
is released under the GFDL. This means we can use it - we can literally 
cut and paste it.

I find it quite unsatisfying to just cut and paste content from other 
sources but this can be very helpful and speed things up quite a lot. 
Its also a great source of diagrams and pictures. This is particularly 
true for Biology because there are two books on Wikibooks which are very 
near complete and cover a fair amount of the material we would need. 
Please take a look at these two books (and look at some of the others as 
well - there is a Biology book):

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Botany

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cell_Biology

We can use content from these books as it is and copy any diagrams or 
pictures. The books for other subjects on wikibooks have been quite 
disappointing and we haven't been able to use much. You will notice that 
a draft of the FHSST Physics book has been put on Wikibooks by the 
Shuttleworth Foundation. Although its still quite a rough draft it is 
the best physics book on Wikibooks at the moment.

One last thing about the mailing list, you must send email to it from 
teh address that is subscribed to the list. If anyone who isn't 
subscribed sends email to the list it must be cleared by the moderator 
(me). This stops any spam from being sent to our lists. You can, 
however, always email the address@hidden list as this is 
completely open so that new volunteers can contact the admin team.

I wil put in a request for a Biology book cover to be created. A graphic 
designer in CT has been helping us and I am sure she'll have some ideas 
pretty soon. I also need to find some time to update the website - but 
you'll need to give me at least a week for that.

I think thats enough for now. Sorry about the long email but its really 
great to have a team to get Biology started. It was always a concern 
that we seemed to have marginalised the life sciences but it was just 
that the founding members were all physics and maths students.

Also - please feel free to voice any opinions/suggestions/ideas as its 
an open collaboration with the only real objective being to make a major 
contribution to education.

Cheers,

Mark