Matric 2011 in review

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Tim Keller

South African students will breathe a sigh of relief tomorrow morning as the 2011 Matric results are released. This evening we got the summary data, and in general the numbers are good. 70,2% of state-school candidates passed (up 2% from 2010) and 24,3% gaining university entrance (up just under 1%).

Students attending independent schools (which sit the equivalent IEB tests) performed exceptionally well. Of the 8 285 candidates, 98,4% passed and 85,5% obtained university entrance.

To make sense of these results I gathered government data for the last four years:

Matric pass rate, per year (Overall pass rate and university entrance obtained, respectively):

  • 2008: 62,5% and 20,2%
  • 2009: 60,7% and 19,6%
  • 2010: 67,8% and 23,5%
  • 2011: 70,2% and 24,3%

On the surface these statistics paint a picture of rapidly improving standards. However, given the pressure on government to both prove the value of the “new curriculum” and improve performance – especially in rural South Africa – one must ask the poignant questions.

Is the difficulty of final examinations being gradually reduced to improve performance? Are marks being adjusted upwards to compensate? And, critically, are school-leavers educated at a level to indeed enter university or adequately equipped find a job after school?

Update: NGO Equal Education highlights a concerning reduction in the number of candidates: 496 090, down 41 453 from 537 543 in 2010. They also note that 923 463 learners started Grade One in 2000 indicating an approximate 46,3% drop-out rate over twelve years of schooling.

Sources:

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The Commodore 64 is 30 years old

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Tim Keller

This month marks exactly 30 years since the announcement of the Commodore 64 – the 8-bit home computer which outsold IBM PC-clones, Apple Computers and Atari’s for much of the 1980′s. It dominated with 35% market share from 1983 to 1986, eventually selling 17 million units, making it the first computer for “ordinary people”.

The C64 featured a whopping 1Mhz CPU, 16Kb of RAM, and 16-colour TV display output. Input was via the built-in keyboard or plug-in joy-sticks. Storage was via an external floppy drive or tape recorder. The tape drive would take up to 30 minutes to load-in a game or programme.

Most notable, however, is that it popularised the use of modems for telecommunications between computers. America Online (AOL) started life as an online service for exclusively for Commodore owners called Quantum Link and offered email, chat, downloads and online games. In fact the original Dungeons & Dragons game, Neverwinter Nights, launched as an AOL game for the C64.

But, unfortunately, I never owned a one (though, it seems I still could). Nor did I have access to the Internet until the late 90′s. My first computer was a 286 PC-clone running DOS 5.0. For the first few years it only ran NewsMaster II and WordPerfect 5.1. After I learned a few DOS commands (and accidentally executed “rd C:/”) an older friend installed several games. This introduced me to Police Quest, Space Quest, California Games and more. A few years later I upgraded to a 486 with a colour monitor before the Pentium era began.

It is amazing to think that the utterly gigantic and world-changing industry of personal computing is little more than 30 years old.

What was your first computer?

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Taking Note

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Tim Keller

Let’s talk about how we go about remembering stuff with a few simple (and free) tools for the Mac, PC, Web, and iPhone/iPad.

  • How many times a week do you forget your online banking credentials?
  • How often do you find yourself surrounded by scraps of paper covered in scribblings?
  • When last did you actually scan and file notes from your last telephone call or minutes of a meeting?
  • Ever just wanted to jot down a few words in a safe place as you think of them?
  • How do you remember the list of items you need to discuss with Joe when next you meet?

If you’re anything like me, paper just doesn’t work for such moments. If I don’t lose that scrap of paper between the office and home, I’ll almost certainly forget to scan and file it for later retrieval. People like us need “a system”. Here’s mine:

Storage

Everything I write gets stored in one or more text files. You’d typically open such files in TextEdit or Notepad. As of today, my notes directory contains 433 .txt files. This gives me the freedom to open access my notes in any application I choose and the peace-of-mind of not being tied to a single piece of software.

Desktop Writing

This is where the magic happens. What we want in a note-taking application is the ability to quickly and efficiently search for information. I’d like to introduce you to two applications: NotationalVelocity (for Mac) and ResophNotes (for Windows).

NotationalVelocity was developed in 2002 by software developer, Zachary Schneiro to solve his problem of tracking short, unrelated snippets of information. Resoph is a great alternative for Windows users that works in a similar way.

Let’s divide the user interface into three parts, top to bottom:

  1. Text field (highlighted in yellow, below),
  2. a list of notes sorted by their last modified date, and
  3. the text editor.

The Text field has the uncanny (and awesome) ability to both search and create notes. As you type, a full-text, incremental, live search is done across all of your notes. That is, within both the filename and file contents. If you hit Return (or Enter) at any point, you generate a new note with its title set to whatever you just typed. From there, the cursor is automatically moved to the third area – the note editor, and you just start typing your note. It feels incredibly natural.

The list of notes shows every note in your notes directory – along with a preview of their contents and date last modified. As you search, this list will update in realtime to show matching notes.

Notational and Resoph also save automatically as you type, so you’ll never lose a note again.

Syncing

But what use is a folder of notes on one computer? We need to get our notes onto “the cloud” for safe keeping and easy access. Enter SimpleNote.

SimpleNote is an online note-syncing service that automatically syncs with NotationalVelocity and ResophNotes. Simply sign-up for a free account and give Notational or Resoph your username and password. In next to no time, you’ll have access to your notes offline and online.

Going Mobile

And it get’s better: If you have a iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, you can download the SimpleNote iOS app (again, for free) and have access to all of your notes – complete with searching and tagging. This is great for note-taking during meetings, conferences and calls.

So, go and get that set up and let me know how it goes. I’ll post some power-user tips in the coming days.

Links

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You’ll never be the same again

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Tim Keller

Steve Jobs in 1995:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

 

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The next three

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Tim Keller

Three years seems to be a familiar cadence in my life: three years of junior high, three years of high school, three years of university, and so on.

This last year was the best and most difficult year I’ve had. But it’s also been incredibly rewarding. Today marks the end to another three-year period which began when I joined Umoya at the end of 2008.

In that time I’ve got to:

  • build staffroom and provide services to 30 local schools,
  • design uniti and have it used in the 2012 Soccer World Cup,
  • deliver FireWeb to fire stations and wild-fire agencies throughout the country,
  • speak at Microsoft TechEd Africa and various other events,
  • start EdTechConf with my co-founders and appear on radio and in the media,
  • and share Cyber-safety workshops with kids, parents and teachers at schools around South Africa.

All this while getting married, buying a house, and fulfilling my role as a shareholder and development manager at Umoya. It’s been a period of giving love and attention to a range of projects and activities. I’ve learned a lot.

But, as you can probably imagine by reading the above, it’s lead to me attention-switching between four or five significant projects each day. Enough. I think I’d rather be great at one or two things, and not simply good at many. It’s time for some changes.

Earlier this month I wrote down three bullet points on a scrap of paper:

  • Reduce the diversity of my projects,
  • increase the depth at which I engaged in each of them, and
  • focus on projects that are aligned to my passion.

Finding my passion

My entire family are teachers. Literally. Grand-mother, father, mother, brother, wife, mother-in-law, and aunt. I’m surrounded by them. Ironically, I made a concerted effort not to go into teaching. I guess you can’t go against your genes.

Starting EdTechConf this year has been nothing short of life changing. I’ve been privileged to work with several schools – from private schools in Grahamstown to under-resourced schools on the Cape Flats. Across the board the cry is clear: “We seem to be losing learners to the realities of the 21st century.”

Poor schools are unable to provide teachers, classrooms and textbooks to learners while wealthy schools can’t pique the interest of digital-native-kids who expect a learning experience that is aligned with their multimedia lifestyles.

Thankfully there are solutions. And some of them involve the marriage of my expertise and passion – namely, technology and education.

I think the future of learning is the intersection of technology and education with the creative arts. I hope to dedicate the next three years to figuring out what this looks like, and how we deliver it to those who need it most.

Product

So, we’re doubling down on staffroom. We think its brilliant, and our users say that its a massive time and stress reducer. This year we’ll ship staffroom v4 – a beautiful redesign of the staffroom interface with several new and hotly requested features.

Then it’s time to move beyond school admin and assessment. We’ve been quietly working since June 2011 on something new, which I can not wait to show you. It’s called Umoya Funda and is already being rolled out at two pilot schools in Cape Town. A lot more on this soon.

Writing

I’ll be writing in greater quantity on a smaller range of topics. Given my purpose statement above, expect posts about Tech, Education and Learning. Some posts will simply be links, others will be short commentary on something topical, and others will be long form (like this tome). I’ll provide independent RSS feeds for when you want to skip the links and just get the long stuff, or vice-versa.

I’ve set a goal of 52 posts in 2012 and I fully intend to meet that. Hold me to this.

Talking

I love sharing ideas. This year we’ll run more EdTechConf events – hopefully in many more cities. We already have four local events confirmed and expect to add several more through the first quarter. We’ll also be announcing EdTechConf ThinkShops – one day workshops on particular topics for school leaders, teachers, and parents.

I’ve also embarked upon a personal project to produce a podcast. It’s going to be casual, informal, and hopefully useful to people. Think of it as a spoken version of what I’ll be writing about, along with interviews of friends and interesting people in the education and technology industry. I’ve acquired most of the neccesary studio equipment, hired a producer, and began lining up guests. I hope to begin broadcasting in mid-January.

tl;dr

So in short, I’m making the change from “Software Guy” to “Education guy that makes software”. I’ll still be advising the Uniti and FireWeb development teams at Umoya, but my primary focus for the next little while is going to be on staffroom, UmoyaFunda, EdTechConf and education in general.

Here’s to an exciting new chapter, 2012. Happy New Year.

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The trouble with Android

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Tim Keller

Ice Cream Sandwich, the 4th major version of Android, was announced at Google IO in May 2011. A month ago, on November 14th, Google completed development and released the source code.

Sony Ericsson explains why customers shouldn’t expect them to ready with an ICS update any time soon:

Many operators also want to customise the software according to their requirements, which in turn are based on their market, network, differentiation and business model. We implement all of these customisations and create a variety of software packages and releases for each operator.

This is just insane. It’ll be months before anyone sees ICS updates on their phones.

Sony Ericsson goes to great lengths to explain that they also need to replace the default Android “graphics” with their own. Why bother?

My wife got received a Galaxy Ace on her contract upgrade but was given a Nexus S by a friend. These phones are both made by Samsung. The Nexus S is an “Google-experience phone” which runs a unadulterated build of Android.  The Ace, however, is loaded to the brim with Samsung’s silly “TouchWiz” UI and bloatware applications.

The result is a sub-standard Android experience on non-Google phones. It lowers the tone of the entire platform, and reduces its attractiveness to developers.

This is the fundamental difference in approach between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.  Apple doesn’t care about carriers and what they want. Android handset makers survive at the mercy of the carriers.

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Playlist – Hudson’s Burger Kloof – Dec 9th, 2011

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Tim Keller

Hudsons make the best burgers in town. Their restaurant on Kloof Street is also well-known for playing excellent music at high volume. Here is last night’s playlist, thanks to Shazam:

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Steve Jobs brainstorming at Next

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Tim Keller

TheNextWeb features a great YouTube find this morning – Steve Jobs and his team at Next on two of their early company retreats.

It’s encouraging, especially as the co-founder of a startup, to see one of the truly great companies in tech history go through these difficult discussions and debates.

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Why Marco’s going to be alright

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Tim Keller

David Smith on Readbility and Instapaper:

Today I find myself feeling deep sympathy and a fair bit of anger over what happened to Instapaper and its founder Marco Arment. Even though the series of events that lead to today has been in motion for months, today things seem to come to a head. Marco is far to much of a gentleman to call out the people who punched him, but it needs to be said.

In the beginning, there was a guy called Marco. Living and working in NYC as Lead Developer at Tumblr, he wanted a way to save the articles he found online, and read them on the subway to work.

The result was Instapaper – initially just a website but soon an iPhone app. In September 2010 he left his full-time employment at Tumblr to focus on Instapaper. He has since put out two major releases of the app.

Sometime in between, the copycat apps started hitting the web and App Store. Today, Readability announced their’s… and there’s a story to be told:

We figured out a way to work together: I’d build a white-label version of the Instapaper app that worked with the Readability service instead of mine, with no source-code sharing, and I’d get a royalty for each copy sold.

In February of this year, the app was finished and ready to launch, but it was rejected by Apple for the in-app-purchase subscription-matching rule, which had just gone into effect. Readability decided that they didn’t want to give Apple the 30%, so the app was put on hold and soon cancelled once it was obvious that nobody was budging.

Marco seems to be staying calm about it. I’d be annoyed. Yes, competition is healthy and moves our industry forward. But its frustrating to see companies competing through imitation rather than innovation! Imitation lowers the tone of the entire category and makes it hard for truly high quality products to stick out.

So, let’s talk about Marco and why I continue to choose his app:

1.
As Merlin Mann writes: “First, care. Care intensely.” I don’t know Marco personally, but have been an avid follower of his work on Tumblr, Instapaper and Build & Analyse for some time. Whether its the quality of his coffee, speed of his MacbookPro’s fans, choice of cereal, type of toaster oven, or his iOS app – he cares.  Like, a lot.

2.
Marco isn’t one of the pretentious VC-funded crowd. He’s bootstrapped his way to success, taking no outside funding. He works for himself, by himself. This feedback loop has driven him to build the best business he can, because his livelihood is directly linked to its success. I’m sure that this is significant pressure for him to cope with… but it results in a great product for us.

3.
There’s this small, privately owned Italian restaurant down the road from us. They’re much smaller, and have to compete with plenty of large establishments in the area. But there are two reasons we choose them: First, they’re authentic. Second, we have a relationship with the owner, Tino.

If we see him in the shops he’ll stop and say hello. He’s at his restaurant every night, and goes to great effort to make patrons feel comfortable and relaxed. There’s a sense that we’re not just his customers for the sake of extracting money from us, but rather that he genuinely cares about producing a great, personal, experience.

In many ways, Marco is like Tino. Through his writing and podcasting, he has established a relationship with his users. Through his honest business behaviour he’s gained our trust. And through his meticulous app design, he’s gained our support.

This is a very big and increasingly crowded market, and there’s no reason why we can’t respectfully share it.

He’s right. There is plenty of space for Readability, Evernote, Apple and Instapaper to all play in this market. But, Instapaper isn’t Marco’s final act. Its just the beginning.

For now, I guess the questions are what’s next for Instapaper and when will competitor’s photocopiers begin?

Instapaper, the best $4.99 you’ll ever spend → App Store

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Kirstenbosch Summer Concerts 2011/2012

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Tim Keller

They’re back this year, and the line-up is looking good.

I’ve attended only a few summer concerts over my 24 years in Cape Town. Amy and I keep meaning to go, but end up forgetting. This year, we’re going to change that.

There are 21 concerts starting this Saturday 20 November with Locnville & Jax Panik and ending with Hot Water & Wreslerish on 1 April 2012. Between those dates there are some fantastic acts including: The Parlotones (11 Dec), Zebra and Giraffe (26 Dec), Johnny Clegg (15 Jan), Goldfish (11 Mar), and Freshly Ground (18 Mar).

Old Mutual Summer Concerts at Kirstenbosch → Programme

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