The following interview is with Mark Horner, the person heading the Free High School Science Text (FHSST) project. This project has the goal of providing free science textbooks to all of the high school students in South Africa. These books, currently under development, are being uploaded to and/or developed on Wikibooks.

Karl: Mark, thank you for taking time out of your Ph.D. research to answer these email questions. Our first one: Tell us just a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where are you now? What is your research about?

Mark:

Firstly, thanks for the opportunity to talk about the project. I really appreciate it. I'd also like to say up front that I am not the only person responsible for where things stand and a lot of people have done a lot to help and keep things going.

I am a South African PhD student registered at the University of Cape Town (UCT, http://www.uct.ac.za). I am currently spending some time at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (http://www.lbl.gov) in California where I work on the STAR experiment which is housed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in NY as part of the RHIC facility (http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/). My research is to try deduce the properties of the medium created in the Au+Au collisions by extending the work in this preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-ex/0501016. Here is a more user friendly link: http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/heavy_ion.htm

Before I start to bore everyone, I think that's enough about what I do as a "day job". Unfortunately it doesn't leave me as much time as I would like for FHSST.

K: How did the Free High School Science Text project get started?

M:

I was a summer student at CERN in October 2002 and the PhD students in my group were all discussing how it would be so much better to have a consolidated set of notes for Physics 3. I floated the idea of a collaborative effort to write either a 3rd year Physics textbook or a high school textbook and there was more enthusiasm for the high school book. The reason we thought there was an opening for a high school book at all came down to an experience I had at the Grahamstown Science Festival (http://www.scifest.org.za/) in 2002. I was demonstrating some wave properties as part of the UCT stand when a group of school students came to me with a notebook and a pen and asked me to write down everything I'd told them during the demonstration. They said they didn't have textbooks and had understood more about waves during the demonstration than during their lessons. That was quite an eye-opener.

I also feel that education really is the key to any sort of sustainable, peaceful future for any country and that's one of my personal motivations for not giving up. I believe that an investment in education is an investment in your own future. Southern Africa is relatively stable for the first time and now is our opportunity to try to add momentum to the education movements.

Another thing that I really like about the project is that it isn't competing with other education initiatives, but developing a resource for them to use. Education initiatives need all the support they can get and forming yet another tutoring organisation won't have the same impact as developing content all other initiatives can use. I like to think we are filling a useful and fundamental niche.

K: Who is working on the project? Are they educators, students, someone else?

M:

Anyone and everyone who wants to. We try to accomodate anyone who wants to make a contribution. Most of the work has been written by graduate students but we do have teachers, undergrads, professors and industry professionals amongst our contributors. We also have a very widespread contributor base. For a long time we had mostly South Africans but that has changed quite a lot over the last 2-3 months.

K: How many people are currently involved?

M:

We have a relatively long list of contributors but only about 25 active contributors at any one time. We are always looking for people who are interested in making a contribution of any sizei; every bit counts and it certainly adds up over time.

K: What is the timetable for the first book to be done? When do you expect to see the books printed and in use in the classroom?

M:

We should have Physics finished by the end of this year and released for print by the middle of next year. Its very difficult to put timelines on development because we have a wide range of volunteers and things take time. There will be some pilot distributions during 2006 and we should have a few thousand copies of Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry in circulation for the beginning of the 2007 school year (January in SA).

K: Where does the funding come from for this project?

M:

At the moment we haven't tried very hard to raise any money. Our hosting is free on Savannah as we use the GFDL. All the recruiting has been by word-of-mouth or email. We have registered a non-profit organisation in South Africa which is, for practical purposes, a prerequisite for receiving funding from any corporate sponsors.

We are currently working on our first real attempt to raise money. We need to have someone employed by the organisation at least part-time in 2006 as we will need to run pilot distributions, raise money, organise printing, run competitions and many other things that the current volunteer administrators just won't be able to keep up with.

We will approach large corporations, who do sponsor education initiatives, as well as the national lottery. A more grass-roots approach we would also like to try get moving is that schools raise money from their local communities to order our books directly from the printer. A project where we match the money raised might help get communities more active in supporting their schools. Obviously we will do our best to raise money to completely cover the costs of distributing to schools in extremely poor areas and these schools will be our priority.

K: What would be your definition of success for this project?

M:

Two things: 1) We make a complete set of textbooks available free of royalties and they are widely used in SA schools. They will always be available through print-on-demand for anyone who can raise money for a print. Even through print-on-demand we estimate that the cost of the books would be less than 40% of current books.

2) Widespread adoption of our content as a starting point for other education initiatives to build their own books, exercises, lesson plans etc. We already have had some success on this front and so the future looks really bright.

K: Can you describe the FHSST textbook development process?

M:

I am nervous of calling anything our development process before we actually finish a book but here is our (my) current feeling for how it is going to go. We need 3 pieces to meet the spirit of the syllabus in SA. We must have the core content with worked examples, we must have experimental and project activities and we must introduce a large body of information regarding real world applications.

Each book has a single coordinator who is also a member of the administration team. Our first approach is to collect all the core content with worked examples. To do this we assign individuals small sections to write with basic guidelines. The coordinator tries to keep things as coherent as possible given that it is being written by a large group of people. We try to keep the language usage and style as consistent as possible.

Once the core content, which is not specific to SA, is done we rotate editing of chapters through the authors, checking everything. Hopefully every chapter would be read by at least 5 people and checked thoroughly. These editors would have stricter style guidelines to impose.

While this is going on we contact individuals and companies with a call for essays of real-world applications for the books. These are modular and country specific. To make a version for another country I would replace all the essays with essays from people in that country.

Then it goes to one qualified editor to check that the text is coherent and consistent and the experiments and projects are added.

Then we will trial the book with a few teachers and get final feedback from them. This would be last set of changes before we pilot the books with students.

K: How did the partnership with Tuxlabs come about?

M:

They had just got close to the 100 mark for labs built and were looking for proper education content to put on their servers since their labs are not necessarily connected to the internet. They did some searching online and decided we had the most content that was actually going to be useful to them and so they phoned us one day to ask if we'd be keen to meet. One of our objectives is to try to work with other organisations, educational initiatives competing is a real waste of resources. After a meeting we agreed that we'd help them as much as we could.

They had been trying to hire people to write content but the prospect of a free license had scared most potential authors off.

K: What role do you think the Wikibooks community can play in the development of these books?

M:

I think that a large community like Wikibooks could be an incredible resource for writing the core content and developing worked examples. Harnessing the power of such a large community effectively would allow us to develop books very quickly. I think Wikibooks could ultimately play a massive role in addressing educational deficiencies all over the world.

The Wikibooks logo says "Think free. Learn free.", so I think we're all in the same business, making knowledge available to all. We've just picked a specific group that needs specific information which should make a massive difference to their future.

K: I think an email of mine convinced you to start the development of the FHSST Biology book directly online. How do you think that developing a book from scratch on Wikibooks will effect the process?

M:

I think there are two massive benefits which come to mind immediately, ease of development for people of different technological backgrounds and a large community of active individuals who care about the same things.

Let me elaborate, we found that there can be significant teething problems for people from a Windows/Word only background to move to working on LaTeX documents available via CVS. We do not want to restrict volunteers to people who know how to use CVS and LaTeX. Different scientific communities use different software. Amongst mathematicians and physicists I have found that CVS and LaTeX are quite common, but amongst the biologists they are almost unheard of. Forcing CVS and LaTeX use would severely decrease our potential contributor base. Contributing through Wikibooks requires a browser and a small learning curve regarding syntax. Its a much smaller hurdle than learning all LaTeX syntax, how to use CVS and all the other nuances that show up. The online help also reduces the workload on the administrators of FHSST to help individual authors.

I hope that development on Wikibooks will prove to be faster, more efficient and less stressful for everyone involved.

A large fraction of people aren't really interested in developing free textbooks. Wikibooks brings together a large number of like-minded people which is great. There is a community of people out there who are dedicated to this worthy cause and we can definitely achieve more working together.

My only concern, and it may stem from not having spent enough time working on Wikibooks and getting a good feel for things, is how to create a feeling of community around a single book. As part of the FHSST project we have a mailing list for each book for general discussion. I know about talk pages and watching a page on Wikibooks but I feel that mailing lists get the core discussions to people faster, requiring less active effort on the part of the author. To produce a textbook, cohesion and consistent notation and language style are very important and I think the best way to ensure this is to get the authors involved in discussion. These issues aren't as important for a project like Wikipedia but to produce a textbook that will be used in a classroom they need to be addressed. By doing so we address one of the first concerns raised by people when they hear that the books were written by volunteers.

K: Who will be the people using these books first? All public high school students in South Africa, or all high school students in general?

M:

In reality we will need to build a base of support and prove ourselves before we will be able to raise enough money to print books for all students, though that is the ultimate goal. We will make our books available from the printer at the cost of only the printing so students/schools who can afford them can just order them directly. For the schools that really need them we will need to raise money to cover printing costs. We would like to support as many other education initiatives as possible and so we would like to distribute books to schools that are involved with partner education initiatives first. These initiatives include tuXlabs and iKamva (http://www.ikamva.kabissa.org/), specifically because the tuXlabs schools will have the FHSST content available on their computers and the iKamva tutors will have helped trial the FHSST content.

From that base we would need to demonstrate that our texts are well

received by the students, make a difference and have the support of the teachers all on a large scale. When we can do this we can raise money to expand into more rural schools, though we won't be restricting use in schools in more affluent areas but we'll first go where we are needed most.

K: The FHSST website states that the primary goal of the project is to provide free science texts to high school students in South Africa. Providing these texts to Wikibooks will make them available to the whole world. What effect do you think this will have?

M:

Ultimately it would be great if there were FHSST textbooks used in all countries. All we would have to do is replace the essays with ones more relevant to that country. In a sense we have a modular textbook. It would also be nice to make a translation project. All of this must wait until we at least have some books written. If we spread ourselves too thin I think things might fall apart and nothing will be achieved.

Our objective is to write books to make a difference in SA but at no point did we not want to make them available to everyone, we are well aware of the implications of the GFDL. Our focus was just to make an investment in education in our country. The way I see it an investment in education is an investment in your own future.

K: Are the books being written according to South African curriculum standards? Are these closely related to those of other countries?

M:

I am not a curriculum expert so I can't comment much on how the SA curriculum compares to other countries. We have adopted the approach of fulfilling all the syllabus requirements and more. Everything that is mentioned in the SA syllabus will be contained in our books and more. We felt that if we wrote a book which wasn't adequate preparation for a student to enter university then we have failed. We have included any topics which we feel can be introduced in high school and would help better prepare students for university. This content will all be labelled as optional if it is not in the syllabus. Hopefully it will help all the motivated, diligent students out there that want to know more and go further. We have taken some guidance regarding additional content from the UK syllabus as well as from university students.

It also means that if the syllabus should change by any reasonable amount in the next few years, our books should still have sufficient scope to cover the changes. This would save unnecessary reprinting of books.

K: What will happen to the other high school science textbooks currently being used in South Africa? Are most of the books used currently imported from outside the country?

M:

A large number of textbooks are written and printed locally, however, they are still costly. One key point to note is that we have a new syllabus, with an outcomes-based structure, starting with a phased implementation in 2006 and so all schools will need new books to cater for significant changes in the syllabus.

It has been asked of me how I feel about competing with publishing houses for their market and for the most part I feel that our target audience are precisely the people who fall outside the real market for big publishing houses. Its clear that they haven't stepped up to the challenge of getting books to all students and I feel education is too important for us to stand idly by.

In the long run our efforts to strengthen communities would enlarge the potential markets for the big publishing houses and when schools have more than adequate financial resources they will buy the books they feel are best for the students and not the cheapest books. This would mean that it would be a more than fair competition for a large publishing house.

K: What percentage of South Africans achieve at least a high school level of education?

M:

This I had to research and I found a nice page documenting the situation in South Africa. Here is a short quote and the link.

"While 65% of whites over 20 years old and 40% of Indians have a high school or higher qualification, this figure is only 14% among blacks and 17% among the coloured population."

http://www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/education/education.htm

One note to avoid confusion, the term coloured has a different meaning in SA to what it does in the US. I refer you to this page for an explanation of what it means in a South African context:

http://www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/demographics/population.htm

K: How would you compare and contrast FHSST to the MIT OpenCourseWare project (Massachusetts Institute of Technology plan to make its course materials available on the web)?

M:

We have quite different target audiences, although I think that web-based coursework is a great idea. We hope to eventually make a difference to kids who've never seen a computer. We really want to support initiatives working in extremely poor areas. By educating people in those areas you work towards sustainable development. In a few educated generations the communities might be strong enough, economically, to support schools with computers and internet access but there are many schools who have nothing like that now.

Of course, the content will also be available for free on the Web, for anyone with access to a computer to download and print in any/all countries.

K: What are the biggest challenges that you see facing the FHSST project?

M:

At the moment we have many ideas and some good solid plans but we don't have the time to carry them out. If we manage to raise sufficient funding then we will hire someone to work on the project at least part-time. This will improve our turnaround time for all administrative issues. It will also allow us to do more active recruiting and have a single person to start negotiating prices for printing etc. We can also put some of our ideas, like scientific writing competitions to raise content rapidly, into action.

Once we have books we need to overcome the "you get what you pay for" stigma but this will be relatively easy if we can gain the support of organisations like the South African Institute of Physics, a few members of which are already involved with our Physics book.

Then we need to raise lots of money, but at least we'll be able to print books for less than $3 per book!

K: What are the enemies to education and learning today? How are they different in South Africa than in other (more developed) countries?

M:

Thats quite a question! There are many symptoms for problems in education but I think that we can bring it all down to one thing, complacency. People must never become complacent about education. If you do you'll only notice in 15 - 20 years time and then it takes as long to fix. The world needs to treat education as a mission critical endeavour all the time, at all levels. A strong education system will support so many other facets of society by producing well-rounded, well educated individuals.

It is not just about the government worrying about education; communities need to support their schools and never lose sight of the fact that the next generation will strengthen or weaken their own society.

It is a concern that worldwide it seems corporations can monopolise textbook markets, politics can affect what science is taught, teacher and school budgets are being cut and there is no massive outcry from the public.

We can't solve all these problems at once but, by working together, we can create a community to support education and hopefully turn the tide.

K: Mark, thank you very much for your effort and contribution in the FHSST project, and your time in answering all of these questions.

M:

Thank you for the opportunity. I apologise that it took me so long to answer all your questions. I really hope that we can add something to the Wikibooks community by ensuring that all the content we develop is available on Wikibooks and is of high enough quality to be useful to everyone.