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| Assessing Mobile Technology Usage in a South African Township School | The opportunities associated with increasingly ubiquitous access to mobile technologies by the youth in Sub-Saharan Africa are widely understood, but unfortunately little to no quantitative data is available for this age group. While studies in the U.S. suggest that lower income groups make greater use of mobile technologies, little information is available about access to mobile media by the majority of youth in South Africa. A survey of low-income black South African youth at an urban township school suggests that a sweeping majority of respondents are very intense cell phone users, dwarfing usage of any other technology such as traditional computers.
The findings contradict some current assumptions about cell phone usage among low-income black South African youth, showing very high usage patterns and expenditures despite very low income levels. Detailed activity-based questions indicate that virtually all respondents (97%) were found to have used a cell phone on the previous day for at least one communication, information-seeking, gaming or multimedia activity. While only three-quarters were found to own a personal handset, there was no significant difference in usage patterns between owners and co-users. Large majorities of respondents were found to already use cell phones for activities with a potential for education, such as mobile Internet access (83% do so on a typical day) and gaming (53%). However, interpersonal communication remains the most common cell phone activity, with 91% of respondents making calls or sending SMS on a typical day. |
| Conceptual Play and Multiuser Virtual Worlds: Worked Examples from the Quest Atlantis Project | Our work over the last decade has focused on reconnecting content with context, and doing so in a way that bears legitimacy and value in schools. In particular, we have used videogame technologies and methodologies to narratize disciplinary content and, at the same time, provide the necessary scaffolding and situational affordances such that the player is likely to disciplinize the game narrative—meaning that player success is dependent on effectively applying disciplinary concepts to transform the game context It is in advancing a new form of curriculum for K-12 schools that we have been experimenting with conceptual play. In this interactive keynote, my colleague Melissa Gresalfi and I will outline the theoretical perspective around conceptual play that motivates our work, with a link to some worked examples that illustrate our research and design work. Participants are encouraged to visit the worked examples online, and then I would like to engage the audience in rich discussions around the value of positioning curriculum in this way. To gain first-hand experience with the actual work, participants might apply for a guest account to the Quest Atlantis (http://QuestAtlantis.Org) project to experience the designs directly. |
| Degrees of Openness | Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a range of opportunities to share educational materials and processes in ways we have not completely envisaged as yet. In an extraordinary, yet paradoxical development, increasing numbers of traditional and distance universities are using ICTs to make a selection of their teaching resources freely available as ‘open education resources’ (OER). The University of Cape Town recently signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration signalling its intent to make some of its traditional face-to face teaching materials and processes available as OER. In anticipation of an institution-wide development, lecturers and educational technologists at UCT are grappling with the issues that need to be addressed to meet this intent. This paper suggests that careful analysis of existing educational materials and processes is necessary to provide an indication of what can be done to make these materials and processes more openly available beyond the confines of an individual teaching and learning space. However, the deceptively simple term “open” hides a reef of complexity. This paper endeavours to unravel the degrees of openness with respect to key attributes of OER that may make the task of identifying where changes could be made to existing teaching materials or processes a little easier for the lecturer and the educational technologist alike. |
| Educators and the Cape Town Open Learning Declaration: Rhetorically reducing distance (Peer Reviewed) | Documents such as the Cape Town Open Education Declaration seek to unify and challenge
educators in the creation and use of open learning resources. We rhetorically analysed some of these key mission and value documents and contrasted these with the practical challenges considering university realities in South Africa. These challenges are not new. What is changing is that the new visions acknowledge some of these challenges and new technologies are emerging that try to address underlying difficulties. Yet the issues of negative distanciation for academics dismissing potentially useful material and their inflexible disciplinary assessment continue to make integration in curricula difficult. Students remain suspicious of novel or unfamiliar educational resources and continue to have vastly different access. Our methodology is to analyse portions of the Declaration text which seem to idealize the educational process. We contrast this analysis by pointing to the likely difficulties experienced by educators when they engage with such an ambitious initiative, especially when determining relevance of open learning materials to their context and needs. |
| Inkundla yeHlabathi / World Forum | Inkundla yeHlabathi (or World Forum) is a simulation of the process of international law, piloted in 2007 and fully implemented in 2008, to support teaching and learning for law students at the University of Cape Town. Students play the role of legal advisers to 10 African States and engage with one another in small groups and plenary sessions - negotiating and drafting treaty provisions, applying legal rules to crisis and conflict situations on the continent and beyond, with the freedom to re-shape the existing law in anticipation of new developments. The simulation is brought to life through extensive use of the Sakai learning environment as well as classroom time. The simulation is complemented by an e-casebook of learning materials, delivered online through Wikis and offline by CD-ROM.
Inkundla yeHlabathi was one of two winners of the 2008 Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award, sponsored by IBM - the only African entrant in this worldwide competition. This presentation explores some of the potentially innovative features of the course, and serves as a useful case study in the development and implementation of simulated worlds to support teaching and learning. Comments and advice would be most welcome, particularly on three imminent challenges identified in the presentation. |
| Maximising the potential of OER for sustainable higher education in Africa | This presentation introduces OER Africa (who we are, why we exist) and then goes on to talk more generally about how OER might be usefully promulgated in Africa to the benefit of its higher education landscape. It dispels some commonly held myths about OER and describes a research agenda that might usefully accompany the creation and use of OER in Africa.
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| Peer to Peer Models in Education | Michel Bauwens is a leading thinker about the implications of Peer to Peer (P2P) technologies and culture for social change. Robin Good of the MasterNewMedia website is a highly respected expert on new communication and collaboration technologies and their use. In May 2008 Robin Good interviewed Michel Bauwens and engaged in the conversation which we can now view about the implications of P2P for education. The topics in the interviews included the meaning of P2P, the opportunities for education and P2P technologies that may be appropriate in countries with constrained bandwidth. These interviews demonstrate that P2P is far more than technology and file sharing. At the most fundamental level P2P is "is a network, not a hierarchy (though it may have elements of it); it is 'distributed', though it may have elements of centralization and 'decentralisation'; intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system." (Bauwens 2008). P2P also describes the collaborative social arrangements which are necessary for large scale voluntary projects such as writing and editing Wikipedia articles. |
| Promoting Technology Use and Classroom Connections | One challenge when trying to take advantage of technology to teach underprivileged students is that the students don’t much like technology. They get excited at first exposure, but that enchantment rapidly fades. This is because the technologies are used primarily for boring, externally‐motivated drill. Bad experiences and bad attitudes can continue to dog students throughout their education. We have been using principles drawn from playground games‐‐‐those universally‐played, cross‐cultural, familiar activities‐‐‐to redesign technologies. Playground games are intrinsically social and embodied, but like school curricula, they have rules. Despite the importance of distance education, face‐to‐face is still the basic setting of instruction, and especially important for students who are not fully integrated into the educational enterprise in general or not fully committed to a particular course of study. I describe three learning activities or aids that are highly relevant at the university level or in an African context. The “Match‐ My‐Graph” activity supports learning about graphical representation of algebraic concepts. The “TextAggregator©” encourages writing as it allows students to anonymously contribute text entries during a lecture. “PlaceMark©” is linked to GPS devices and allows students to create and share narratives about places. |
| RAT Online The Belt: En Route to Effective Online Self-Defence Courses (Peer Reviewed) | Rough and Tumble (RAT) is a South African martial art. Usually, RAT
practitioners learn in a face-to-face setting, but can now also learn in computer supported learning environments. This paper is about one of the collaborative online courses of the RAT Online project, where learners were tasked with using a standard clothing item, the belt, as a self-defence implement. The researcher uses a design experiment as a research methodology and mixed data collection protocols to corroborate previous findings. The aim is to successively improve these courses and show that some types of martial arts learning can take place online. |
| The OER Commons Initiative: Transforming Teaching and Learning | The open content movement, which involves the aggregation, sharing, and collaborative enrichment of free educational materials over the Internet, is re-energizing efforts to transform teaching and learning and make educational resources more dynamic through a cross-pollination of ideas and expertise. The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education's (ISKME) online network, OER Commons, aggregates open educational resources (OER) within a social networking environment for the purpose of stimulating the engagement of diverse populations in accessing and using OER worldwide. ISKME's OER initiative includes not only the OER Commons network, but also research, case studies, and evaluation of collaborative learning environments, author use and reuse, and content creation projects such as open textbooks.
Overall, our work suggests that open education is fundamentally about strengthening teaching, learning, and scholarship through collaboration and the development of the technologies necessary to make that happen. Additionally, it is our hope that efforts to provide a better understanding of how this nascent movement is addressing the technical and cultural challenges that impact its widespread adoption will allow us to both develop resources and tools that provide ways to continuously improve practice within the OER community as well as be able to share learnings within and across projects worldwide. |
| Workshop: Quest Atlantis Hands On | This hands-on session will allow participants to explore the worlds of Quest Atlantis. You will have the opportunity to explore the world spaces and communicate with other teachers about the globe. You will discover first hand how students in QA engage in quests, missions and units of work and think about where Quest Atlantis fits in the local school curriculum. This session is equivalent to the first of 4 online professional development sessions and participants may choose to take up the remaining online sessions in order to bring their own classes into Quest Atlantis.
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