Blogs
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A very belated post on the International Conference on eLearning (ICeL), which I have blogged about. Some thoughts and reflections:
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We live in a world where information is being generated at such a rate, and existing knowledge being challenged so readily, that the best education we can give children is to teach them how to learn.
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ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Social Constructivism in Games Based Learning in The South African Context.
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ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: ProBoPortable: Development of Cellular Phone Software to Prompt Learners to Monitor and Reorganize Division of Labor in Project-Based Learning.
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At ICel 2008 Sue Greener of the Brighton Business School, University of Brighton (UK), presented her research titled Plasticity: The Online Learning Environment’s Potential to Support Varied Learning Styles and Approaches.
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Last week was the 5th annual Games for Change conference in New York. An interesting blog post to come out of that discusses the need to localise social issue games.
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I’ve posted a round-up of the eLearning Africa conference on Tech Leader. Helpful input to the pie
My presentation at eLearning Africa was Digital storytelling for Africa: Case study of an international digital media project.
Below are notes from the eLearning Africa session titled mobile phones offering a lifeline to learners.
There are hordes of really impressive yet undervalued resources for teachers, parents and kids to use. I keep mentioning that I want Kusasa to embrace other resources and facilitate their use.
I'm switching to Wordpress. Ukubuza is now officially laid to rest. All of the postings from here have been transferred to my new blog: innovating education.
Grand Theft Morals, or ultimate role model? is a piece written for Tech Leader, the M&G’s new offering in the Thought Leader stable.
How to stem the Matthew Effect in education is a piece I wrote about a presentation given by Dr Luis Crouch at the Integrated Education Programme (IEP) conference (in February).
One of the very cool things about Kusasa is that I get to visit schools and just hang around and observe. Often I am interested in trying to pin down scenarios where kids share ideas or assist each other to see if we can build similar scenarios into our own material.
What we do in this area:
“The Shuttleworth Foundation is involved in research into the idea that the two core skills acquired by learners at school are communications and analysis. As such, the transfer of these skills should be prioritised – especially in the African context where resources are often scarce and fundamental skills require specific focus.”
A little late, but below are my notes from the Integrated Education Program (IEP) Conference in Pretoria (6-7 February 2008).
Part of the idea for the Kusasa blog was to create a space for recording ideas and insights that are linked to the Kusasa approach. Kusasa is more that just the content we are creating, it represents a kind of head space. Last night while watching Cameroon trounce Ghana in the African Cup of Nations semi-final I started teasing out the following thoughts:
A new study from Nokia and The Future Laboratory predicts that by 2012, a quarter of all entertainment will be "circular", that is created, edited, and shared within peer groups rather than being generated by traditional media. The bulk of the study was based on interviews with trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles.
ICT4Champions is a Google group concerned with the use of web 2.0 in South African schools. Today Maggie Verster, founder of the group, lead a workshop on blogging in the classroom. It was attended by 10 educators, all from private schools, who were shown how to create and customise a class blog using Edublogs. I attended to meet Maggie and the others in the group and to pick their brains on the state of Web 2.0 in our schools. The bottom line: basic use of ICTs, let alone for connected, creative, collaborative web 2.0 activities, is limited and problematic in South African schools. According to the attendees of the workshop, reasons for this include:
