According to the latest edition of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (2008) by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), there is some good and some bad news. The good news is that the number of children starting primary school has increased sharply since 2000, there are more girls in school than ever before and spending on education and aid has risen. On the down side, however, poor quality, the high cost of schooling and persisting high levels of adult illiteracy are undermining the chances of achieving education for all by 2015. Some of the main findings of the report are:
A new partnership between UNESCO and an Italian foundation has made $1.7m available for the funding of an HIV/AIDS prevention education project in Angola, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland for two years. The new initiative will provide prevention education programmes and materials to some 100 000 students in each of the target countries. Almost 100 schools and 1 000 teachers will be involved in the initiative, which will also include activities related to reducing stigmatisation of HIV-positive people.
The United Nations has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, adding fresh impetus to South African star-gazer’s efforts to encourage more young people to study mathematics and science. According to Kevin Govender who chairs the local steering committee to drive South Africa’s participation in events marking the International Year of Astronomy, ‘this is a huge opportunity to spark the curiosity of young people and get them interested in astronomy. We can use the stars to start a conversation about science and technology, and inspire people towards learning’. The International Year of Astronomy is intended to celebrate the first astronomical use of the telescope by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei – a development that lent support to the then revolutionary idea proposed by Copernicus that the earth orbited the sun.
South Africa’s Aaron Mokoena, captain of Bafana-Bafana, and other international football stars playing in the African Cup of Nations 2008 have come together to help UNICEF raise money for children across Africa to receive a quality education.
According to the 2007 School Realities published by the Dept of Education (DoE), there were 12.41m learners in 26 099 ordinary schools (12.04m learners in 24 974 ordinary public schools and 0.37m learners in 1 125 ordinary independent schools) in 2007 who were served by 395 452 educators. By comparison, there were 12.29m learners in 26 269 ordinary schools served by 385 860 educators in 2006.
On a provincial basis, KwaZulu-Natal, the most populated province in the country, was in the lead with 2.85m learners, 88 023 educators and 6 060 schools in 2007. KwaZulu-Natal was followed by the Eastern Cape with 2.14m learners, 66 246 educators and 5 852 schools, Gauteng with 1.88m learners, 63 212 educators and 2 397 schools, and Limpopo with 1.78m learners, 54 797 educators and 4 080 schools. The Northern Cape, the least populated province in the country, had only 0.26m learners, 8 522 educators and 613 schools in 2007.
On a gender basis, there were slightly more male than female learners in ordinary schools in 2007 (6.22m versus 6.19m). In Grade R the gender distribution was 245 116 boys vs 242 409 girls; in primary education (Grades 1 to 7) it was 3.74m boys vs 3.57m girls; and in secondary education (Grades 8 to 12) it was 2.20m boys vs 2.35m girls.
In 2007, 9.4% of all learners at ordinary schools were enrolled in Grade 1, compared with 5% enrolled in Grade 12. This means that for every Grade 12 learner there were 1.9 Grade 1 learners.
Nationally, the learner-to-educator ratio (LER) for ordinary public schools in 2007 was 32.3. On a provincial basis, the LER ranged between 29.1 in the Free State and 33.2 in Mpumalanga.
The gross enrolment ratio (GER) for primary schools nationally, using 7 year-olds as the appropriate school-age population for Grade 1, was 103% in 2007. The highest GERs for primary schools were in the Eastern Cape (120%), Mpumalanga (109%) and KwaZulu-Natal (105%), while the Free State had the lowest GER (91%). Nationally, the GER for secondary schools was 91%. In two provinces, Limpopo (104%) and Mpumalanga (103%), the GERs for secondary schools exceeded 100%.
The gender parity index (GPI) for primary schools in 2007 was 0.97, while for secondary schools it was 1.08. GPI values exceeding 100 indicate that, in proportion to the appropriate school-age population, there are more females than males in the school system.
Both the number of matric candidates and the number of candidates obtaining senior certificates have increased significantly over the last five years. In 2007, 564 775 Grade 12 learners wrote the matric exam, up from 528 525 in 2006 and 440 267 in 2003. The number of learners passing Grade 12 in 2007 was 368 217, up from 351 503 in 2006 and 322 492 in 2003. According to Nick Taylor of the JET Education Services, ‘this is a solid achievement on the part of government, ensuring that more children enter the labour market each year with the minimum qualification required for white collar jobs in both the public and private sectors’. However, since 2003 the matric pass rate has been declining annually, from 73.2% in 2003 to 66.5% in 2006 and to 65.2% in 2007. In addition, the endorsement rate has also declined from 18.2% in 2004 to 15.1% in 2007.
On a provincial basis, the Western Cape and Gauteng continued to be the two top performing provinces in 2007 with matric pass rates of 80.6% and 74.6%, respectively and endorsement rates of 24.6% and 20.4%, respectively. However, the 2007 pass rates of the two top provinces (as well as all other provinces except Limpopo and North West) were significantly lower than the 2006 rates of 83.7% and 78.3%, respectively. The Eastern Cape and Limpopo continued to be the two lagard provinces in 2007 with pass rates of 56.9% and 57.9%, respectively and endorsement rates of 9.3% and 11.7%, respectively.
A positive sign is the number of Grade 12 learners passing higher grade (HG) maths which has increased slightly from 25 217 in 2006 to 25 415 in 2007, while the number of matrics passing standard grade (SG) maths has increased significantly from 110 452 in 2006 to 123 813 in 2007. In the case of HG science passes, however, the numbers declined from 29 781 in 2006 to 28 122 in 2007, while there was a significant increase in the number of SG science passes from 81 151 in 2006 to 87 485 in 2007. Thus, 2007 saw large increases in the number of SG passes in both maths and science. According to Nick Taylor, ‘it is possible that many of these candidates are capable of passing at the HG, and it would seem that the DOE’s efforts in trying to persuade schools to shift more candidates from SG to HG are not yet bearing as much fruit as had been hoped’.
The ANC plans to make 60% of South African schools ‘fee-free’ by next year and ultimately to ensure that education is free for the poor up to undergraduate level, according to draft resolutions adopted at its elective conference in Dec 2007. According to the DoE, 40% of schools, attended by almost 5m learners have already been declared no-fee schools from Jan 2007 at a cost to the state of more than R3b.
A Finweek report has highlighted SA’s education crisis and concomitant skills shortage. In a nutshell, the education system is failing to face up to the challenges of global competition in the 21st century. In the report, Stellenbosch economist Servaas van den Berg suggests that even if we could get the education system functioning optimally now, it would take an entire generation (30-40 years) ‘before we see the results of a well-educated society working its way through the labour market and economy.’
The extent of the education crisis is reflected inter alia in the fact that during the past two years 535 000 learners left school without earning any certificate. These school leavers will in all likelihood join the ranks of the unemployed. In addition, less than half of the 675 132 learners who started school in 1999 actually made it to matric.
According to the report the prognosis for the matric classes of 2010 and 2011 is not much better - when the class of 2010 (now in Grade 10) was in Grade 3 in 2001, the national survey of performance showed that 30% did not achieve the required standard in numeracy, and 54% did not achieve the required standard in literacy. For the class of 2011, the 2005 Grade 6 evaluation showed that only 28% performed at the required standard in numeracy. For literacy the rate was 38%. Adding to the crisis is the fact that SA is losing skilled professionals to other countries who use South Africa as a hunting ground for recruitment. A study recently found that the loss of one skilled professional in SA costs up to 10 unskilled jobs.
According to Pretoria clinical psychologist, Marita Rademeyer, between 20% and 40% of South African children were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The latest available police statistics on child victims of crime, for the period 2005 to 2006, showed that 1 075 children were murder victims. Of the attempted murders reported, 1 378 were children. In this period nearly 24 000 children were raped. Because trauma changes a child's brain functions, it has far-reaching consequences, for instance, children struggling to concentrate at school, sleeping badly or being aggressive and fearful. Child educational psychologist Professor Kobus Maree says most South African children are genuinely traumatised. ‘They're exposed to events that are way beyond their control. That's the worst. It doesn't surprise me that children develop physical or mental illnesses.’ He argues, therefore, that school subjects such as life skills could be a lot more useful in helping children to cope with trauma, and that schools could use a lot more of this time to discuss trauma.
Research in the USA shows that about 50% of high school seniors in 2000 had planned to continue their education after college and acquire an advanced degree, compared with only 20% of seniors in 1976. In reality, however, the actual percentage of high school seniors who obtained advanced degrees remained the same. This suggests that many of today’s young people have unrealistic expectations about the future.
Some of the education-related forecasts recently identified by The Futurist include the following:
In response to research conducted by the University of Pretoria which showed that 80% of SA’s grade 4 and 5 pupils were not reading at the required grade level, Education Minister Naledi Pandor recently launched the Foundations for Learning Campaign which aims to improve public primary school pupils’ average performance in reading and numeracy to a 50% proficiency by 2011. Increasing pupils’ reading and numeracy proficiency in primary schools to 50%, would mean an average improvement of between 15% and 20% over the four years of the campaign.
Grade R to grade 3 learners and teachers can now benefit from a highly successful international initiative that partners primary schools and universities to promote the improved teaching and learning of English. On a local level it has been tailored to include all 11 official languages through the use of free interactive software and a range of educational resources. Called the Absa Thrass Talk Together Project and pioneered by the British educational psychologist and entrepreneur, Alan Davies, it incorporates a phonics component that focuses on the teaching of handwriting, spelling and word-solving skills. A significant part of the project is a groundbreaking interactive computer programme called Phoneme Machine, which uses moving human lips and the international phonetic alphabet to teach children and learners of all ages and abilities to read and spell in an entertaining and fun way. Linking local universities to designated schools means the latter receive Thrass-trained student teachers, who help with the daily teaching of Thrass and other home languages. These teachers spend about two hours a week teaching and assessing the 10 Thrass skills and helping with the learning of home languages. Schools that are part of the initiative include Roseneath Primary in Johannesburg, linked to the University of the Witwatersrand; Sunlands Primary, associated with Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town; George Randell Primary in East London supported by Fort Hare University; and Eendracht Primary in Pretoria, associated with the University of Pretoria.
According to the Report of the public hearing on school-based violence by the South African Human Rights Commission, school-based violence in SA is multi-dimensional and takes on various forms. ‘How it manifests itself often depends on the context in which it arises, such as whether the violence is perpetrated by learners against fellow learners, by educators against learners, by learners against educators or by external persons against both learners and educators.’ The most prevalent forms of school-based violence identified during the public hearing were bullying, gender-based violence, accidental violence, discrimination and violence, sexual assault or harassment, physical violence and psychological violence. Although the nature of these types of school conflicts is not new, learners now seem more willing and able to employ physically aggressive methods to resolve them. Knives, weapons and handguns appear to be more readily used than before.
The report states that the impact of school-based violence goes beyond the physical harm inflicted by violent incidents. Its effects are also expressed in a range of defective learner behaviours such as high absentee rates, poor learning performance and achievement, high truancy rates, high dropout rates and, as some studies indicate, an increase in suicide rates among learners who are not able to deal with violence and who feel unprotected. ‘The reality that the Hearing depicted was one of a national school system in which many learners are under constant threat of violence at school, even from educators and principals.’ Various factors contributing to school-based violence in SA were identified during the public hearing. These included discipline models in schools and unclear management roles; unattractive school environments; educators’ misconceptions regarding the human rights of learners; the impact of community poverty; the presence of gangsterism and drug and alcohol abuse in the community; conditions in the home environment; and the social de-sensitisation of youth to a culture of violence.
The report concludes that young people cannot effectively enjoy the right to education in conditions that jeopardise their freedom and security of person. To protect the fundamental rights of learners, the Department of Education must be proactive in making schools safer places. The following recommendations are made:
According to research by Allyson Lawless on the engineering profession in SA, the number of school- leavers enrolling for engineering courses has seen a dramatic increase in recent years. For example, the University of Cape Town received almost 5 000 applications for only 700 places in the 2008 academic year, compared with 597 in the previous year. According to the Institute of Municipal Engineers of Southern Africa, this increase can largely be attributed to the buoyant state of the construction industry, economic growth and infrastructure development. Although student interest in the engineering profession has certainly surged, Lawless counsels this to be a necessary, but insufficient, ingredient for dealing with the current shortage of engineers, and stresses that career guidance remains crucial. She argues ‘that it is imperative that career guidance becomes a formal part of the secondary schooling system, to help ensure that the students admitted into engineering in universities are passionate about the profession and understand its rigours’. This, she believes, will help reduce the dropout rate, which is still high.
Other challenges also remain and the problem appears to be shifting from the demand side to the supply side. This is reflected at every level, from insufficient maths and science teachers at the schools, through to too few, inexperienced or underqualified lecturing staff at universities and colleges, and a serious lack of capacity to provide mentorship and on-the-job experience in the formal work environment. According to Lawless, there are simply not enough lecturers in the system for SA to meet its goal (as outlined in the JIPSA) of graduating 1 000 more engineers a year than currently. Lawless believes there is a need for a strategic, long-term approach, which seeks to leverage off the ‘golden opportunities’ arising from a convergence in interest in engineering and the opportunity to participate in vibrant projects.
According to Education Minister Naledi Pandor, R48m has been allocated to four universities, i.e. the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of Pretoria to increase the number of engineering graduates.
The National Treasury has identified skills shortages as one of the significant barriers limiting faster export growth, which in turn has fuelled the trade deficit – one of the ‘points of vulnerability’ in the South African economy, and has allocated the largest portion of the 2008/2009 Budget, i.e. R121.1b to education. In 2007/2008, education spending in total exceeded R105b, ‘rightly signifying that investing in the capabilities on which dignity, self reliance and social progress are built, is at the centre of our development strategy’, said Finance Minister Trevor Manuel. The 2008/2009 Budget, which prioritised school building, early childhood education, school books and educator remuneration, made a provision of R1.4b for higher education, research and knowledge development. In his 2008 Budget speech, Minister Manuel said that ‘over the next three years, provinces have budgeted to spend over R18-billion on school infrastructure and equipment’.
South African learners will be taught a new Bill of Responsibilities as part of their life orientation lessons, a subject that is compulsory at matric level, and has to be passed for the candidate to matriculate. Unveiling the bill in February, Education Minister Pandor said there was a need to instil a culture of respect and responsibilities among the youth. The bill, which was endorsed by President Mbeki, lists 12 responsibilities that flow from the rights afforded to South Africans by the Constitution. The responsibilities that young people acknowledge in the bill are to ensure the right to equality, human dignity, life, family or parental care, education, work, freedom and security of the person, own property, freedom of religion, belief and opinion, live in a safe environment, citizenship, and freedom of expression. Although the bill is being distributed to schools in poster format (and in all the official languages), the minister said members of the public still had time to comment about the bill until March. Earlier in February, the minister unveiled the draft National Schools Pledge which aims to instil a sense of morality into young South Africans and which government intends having all school children recite during morning assembly or in the classrooms. The pledge which is still open for public opinion and has caused outrage from various sectors of the community, reads as follows:
‘We the youth of South Africa, recognising the injustices of our past, honour those who suffered and sacrificed for justice and freedom. We will respect and protect the dignity of each person, and stand up for justice. We sincerely declare that we shall uphold the rights and values of our constitution and promise to act in accordance with the duties and responsibilities that flow from these rights. ! KE E: / XARRA / / KE Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.’
According to the National Student Financial AID Scheme (NSFAS) chief executive Pragasen Naicker, about R50m from a budget of R1.6b allocated for loans to poor students remained unspent last year. Universities now have to return the money, which could have provided about 1 500 students with the maximum subsidy of R35 000, to the NSFAS. In 2006, about R11m from a budget of R1.2b was returned to NSFAS. Naicker said the key reason for the failure to use the money was universities’ lack of capacity to process the loan funds. The University of Johannesburg, which experienced violent student protests against fee increases last year, recorded the highest unspent funds (just more than R9m), followed closely by the Vaal University of Technology (also about R9m). Of the 23 government-funded universities, only five managed to use their NSFAS allocations in full.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has dispatched 58 so-called ‘schools-in-a-box’ to flood-hit areas of Zambia to assist pupils whose families have had to flee their homes because of rising flood waters or whose school buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Each school-in-a-box contains enough supplies for 100 children. Pawan Kucita, chief of UNICEF Zambia’s education section, said ‘the kits are designed to provide support for teachers and children and to ensure a sense of normalcy remains despite the difficult circumstances that tragedies such as floods can bring’. The kits, designed for grade one to nine learners, contain exercise books, student slates, an inflatable globe, a student register, crayons, pencils, pencil sharpeners, ballpoint pens, felt-tip pens, erasers, chalkboards, chalk and chalk dusters, scissors, tape, a clock, flipchart markers, a compass, coloured wooden cubes, educational posters, book bags, rulers and a metal box for transport and storage. About 400 000 people are estimated to have been affected by this season’s floods in Zambia, while up to 36 000 people have been displaced and almost 3 500 homes and 44 schools have collapsed because of prolonged heavy rainfall.
More than one-sixth of Mozambique’s 9 000 teachers are dying of AIDS-related diseases annually, lowering the quality of education and jeopardising future development. Mozambique’s Education and Culture Minister Aires Aly recently stated that ‘we are losing 17% of our 9 000 teachers each year, which means we are talking of 1 360 workers lost to HIV/AIDS, and the disease is spreading very fast at national level’. According to health officials, more than 16% of the 20m Mozambicans aged 14-49 are HIV positive, while an estimated 500 new infections occur on a daily basis.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) recently unveiled a new global fundraising and awareness campaign to benefit the 59m children around the world who go to school hungry. The new initiative called ‘Fill the Cup’ literally aims to fill a cup with food for hungry schoolchildren, thereby increasing their chances for health, education and a better future. According to the WFP, it will take about $3b annually to feed all 59m children worldwide who go to school hungry, while $1.2b can provide meals for 23m children in 45 of the neediest African countries. A mere $0.25 can give one child one cup of porridge, rice or beans and provide girls with a monthly ration to take home.
On 8 March International Women’s Day was celebrated and according to UNESCO it provided a timely occasion to take stock of progress in reducing barriers to girls’ and women’s education. ‘The international community pledged to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005 and achieve gender equality in education by 2015. The first target has not been met – but many countries are making significant inroads.’ UNESCO says gender disparities tend to increase at higher levels of education. Approximately 63% of countries with available data have achieved gender parity at the primary level of education, compared with 37% at secondary and less than 3% at the tertiary level. In many parts of the world, school environments remain physically unsafe for both boys and girls; teacher attitudes and practices, curricula and textbooks continue to be gender-biased; and fields of studies and occupational choices remain clustered by gender.
According to UNESCO, ‘reducing the gender gap in education does not automatically translate into equality between men and women. There are many overt signs of enduring gender inequalities, such as salary gaps, minimal access to certain fields of study and jobs, and a lack of political representation. Clearly gender parity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for gender equality. Promoting gender equality in education requires altering gender socialization processes and certain learning conditions in school.’ As highlighted in the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008, effective policies and progammes should ensure safe and non- discriminatory school environments; the presence of enough female teachers to act as role models, as well as unbiased teacher training and classroom dynamics; unbiased learning content; and less gendered choice of subjects in tertiary education.
UNESCO estimates that 18m new teachers are needed globally between now and 2015 to accommodate all children at school in classes of no more than 40 children per teacher. Sub-Saharan African will need 2.4m new teachers. This calls for massive new investments, but it is clear that such growth in spending is unlikely to be achieved according to reseach by ActionAid entitled Confronting the contradictions: The IMF wage bill caps and the case for teachers. Despite compelling evidence that education is a sound long-term investment for a country, the IMF regards spending on education as simply ‘consumption’ and not as ‘productive investment’ and therefore education spending, especially on wages, is always curtailed. The researchers argue that in setting these wage bill caps, rising school enrolment rates should be taken into consideration.
In her budget speech, Education Minister Naledi Pandor said the continued failures of some teachers and education officials could no longer be blamed on apartheid or insufficient resources and that levels of under-performance in the education system were too high and an unjust subversion of the promise of freedom and democracy, to our people. After referring to ‘reported failures in our execution of the no-fee schools policy the minister also said ‘the time have arrived for SA to offer all children free primary education’. Free primary education is also one of the issues to be discussed at the ANC policy conference at Gallagher Estate this month.
Minister of science and technology, Mosibudi Mangena, announced in his budget speech that some R323m would be spent on development programmes to encourage careers in the ‘critical’ human resources shortages in science, engineering and technology (SET). His department also allocated R178m to provide modern research facilities and infrastructure for the research community. The minister said his department and the National Advisory Councils on Innovation have compiled a comprehensive report on the infrastructure requirements of both science and innovation, which is toform the basis of a long-term infrastructure plan for science and technology.
A novel programme aimed at installing a reading habit among low-income communities was recently launched in Argentina. The ‘Books and Houses’ campaign plans to distribute a total of 80 000 bookshelves, each complete with 18 volumes of books, to individual households in 800 districts and towns around the country. The books were carefully selected by a team of experts in education and literature, and although the central goal of the new programme is to make books available to children in order to help them acquire a reading habit, the volumes that were chosen are for the entire family. The programme began by delivering bookshelves to 70 homes in Anatuya, where 27% of the local residents have either no formal schooling or did not complete primary education. The next area to be targeted is the Buenos Aires suburb San Isidro, where affluent neighbourhoods coexist alongside six slums that are being upgraded with new low-cost housing.
Volunteers at the English Wikipedia and SOS Children have launched the 15 volume Wikipedia Selection for Schools consisting of articles that have been cleaned up and checked for suitability for children, avoiding adult content as well as extra material specifically selected to be of interest to children who follow the UK National Curriculum and similar curricula elsewhere in the world.
Wikimedia Foundation chairperson said the foundation aims to encourage the development and distribution of reference content to the public free of charge. It is intended to extend and update the selection periodically.
A new report, Corrupt shools, corrupt universities: What can be done? by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), traces illegal registration fees, academic fraud, embezzlement and other problems which are undermining education systems in more than 60 countries, with information derived from government ministries, development agencies and research institutes. The report notesthat bribes and payoffs in the recruitment and promotion of teachers lowers their quality, and illegal fees paid for school entrance and other hidden costs result in low enrolment and high dropout rates. In universities most corruption is in the form of fake universities offering bogus degrees and engaging in accreditation fraud. The number of phony universities offering sham degrees quadrupled from 200 to 800 on the Internet between 2000 and 2004.
The study argues that leadership and political will at the highest levels of government is crucial to combat this. Transparent regulatory systems and stronger management efforts to bring about greater accountability are among the improvements necessary for corruption in education systems to abate. The report recommended that management, accounting, monitoring and audit skills are crucial for such groups as administrative staff of schools, parent-teacher associations, unions and other individuals associated with the educational process.
The past month has seen numerous attacks on pupils by fellow pupils while three pupils died in violent attacks by classmates.
According to research by the UK Institute of Education, ‘business as usual’ will not meet the education challenges of the HIV epidemic in South Africa and Mozambique, but open, distance and flexible learning (ODFL) can reduce the effects of HIV on young people. ODFL has the potential to increase access to education; improve quality of schooling (and thereby child survival and family health); raise public awareness and advocacy for health initiatives; and spread health information and encourage health behaviour. The study found that HIV/AIDS-afffected young people need more opportunity to develop literacy skills and undertake vocational training. They are most easily reached by radio and particularly like to learn through music, drama and stories. The study recommends using ODFL to:
The DoE has backed out of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMMS), an international maths and science exam conducted every four years to measure pupils’ performance in maths and science globally, because it did not want to subject pupils to too many tests. South African pupils came last in the two most recent TIMMS conducted in 1999 and 2003. Vishnu Naidoo, chairman of the SA Mathematics Foundation described the country’s pullout as sad. ‘Even though we may perform poorly, these are indicators that serve to inform us about our curriculum and what adjustments we should be making’.
SA technology and training company IT School Innovation has launched an educational tool MOBI which turns mobile phones into edutainment devices by allowing users to chat and listen to the latest music hits while learning the high school maths syllabus. The service is available in English and Afrikaans and other subjects such as physics and chemistry are in the pipeline. MOBI runs on most Java enabled handsets and can be downloaded and installed for free. Once installed the application is able to connect to an online server via a mobile wireless protocol such as 3G or GPRS and provide access to MOBI Maths, MOBI Chat and MOBI Radio. Full use of MOBI Maths is charged at a nominal monthly fee, while some sections such as Basic Skills are free.
The department of science and technology (DST) recently launched a database that quantifies and monitors the levels of unemployment among science, engineering and technology graduates. The database will be managed by the South African Graduate Development Association, an NGO that empowers unemployed graduates. It will be used by job seekers, employers, candidates for postgraduate studies, institutions of higher learning and other stakeholders to improve the rate of human capital development, especially in science, engineering and technology. According to science and technology minister Mosibudi Mangena, SA has a considerable skills mismatch retarding the country’s economic growth and competitiveness. ‘I have no doubt that what we are engaged in today is a step in the right direction to closing the gap between the skills shortage and the skills mismatch’. The minister also announced that the lion’s share of the DST’s medium-term budget (some R323m) would be spent on human capital development programmes to encourage careers in science, engineering and technology.
The 2nd international e-Learning Africa conference that seeks to help mainstream technology in education to serve the population was held in Nairobi in May. Topics ranged from the use of cellphones as education tools to the training of civil servants through distance education and the role of e-learning in HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. Experts said computer-based learning has created opportunities for many who would otherwise have been overlooked. The Electronic Schools Project aimed at creating digital centres in schools throughout Africa is set to grow, following the successful outcome of a pilot study which implemented the project in 120 schools in 16 African countries. The pilot study recorded a 35% improvement in students’ examination performance in places where electronic schools (e-schools) are operational. The primary goal of the e-schools project in Africa, led by NEPAD and supported by Smart Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Nokia and Microsoft, is to have 600 000 schools on the continent imparting ICT skills to their students within 10 years of implementation. Smart Technologies have already donated 50 ‘smartboards’ – electronic blackboards that enable teachers to communicate information to hundreds of students at a time – to help the project in Kenya, Rwanda and SA. According to Smart Technologies, the success of the project depends on the speed at which teachers can be trained to adopt and use the new technology. The project also faces challenges such as lack of infrastructure, especially in rural areas, lack of physical security and difficulties involved in managing a consortium of private sector partners.
A study by the University College of London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an international group of academics which assessed the links between poverty, stunted growth – often caused by ill health and malnutrition – and low achievement at school, has found that more than 200m children under five years in developing countries are not achieving their full potential.
They do badly at school and have low productivity in adulthood, and as a result they pass on poverty and deprivation to future generations. The researchers found that:
The study found a strong link between school success and economic prosperity: each year of schooling increases adult wages by almost 10%.
A Centre for Development and Enterprise survey, The South African skills crisis: A report from the corporate coal face, revealed that SA’s businesses had few positive things to say about the schooling system in SA. For instance:
According to the survey findings the skills shortage was worsening as a result of the brain drain, the aging of skilled staff or their promotion to more senior positions, and government’s emphasis on employment equity.
The report recommends that an improved apprenticeship be instated, immigration be opened up as a short-term solution and that government should moderate its pressure for employment equity.
According to new estimates by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the number of primary-school-age children not attending school declined by 2m worldwide between 2005 and 2006. The latest education statistics show that 75m children were out of school in 2006, down from 103m in 1999. Girls account for more than 50% of the out-of-school population. The 72m figure reported for 2005 and published in the latest Education for All Global Monitoring Report has been revised upwards to 77m, based on new population estimates released by the United Nations Population Division in 2007. From a regional perspective, South and West Asia reported the greatest progress. This was mainly as a result of changes in India, where the number of children out of school declined by more than 12m as participation in primary education significantly improved for girls (accounting for more than 75% of the decrease). Sub-Saharan Africa also made important strides, with a reduction of 10m – largely the result of progress reported by the governments of Ethiopia and Tanzania.
A new UIS study entitled A view inside primary schools which presents the results of a unique survey conducted in 11 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Uruguay), highlights the strong effect of social inequality on primary education systems in many countries and the challenge to provide all children with equal learning opportunities. Fourth grade teachers and principals from more than 7 600 schools responded to detailed questionnaires on how schools function, how teachers teach, learning conditions and the support available to teachers and principals. The report reveals major gaps in resources between urban and rural schools. ‘It is disturbing to think that students get more or less resources based on where they live. But that is just part of the story,’ says Yanhong Zhang, one of the authors of the report. ‘The study shows that pupils in villages were more likely to come from disadvantaged homes. So the inequalities in school resources are linked to their socio-economic status. In effect, these children are subject to a double-jeopardy – with fewer resources at home and in school’.
Approximately a third of the 75m children out of school in the world are disabled and only 10% of disabled children in Africa attend school. Recent research conducted by the World Vision UK shows that getting disabled children into education is critical for achieving the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015. Access to good quality basic education is a fundamental human right and so is inclusive education for disabled children. Furthermore, since there is a strong link between disability and poverty, it is important to educate disabled children in order to reduce poverty. Overall, the study found that the main gaps in education for disabled children at national levels include:
According to one of Africa’s distinguished education leaders, Prof Akilagpa Sawyerr, secretary-general of the Association of African Universities and former vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, research capacity of African universities is being hindered by the emergence of serious bottlenecks. He suggests that the most significant human element is the lack of sufficient highly qualified academics. According to him a ‘pandemic of enrolment explosion’ had taken place in recent years without commensurate growth in faculty numbers. ‘From all accounts faculty have aged and moved on to retirement; they are not being replaced at the rate required to maintain the appropriate levels of mentorship of junior faculty and leadership of graduate programmes’.
Zimbabwe’s economic crisis has taken its toll on state universities that have also been devastated by a mass exodus of academics, resulting in plummeting standards. According to Prof John Makumbe, a political science lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, the flight of lecturers had hit crisis levels. Major push factors were low pay for academics in a collapsing economy with 165 000% inflation – the world’s highest – poor working conditions, lack of transport and computers, and problems finding accommodation.
The importance of investment in early childhood development in sub-Saharan Africa was underscored as crucial to overall development and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals at the launch of Africa’s future, Africa’s challenge: Early childhood care and development in sub-Saharan Africa by the World Bank. According to Marito Garcia, World Bank human development lead economist, ‘children are the future and investing in their future during the early years becomes an investment in the future of the continent’. Statistics show that sub-Saharan Africa’s gross pre-primary enrolment ratio of 12% (compared with 48% for all other developing regions) contributes to a low primary schooling completion rate and poor performance in primary grades. Early learning experiences help children through the transition phase when entering primary school and increase the likelihood that they begin and complete primary education. ‘Today the challenge is to provide a good start for the 130m children under the age of six in sub-Saharan African countries. Urbanisation, for example, tends to change the role of extended family members as caregivers. The growing number of working mothers with young children has increased the demand for nonparental childcare. This demand is further exacerbated by the newest challenge, which is the rising number of orphans, who now total over 12m, mostly as a result of HIV/AIDS’, noted Garcia.
According to a recent survey by the Films and Publications Board’s ministerial task team on child pornography under the leadership of the deputy minister of home affairs, Malusi Gigaba, conducted among high school learners at randomly chosen schools in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, 81% of surveyed children aged 13 to 17 have seen pornographic images on their friend’s cell phones. Sixty-seven percent have been exposed to pornography through movies and, by the time they are aged 18 years, 64% have seen images of pornography on the Internet. The survey also revealed that 45% of the respondents admitted to watching pornographic films regularly. ‘More boys (84%) than girls (54%) have watched at least one pornographic film’, the report said. The aim of the study was to provide an informed basis for the establishment and implementation of public policy initiatives and other measures to minimise children’s exposure to such materials.
According to the recently published National Schools Violence Study by the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention, learners at both primary and secondary schools in South Africa are significantly at risk of falling victim to some form of violence while at school. The study focussed on four primary forms of violence, viz, threats of violence; physical assault; sexual violence; and robbery. Theft at school was included as a marker variable. The main findings of the study are the following:
The department of education is to distribute 120 000 copies of a children’s book which tells stories with positive values messages to primary schools around South Africa. The read-aloud booklet, which is available n all official languages, and which is aimed at three to nine-year-olds, consists of 10 picture stories, each revolving around one specific value. The stories are interspersed with pages for adults that include discussion questions and information on how to discuss the particular value explored in the story with young children. Speaking at the launch, Minister Pandor said the book was launched in recognition of the need for values education.
The South African Schools Football World Cup was recently launched in an effort to stimulate excitement around the 2010 FIFA World Cup for the 12m learners in South Africa. The Schools Football World Cup is a partnership between government departments, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and the Local Organising Committee (LOC). The launch also saw the opening of a two-phase competition. Schools are to assume the identities of the participating countries and will be encouraged to fly that country’s national flag, sing its national anthem and engage in activities such as preparing the national food of the country they represent. Minister Pandor who kicked off the games, said the initiative was also aimed at luring school children away from the streets and inappropriate habits, and encouraging them to engage in healthy lifestyles. District competitions for the South African Schools Football World Cup will take place from 16 May to 16 August 2008, followed by provincial competitions from 30 August to 14 September 2008 and finals from 20 to 23 March 2009. The department of education has proposed a five-week long school break during the 2010 Soccer World Cup to avoid pupil and teacher absenteeism and a chaotic transport system. The proposed school calendar deviates from the usual three to four week mid-year break and will run from 10 June to 12 July 2010.
According to education minister, Naledi Pandor, South African schools are to be visited by inspectors this year for the first time in 24 years. The department of education has previously partly blamed South Africa’s poor rating in international comparative standard tests in which South African children often came last on the lack of a school inspection system. A small cohort of school ‘evaluators’ would begin work this year, and the education ministry would draft legislation to create an agency or institute to develop expertise in education evaluation and development, Pandor said when she recently presented her budget vote to parliament.
The South African government is considering re-creating teacher training colleges that were either shut down or incorporated into universities a decade ago. Now a teacher college campaign is being driven by the ANC president, Jacob Zuma, backed by some political parties and teacher unions, but not necessarily by universities, in the face of drastic teacher shortages in schools as teachers emigrate, die of AIDS-related diseases or leave the teaching profession. Recently, education minister Pandor told parliament that her department was investigating options to re-establish some colleges in view of the teacher shortage. However, she has stressed that not all colleges will reopen since South Africa needs to train more teachers at university-level to improve quality. Pandor’s announcement was welcomed by teacher unions.
However, John Lewis, media office of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), said government also needed to put more effort into making teacher training arrangements in universities work better. ‘We don’t see this as colleges versus universities. We think that a lot of the intellectual drive behind teacher training will continue to come from universities. But colleges have a role to play in teacher training outreach.’ Sadtu’s pro-college argument has three main thrusts. First, Lewis said, when teacher training was transferred to universities ‘they didn’t really rise to the occasion. There has been a massive drop in the number of teachers being trained.’ Universities are graduating around 6 000 to 10 000 teachers per annum, but the profession is shedding 18 000 teachers a year. South Africa loses approximately 4 000 teachers per annum to emigration. Secondly, universities have focused on the high end of teaching, on upgrading teachers at the postgraduate level rather than training new teachers, Lewis explained. ‘Third, an advantage of colleges was that many were located in rural areas so they were much more accessible to people in areas that most need teachers. The idea is to take teacher training to where it is most needed.’
According to the rating system of the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa now has 72 ‘A rated’ researchers who are ‘unequivocally recognised by their peers as leading international scholars in their field’. Among the 72 ‘A rated’ scientists, 30 are from the University of Cape Town, 16 from the University of the Witwatersrand and 12 from the University of Stellenbosch. There are no ‘A rated’ researchers at universities of technology. In terms of fields of research, the highest number of ‘A rated’ academics are in animal and veterinary sciences (10), while there are eight each in engineering and mathematics, seven in health sciences, six in physics, and five each in plant sciences, law, and literary studies, languages and linguistics. The latest statistics on rated researchers in South Africa, provided by the NRF, indicate that around one in every seven researchers in the country is now rated in one category or another. South Africa has approximately 22 400 full-time equivalent researchers.
According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 by the United Nations, progress has been made with regard to achieving universal primary education by 2015. The net enrolment ratio in primaryeducation in developing regions increased from 80% in 1990 to 88% in 2005. Nonetheless, an unacceptably high number of 72m children of primary school age were not in school in 2005 – 57% of them were girls. Although sub-Saharan Africa has made significant progress over the last few years (ie, from a primary school net enrolment ratio of 54% in 1990 to 70% in 2005), it still trails behind other regions, with 30% of its children of primary school age still out of school. The report states that ‘a strong push will be needed over the next few years to enrol all children in school and to fulfil their right to a quality education’. The children most likely to drop out of school, or to not attend school at all, are those from poorer households or living in rural areas. For example, 31% of children of primary school age in rural areas of the developing world were still out of school in 2005, compared with 18% of children in the same age group living in cities. Girls are still excluded from education more than boys, a pattern that is particularly evident in Western and Southern Asia.
The report also notes that primary school attendance by over-age children is very common in some regions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where more children of secondary school age are attending primary school than secondary school. ‘Though late enrolment is better than not enrolling at all, it represents a challenge for the education system and reflects the difficulties families face in sending their children to school. Late enrolment also puts children at a disadvantage by causing potential learning problems and lessening opportunities to advance to a higher level of education.’ Data shows that children who start school at least two years later than the official age are more likely to be from poorer households and have mothers with no formal education.
It is generally agreed that education leads to accelerated human development, poverty reduction and sustained economic growth. Education also improves health and nutrition, benefits personal health and empowers girls in particular. This has spin-offs for better reproductive health, lower child mortality rates and improved welfare through better nutrition and higher immunisation rates. Education may be the single most effective preventative weapon against HIV/AIDS. It is also argued that education increases productivity and earnings. Research has shown that globally, every year of schooling translates into increased individual income of about 10%. In poor countries, the gains are even greater.
According to official statistics from the Labour Force Surveys, the strict unemployment rate for young people aged 15-24 in 2006 was 50.2% – almost double the general unemployment rate of 25.5%. In addition, more young people are discouraged from seeking work than people in any other age group. If those who are no longer looking for work are included, the unemployment rate for young people rises to65.2%, compared with the general unemployment figure of about 38%. What is more, the burden of unemployment falls disproportionately on young blacks/Africans. In order to generate improved information that will deepen knowledge about unemployment among young people in South Africa, the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) conducted research on employment histories and unemployment. The retrospective survey, conducted between July and November 2006, was based in three sites (ie, Johannesburg, eThekweni and Polokwane) and traced the histories of 1 000 young people aged 20-35 from their 15th birthdays onwards. The main findings of the survey are as follows:
The study suggests that in order to improve the employment prospects of young people and young blacks/Africans in particular, policy-makers should:
Public Enterprise Minister Alec Erwin has welcomed an initiative by state-owned arms developer Denel, to train young people in the areas of mathematics and science. The Denel Youth Foundation Training (DYFT) seeks to address the shortage of learners with maths and science by offering a second chance to
matriculate with maths and science on higher grade. Minimum entrance requirements into the programme are a Grade 10 education with mathematics and science as school subjects.
According to the results of the General Household Survey 2006, 13.28m learners were at school in 2006, with an additional 1.56m learners in pre-school institutions and a further 0.6m students at university or technikon. Among learners aged 7-15 years, school attendance rates increased from 96.3% in 2002 to 97.9% in 2005, followed by a slight decline to 97.7% in 2006. The percentage of learners aged 7-24 who were not attending an educational institution because of a lack of money or fees declined from 39.6% in 2002 to 37.4% in 2005, followed by an increase to 38.6% in 2006. Statistics on the levels of educational attainment among people aged 20 and above indicate that there was a slight improvement over the 2002-2006 period: the percentage without formal education declined from 12.1% in 2002 to 10.7% in 2006, while the percentage with matric increased from 21.1% to 23.9% over the same period; the percentage with tertiary education increased from 9.1% in 2002 to 9.8% in 2005, followed by a decline to 9.2% in 2006.
Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines. The first laptops should be ready to put into the hands of children in developing countries by October 2007.
The education department is conducting a second round of large-scale assessments of Grade 3 and 6 learners’ abilities, to determine whether there had been any improvement. The previous round of socalled systemic evaluations of Grade 3 and 6 pupils showed that the South African school system left much to be desired, revealing, for instance, that about 60% of Grade 6 learners were not able to read at the level at which they should and 80% were not achieving 50% or more in a Grade 6 mathematics test.
The assessments would be carried out over two months in about 3 000 schools, serving more than 60 000 Grade 3 and 6 learners. The schools have been randomly chosen from all nine provinces and standardised tests would be administered in these schools by trained assessors. The Grade 3 results are to be reported as part of the three-yearly systemic evaluation process, while the Grade 6 results will be fed into the international Southern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality process, which measures education quality in southern and eastern African countries.
As part of an initiative by the department of education to professionalise principalships and reclaim the status once attached to the position, the first group of 400 school principals has been enrolled for the South African National Professional Qualification for Principals. Participating principals’s feedback will be decisive in the further development of the qualification, which will be rolled out formally from 2009 and will be a compulsory requirement for any person wanting to be a principal. The first intake of principals is spread across five higher education institutions, which met the preparation criteria set by the department and registered the qualification timeously with the Council on Higher Education. They are the University of Pretoria, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. In addition to the school principals’ qualification, the department is developing a range of national courses for serving principals with a particular focus on curriculum management; these courses will be experiential.
Landmark legal action occurred in June concerning school fees. Following an application to the Durban High Court brought by Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals) and two single, unemployed mothers of pupils attending Hunt Road Secondary School, an order interdicts the school from proceeding with any debt actions instituted against parents for unpaid fees unless it can show that those parents would not have qualified for exemptions. The school is also required to write to all parents informing them of the exemptions policy and inviting them to apply, as well as to process all applications received and advise parents who are refused exemptions of their right to appeal and how to do this. The case highlights the legal framework’s failure to provide for compensation to schools who do grant exemptions. The attorney for Hunt Road Secondary School said he did not think the school would survive: ‘The combination of the school’s inability to collect outstanding fees and underfunding from the KwaZulu-Natal education department is going to have a devastating effect on the school.’ The education department has revealed it is now working out how to compensate schools for fee exemptions. The larger issue of free education was discussed at the ANC policy conference at the end of June. Department of education director general Duncan Hindle said: ‘The key debate is whether to adopt a horizontal split, to provide (for example) free primary schooling for all, even the rich, or a vertical split, to support the poor at all levels of the system.’
Speaking at an Information Systems, Electronics and Telecommunications Technologies Seta graduation ceremony in Johannesburg, labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana confirmed that his department was considering reducing the number of sectoral education and training authorities (Setas) in SA. Pointing out that: ‘At the time we established Setas there was no industrial policy (for the various sectors). Now there is,’ he said there is a need to review the way some of the Setas were structured – resulting in duplication of responsibilities. He cited the example of security and finance sectors which have up to three and five Setas respectively. He also stated that the legal existence of the Setas would not be tampered with until their mandate expires in 2010. These remarks came in the wake of recent media claims that the CEOs of SA’s 23 Setas would lose their jobs. The minister has already slimmed down SA’s Seta complement from 25 in 2000 to the current 23 and it is commonly accepted he has been frustrated with some Setas’ failure to accelerate the implementation of skills development. Other concerns being discussed by government include issues regarding whether further education and training colleges were properly equipped to train the artisans the economy needed and whether the decision to merge technikons with universities had been a good one.
Opinions are mixed about the effects that the month-long public service strike – the largest and longest in SA’s history since democracy – could have on educators, learners and education in general. According to Prof Crain Soudien, director of the education faculty at the University of Cape Town, ‘Of course, any kind of disruption is fatal and (many schools, especially in disadvantaged areas) are already in a state of fragility.’ However, Prof Lesley le Grange, chairman of the curriculum studies department in Stellenbosch University’s education faculty, points out ‘the basic stuff should be in place. If so much depends on one month, it’s an indictment on the system as a whole but I think if the matric results are down 3%-5%, people will blame it on the strike.’ According to Dr Nick Taylor, CEO of JET Education Services, a nongovernmental organisation that aims to improve the quality of education in South African schools, ‘The hardest hit will be … the poor black schools that do really well and there are about 500 of them. That’s the way – the poor always suffer.’ Meanwhile, a tussle has emerged between teacher unions and education department officials over whether teachers can be paid for the extra work (and how much they should be paid) they will now have to do in respect of recovery plans.
According to a new study, poor pay is a key factor in the decision of many South African teachers to seek work in the United Kingdom. The as-yet-unpublished study by Oxford research fellow Dr K Ochs, surveyed 192 teachers recruited from other Commonwealth countries to jobs in the UK. Ninety % of the South Africans who responded said they did not consider financial packages at home attractive enough, compared to a figure of just 60% in Australia. One thousand teachers in the Western Cape were absent during the first two months of 2007 due to, amongst other reasons, stress. Teachers feel alone, unsupported and disillusioned. The department said it would no longer accept doctors’ certificates for stress unless they were issued by a psychiatrist.
Teachers are under pressure from high work loads, violence and undisciplined learners. Since the introduction of the new curriculum which depends on continuous assessment, teachers have been complaining that they spend more time keeping up with paperwork than teaching. Other factors that are inhibiting successful teaching are class sizes, a discipline system where the rights of ringleaders seems to be prioritised, the rights of teachers that are being ignored, lack of in-service training for the new curriculum and weak departmental administration. A shortage of 50 000 teachers is foreseen within the next three years if government does not urgently intervene to improve the working conditions of teachers.
In yet another incident of school-related violence, a Grade 2 Eastern Cape educator died after being shot three times by a man masked in a balaclava. In expressing his condolences with the family of the murdered educator, Johnny Mankato, MEC for education in the Eastern Cape, stressed the importance of the speedy implementation of the education department's security programme for schools. This programme, he hoped, together with the co-operation of the community, would bring an end to violence at schools.
Increasing numbers of foreign students are enrolled at South African universities. Last year more than 52 000 students from 10 countries in Southern and Central Africa were enrolled at South African universities and universities of technology. At the recently held conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers in Cape Town, education ministers from Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Zambia stated that South Africa’s universities are among the best on the continent.
The sale of Decor’s Graduate Institute of Management and Technology to a BEE group has given birth to South Africa’s first black-owned business school that will focus on building local government capacity. In another deal women’s empowerment group Winhold and businessman Vincent Rosaria bought 26% of the executive education arm of Stellenbosch University’s business school. New academic research programmes introduced by the Marang Centre (a maths and science facility at Wits education campus in Parktown) are set to develop capacity and produce a pool of more maths and science leaders on the African continent. Research will be spread over three years with a strong mentorship component.
The number of teenage pregnancies in South Africa is increasing rapidly. According to the department of education, more than 72 000 girls aged between 13 and 19 did not attend school last year because they were pregnant. Official figures from the provincial departments of education reveal that 5 868 learners in KwaZulu-Natal and 1 748 in the Free State fell pregnant last year, while about 5 000 teenage pregnancies were reported in Limpopo. Gauteng recorded 2 542 teenage pregnancies in the past two years. In the light of the severe HIV/AIDS epidemic that is reaping havoc in South Africa, it is a very disturbing fact that so many teenage pregnancies occur, and questions arise such as: How many of these girls are infected with HIV and what does the future hold for these girls and their babies? According to Steven Levitt, writer of the international bestseller Freakonomics, ‘growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child’s propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother.’ Educators should ensure that learners are equipped to enter adulthood with the potential to make a living and provide for a family. However, this cannot be done without highly qualified educators, and the wholehearted support of government, the education department, business, society and parents.
The minister of education recently launched the Higher Education HIV & AIDS (HEAIDS) programme. The challenge faced by the higher education sector with regard to HIV/AIDS is succinctly captured in the following statement from the Association of African Universities: ‘To a greater degree than ever before, African universities must renew their commitment to help Africa find effective solutions to its perennial problems of hunger, poverty and disease. In particular, the HIV/AIDS crisis poses a serious threat to African societies within which universities are situated. We need to recognise that the solution to this problem might well lie in Africa. African universities must, in any event, be in the forefront of research, education and action in this matter.’ As a nationally coordinated effort in the fight against HIV/AIDS, HEAIDS seeks to strengthen the capacity, systems and structures of all higher education institutions in managing and mitigating the causes, challenges and consequences of HIV/AIDS in the sector and to strengthen the leadership role that can and should be played by the higher education sector.
According to the minister, one of the first activities of the HEAIDS programme will be a national survey involving a sample of 25 000 staff and students, to establish HIV prevalence on the campuses and to understand the beliefs and behaviour of students as they relate to HIV/AIDS. A second area of activity that will take shape soon is the focus on equipping student teachers to deal more effectively with the challenges they will face as they enter the classroom. More detailed content on HIV and AIDS in the teaching curriculum will be developed and more time will be spent on developing the skills that teachers need to respond to learners living with the virus or affected by its impact on their families.
Six years after the department of education first put forward the idea that many children with disabilities and learning impairments should be accommodated in public schools, there is still no idea how this can be done or funded, says a new paper by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). There is also no clear idea of how many learners in South Africa have special educational needs. The white paper which tackles the idea of ‘inclusive education’, envisages offering the country’s 12m learners a learning environment in which those who experience ‘barriers to learning’, from physical and mental disability through psycho-social disturbances and to poverty, are all accommodated, excluding the most severely physically and mentally disabled. While the white paper states that changing South African’s education system to an all inclusive one would take 20 to 25 years, none of the short-term goals set by the education department have yet been met.
The Woolworths Trust EduPlant has launched its 2007 programme with a series of free, empowering workshops that will help educators to create food-rich, sustainable environments at schools. Coordinated by Food and Trees for Africa, Woolworths Trust EduPlant – with the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, LandCare SA and SABC Education – is offering a programme that promotes and supports schools to grow good food, using resource-efficient permaculture (environmentally-friendly gardening and farming) techniques. Last year more than 380 schools participated in the Woolworths Trust EduPlant programme. Workshop topics include water harvesting, soil improvement, natural resource mapping, recycling design, as well as how to involve learners in the school’s living, learning laboratory.
In 2006, 12.3m learners in South Africa were enrolled at 26 292 ordinary schools (public and independent schools) and served by 386 595 educators, resulting in an average learner-to-school ratio of 468 and an average learner-to-educator ratio of 31.8. By comparison, in 2000, 11.9m learners were enrolled at 27 760 ordinary schools and served by 363 343 educators, resulting in average ratios of 429 and 32.8, respectively. The majority of the 2006 learners (92.2% or 11.96m) were enrolled at 25 194 public schools and served by 367 188 educators, with a learner-to-school ratio of 475 and a learner-to-educator ratio of 32.6. In the case of independent schools the ratios for 2006 were significantly lower at 310 and 17.5, respectively. On a provincial basis, the four provinces with the largest number of children, viz, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo, had the highest numbers of learners, educators and ordinary schools in 2006. Learner-to-educator ratios varied between 29.1 in North West and 34.1 in Mpumalanga, while learner-to-school ratios varied between 359 in the Eastern Cape and 788 in Gauteng.
Although enrolment at public schools increased by only 2.7% from 11.65m in 2000 to 11.96m in 2006, enrolment at independent schools increased by 32.7% from 256 283 to 340 060 during the same period. In 2006, Gauteng had the highest percentage of learners enrolled at independent schools (8.6%), followed by the Western Cape with 3% and Mpumalanga with 2.3%. North West had the lowest percentage enrolled at independent schools, namely 1.2%.
‘A mobilised national consensus around education and broader social intervention is needed if SA is to grasp the structural constraints sustaining inequality and exclusion in its schools and education system’ says Graeme Bloch of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). The disparities existing between 2007 schools are disconcerting. He pointed out that a ‘host of out-of-school factors impact heavily on leaner performance’. Many are historical and sociological factors with deep roots which can only be addressed partially through school-based initiatives with the rest needing broader social interventions. The DBSA aims to achieve a broader understanding of the social factors impacting on the delivery of quality education and strives for a more comprehensive frame of intervention. Education minister Pandor has approved the appointment of a six-member team of experts led by independent analyst Gugu Nyanda to determine how bad SA’s school dropout rate is and why learners drop out. While primary school enrolment has stayed close to 100% many children drop out of school before reaching matric or even before completing nine years of compulsory education. In the past few years the dropout rate has been quoted as being anything from 22% to 60%.
Business and educational institutions are increasingly using online instruction/distance education as a teaching method. In 2000 investment in e-learning in the USA was $2.2b and was estimated to exceed $23b by 2004. However, very few empirical investigations of this method of teaching have been done so far. One investigation into the high drop-out rate of students attending e-learning courses shows that student’s satisfaction with e-learning is a key indicator in their decision to drop-out, while the academic locus of control seems to have no impact on their decision. As e-mail forms an important medium for Internet-based education concerns exist about the care students put into writing their e-mail messages.
In an effort to improve SA’s poor matric results the DoE will, for the first time, set mathematics and language exam papers for Grade 11 pupils. National exam papers will also be set for all the other Grade 11 subjects and some schools will be selected to write these papers to enable the DoE to benchmark standards.
The KwaZulu-Natal department of education has reportedly instructed schools to promote grade 11 pupils who failed last year to matric. The reasoning seems to be that normally, failed grade 11s opt to repeat grade 11 at school; however, this year that means that these pupils are doing the New Curriculum Statement with all the changes that accompany the introduction of the new curriculum. As a result, most pupils are not coping with this shift. Moreover, some schools are not able to provide additional assistance to these pupils. A spokesperson for the National Teachers Union has described the decision as a ‘good formula of disaster’, contributing to a continued decline in matric results in the province. The KwaZulu-Natal directive follows an earlier statement by the director-general of education that the department will not allow 38 000 failed Grade 11 pupils in the Eastern Cape to be pushed through to matric this year.
The department of education announced that South African learners would not be participating this year in an international maths and science test in which it has twice come last, the Sunday Times reported. The test is conducted every four years. In 1999 South Africa came last out of 38 countries, and in 2003 last out of 50. The reason given for the decision was that the department did not want to ‘over-test’ pupils, as they would already undergo one domestic and one Southern and Eastern African regional test this year.
According to an article in The Lancet world wide at least 200m children younger than 5 year fail to reach their potential in cognitive and socio-emotional development, because of: malnutrition leading to stunting, iodine and iron deficiencies, and inadequate stimulation in their first five years of life. These children are likely to fare poorly in school and subsequently have low incomes, high fertility, and provide poor care for their children, leading to an intergenerational transmission of poverty. As there are effective and low cost actions to prevent the damage and remedy these deficiencies, this lost potential is preventable, but the problem is the lack of professional and political commitment to mobilise action.
South Africa is facing a serious IT skills deficit due mostly to a lack of training. ‘We are not seeing a big enough inflow into the economy of IT and engineering graduates,’ said director of black-empowered IT training company IT Intellect, Peter Denny, who also claimed that the problem is getting worse. Denny also pointed out that there are just not enough young adults coming out of school with the ability to move on into the tertiary level and undertake IT, engineering or science-focused degrees or diplomas. Moreover, like the UK, South Africa was losing skills to other countries ‘as young people opt to leave the country to work overseas, due to perceived higher levels of employment, overall opportunities and, frankly, considered safety factors’.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has recently issued a wide-ranging new guide on teaching good eating habits to primary school children in an effort to reduce malnutrition and diet-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. Good nutrition education makes children aware of the benefits of eating a well-balanced diet, how to prepare and handle food safely, and how to avoid food-related risks. ‘What many people don’t realize is that it is not only the amount of food, but the quality of a diet that has a critical effect on children’s growth, health and learning capacity’, said Ezzeddine Boutrif, Director of FAO’s Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division. Chronic diet-related diseases are on the rise worldwide due to new lifestyle and eating habits. Worldwide 1.6b adults are overweight and at least 400m are obese, according to the World Health Organization.
According to a new publication by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), global spending on education is concentrated in just a few countries, with the education budget of a single country such as France or Italy outweighing education spending across all of sub-Saharan Africa. The report finds that sub-Saharan African countries, home to 15% of the school-age population of the world, spend only 2.4% of the global education resources. By contrast, the USA spends 28% of the global education budget although only 4% of the world’s children and young people live there. The report attributes this to the large number of university students and the relatively high costs of tertiary education in the USA. Although public spending is a major source of education funding, many countries, particularly in less developed regions, rely on households and communities to cover education expenses such as tuition, textbooks, school uniforms and teachers’ salaries.
HIV/AIDS represents a direct threat to achieving the Millennium Development goal of ‘Education for All’. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has already cut the supply of teachers in countries with high HIV-prevalence rates and has made millions of children orphans. However, education remains one of the most effective weapons against the disease. In 2005, African education ministers highlighted the lack of information about education sector responses to HIV/AIDS. In response, the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa compiled a report on evidence and examples of good practice from across the continent. The report states that ‘there are pockets of excellence in all countries, but implementation is patchy and often overlooks non-teaching staff and parents, higher education and preschool sectors, out-of-school youth and programme monitoring and evaluation’. Furthermore, ‘effective life skills programmes are not implemented uniformly and condoms remain controversial despite evidence that they reduce risk’. Recommendations for education policymakers in Africa include:
The government of Afghanistan and the UN Mine Action Centre for Afghanistan have recently launched an awareness campaign to educate more than 6m school children countrywide about the risks of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). The country is replete with landmines and UXO, which kill and injure about 60 people, almost half of them children, every month – one of the highest landmine casualty figures in the world.
According to the February Community Survey 2007 conducted by StatsSA in all provinces, covering 246 618 households and enumerating 949 105 persons, ‘substantial progress has been made with regard to both school attendance and educational attainment during the last decade’.
Based on the findings from international comparative research the SA Institute of Race Relations claims that ‘South African schools are among the worst in Africa.’ Among Southern and East African countries that participated in a study on schooling quality, South Africa scored below average on reading and mathematics proficiency for pupils in Grade 6. Only one in five Grade 6 pupils in SA had attained the desired level of reading mastery. ‘This was despite SA having a higher per capita gross domestic product, a higher human development index rating, and higher spending per primary school pupil than many of the countries that recorded better scores. The institute also raised questions over whether sufficiently skilled teachers were available to teach these basics.
The government is planning a fourfold expansion of educational and care services for children under the age of six within the next three years. In his mid-term budget, Finance Minister Manuel recently announced a R7.9b cash injection for grade R (the reception year for primary school) for the three years to 2011, as well as R1.7b for early childhood development (ECD) over the same period. Research worldwide shows the first years of a child’s life are critical for all aspects of development and greatly affect the child’s chances of success later in life. In SA, almost 10% of the population is aged 0-4 years, yet only 15% of these children have access to ECD services.
In partnership with the private sector, Education Minister Pandor recently unveiled the pilot Fundisa Fund project which will give lower income earners an opportunity to save for their children’s education at colleges and university. Through this project, parents will be able to send their children to university or colleges by joining an investment scheme for only R40 per month. The three-year pilot fund will offer financial assistance to academically deserving students and parents will receive a bonus each year as a reward for saving for their children’s education. The education department has allocated R20m to the scheme and the National Student Financial Aids Scheme has committed R21m.
The National Research Foundation (NRF) supported by the department of science and technology has unveiled a South African Post-higher Degree (PhD) Project to strengthen the corporate and higher education sectors by increasing the numbers and diversity of appropriately skilled postgraduate professionals in the country. The PhD project will provide peer and mentor support networks to postgraduates as they initiate and progress through their studies and become professionals or leaders in their respective disciplines. The project aims to direct and encourage persons to appropriate PhD programmes through various mechanisms including:
The initiative aligns with the country’s National System of Innovation (NSI) and aims to position SA as a leader in knowledge production in all fields of scientific research, including social sciences, humanities, law, natural sciences and engineering and technology.
According to results of a research project carried out by the South African Medical Research Council, two experimental lifestyle programmes have had a significant effect on smoking rates among a group of South African high school learners. The two programmes used consisted of a life skills training programme based on a model used at thousands of schools in the USA with a strong emphasis on abstinence and resisting peer pressure and a ‘harm reduction’ programme based on the Australian ‘Keep Left’ initiative, which encourages young people to find ways of minimising the harm of smoking, by, for example, smoking fewer cigarettes. The two programmes were offered over a two-year period to about 3 200 Grade 8 learners at 24 schools in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. The study found that while smoking rates in a control group of learners increased by 6% over the two years, the rate among those on the two programmes increased by only an average of 3%. There were, however, gender differences, ie, the programmes were more effective in holding back smoking rates among boys than among girls; and they were noticeably more effective among black/African, white and Asian/Indian learners than among coloured children, who had by far the highest smoking rates. Furthermore, it was found that the harm minimisation programme reduced the smoking rates among boys, while the life skills training programme reduced the smoking rates among girls.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has proposed a code of conduct for schools, to be signed by parents, as one of the means to reduce violence in schools. According to DA spokeswoman on safety and security Dianne Kohler-Barnard, ‘the reasons (for the increase in crime in schools) are complex. On the one hand, it can be attributed to a failing police service, which simply doesn’t have the resources or the expertise to grapple with problems of this nature – especially something as complex as violence in schools. On the other hand, the state’s failure to deliver services properly means that where the public’s interests meet with the interests of the state, these institutions become the scene of conflict and tension.’ The DA’s action plan includes a code of conduct agreed to by parents, education and training for teachers in the management of difficult and disruptive pupils, including removing them from the school if the behaviour persists. The document also suggests that education and police authorities should develop a school violence database and ‘adopt-a-cop’ projects should be implemented at every school.
Japanese-based Cyber University, the nation's only university to offer all classes only on the Internet, recently began offering a class on the mysteries of the pyramids on cellphones. For classes for personal computers, the lecturer downloads play on the monitor as text and images in the middle, and a smaller video of the lecturer shows in the corner, complete with sound. The cellphone version, however, which pops up as streaming video on the handset's tiny screen, plays just the Power Point images, while a professor's voice plays from the handset speakers. Cyber University, which opened in April with government approval to confer bachelor's degrees, has 1 850 students. Unlike other classes, the one on cellphones will be available to the public for free, although viewers must pay phone fees.
A new report released in the USA shows that young Americans appear to be reading less for fun, resulting in declining reading test scores. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines, such as maths and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills. The study also examined results from reading tests administered to adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined. While the statistics used in the report could not explain why reading had declined, several commonly accepted culprits were referred to, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the Internet and other gadgets, the failure of schools and colleges to develop a culture of daily reading habits, and ‘a society where the media does not recognise, celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.’ In the work place nearly 75% of employers polled rated reading comprehension as ‘very important’ for workers with two-year college degrees, and nearly 90% of employers said so for graduates of four-year college degrees. Better reading skills were also correlated with higher income.
A study conducted jointly by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the Council on Higher Education (CHE), and funded by the Ford Foundation found that finances, poor school preparation and inadequate academic teaching and support are among the leading reasons cited by students who have dropped out. Some 80% of the 3 328 cited financial constraints, although this is a far greater factor for Africans and coloureds than for Indians and whites. When it comes to academic factors fuelling the dropout rate, there is generally more unanimity among racial groups. For instance, almost equal significance is given to the following reasons: ‘I realised that even with good [matric] symbols I could not cope with higher education study’; ‘I battled to learn all the new terminology and ‘think’ in my chosen field of study’; ‘The poor quality of teaching at the institution’; and ‘My lecturers were so inaccessible that I did not think I could approach them for help’. More than three-quarters of respondents cited difficulty with their institution’s language of instruction. Surprisingly, 70% of the students surveyed nevertheless found employment and raised sufficient funds to resume their interrupted studies.
According to a recently released UNESCO report entitled Education counts: Benchmarking progress in 19 WEI countries, China has the most tertiary graduates in the world (2.4m in 2006) -- almost twice as many as the USA which used to be the world leader.
As part of the World Education Indicators (WEI) Programme, the publication analyses the progress made by 19 middle-income and developing countries (viz, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay and Zimbabwe). For comparative purposes, the report also includes benchmarks for OECD countries and an additional 12 countries (viz, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Romania, Slovenia and Macedonia). Key findings from the report include:
In 2005, more students graduated from universities in the 19 WEI countries than in the OECD states combined (5.7m versus 5.2m).
Despite the surge in the absolute numbers of university graduates, graduation ratios remain lower in WEI countries than in the OECD. In WEI countries 19.7% of young people attain a university degree, which is just more than one-half of the OECD average. Similar to OECD countries, WEI countries report a strong trend in tertiary studies attracting more women than men. Women account for 56% of university graduates in WEI countries compared with 55% in OECD countries.
The growth in tertiary education has come at a high cost for WEI countries, which spend 53% of GDP per tertiary student on average compared to the 40% OECD average. Overall, children in WEI countries can expect to spend about 14 years in school -- about four years less than in an average OECD country. In an average WEI country, just over one in five upper secondary students is enrolled in technical and vocational education, which is about one-half of the OECD average. While OECD teachers earn more in absolute terms, WEI countries pay their teachers more relative to national income. WEI primary teachers with 15 years of experience earn on average 184% of GDP per capita, compared to the OECD average of 135%.
At the annual Clinton Global Initiative summit recently held in New York, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) launched a campaign to raise $220m by 2010 to allow 9m refugee and vulnerable children, particularly those from Sudan's Darfur region, Iraq and Colombia, to acquire an education, partly based on the Internet, but also by attrackting teachers into remote locations. The campaign seeks to address all aspects of a child's educational needs, from teachers and notebooks to transportation, water and vocational training, and puts particular emphasis on getting girls into the classroom. The campaign brings together the UNHCR and private sector partners such as sports goods maker Nike, software giant Microsoft, employment service provider Manpower, the advertising group WPP, and GSMA, an association of mobile phone operators and equipment suppliers.
Bangladesh, a very low-lying country, is among the most vulnerable countries on the planet to climate change. Melting glaciers in the Himalayas are already causing sea levels to rise, and scientists say Bangladesh may lose up to 20% of its land by 2030 as a result of flooding. A creative response to flooding in Bangladesh is so-called boat schools and libraries. In 1998, a Bangladeshi architect, Rezwan, started his nonprofit group with just one 20 feet by 15 feet flat-bottomed boat built from local materials. Today, his fleet of school boats consists of 45 vessels, including some library boats. Each school boat fits about 60 young people -- 40 on the deck and about 20 on wooden benches set up on the bow.
The boat schools were made possible partly by an award of $1m in 2005 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with funds from the Washington-based Global Fund for Children. The money helped Rezwan set up hugely popular Internet services -- including live chats with scientists -- and design a solar-powered lamp that he gives out to families to enable their children to study at night. The boat schools operate year-round and offer a full primary school education with the same syllabus as classrooms on dry land. They serve about 90 000 families in an area covering more than 300 miles, and make three to four-hour stops six days a week.
At the recently held FIFA Women's World Cup 2007 in China, UNICEF and FIFA 'kicked off' a new 'Goals for Girls' campaign which aims to promote education, gender equality and women's rights through sport. The competition was used as a platform to explain how educating girls not only helps eliminate gender discrimination, but also contributes to addressing many of the most serious problems their communities face, eg, poverty, hunger, disease, violence and abuse. The UNICEF-FIFA campaign promotes the child-friendly school model, offering both genders a quality education in a safe environment, even in emergency situations. UNICEF also works with partners and governments to remove barriers to education, including school fees and lack of access. GIS for schools The City of Cape Town, together with partner organisations, is developing a hands-on geographic information systems (GIS) project for high schools based in urban nature reserves.
The environmental education centres at Rondevlei and Tygerberg Nature Reserves are preparing to support GIS-based fieldwork. As part of this project, called Youth, Urban Nature & GIS, senior learners will be able to experience how nature conservationists use GIS technology to monitor and care for nature. Learners will use hand-held global positioning system (GPS) units to locate monitoring sites and record coordinates; monitor plants, animals and the environment and record observations in a database; construct GIS layers; and display findings and digital photographs using GIS technology. By monitoring the environment, learners will help the nature reserves to care for nature in the City of Cape Town. The Western Cape Education Department has already selected six schools to take part in the pilot project this year. In 2008, the reserves will make GIS-based fieldwork part of their senior high school programme.
Recently the Department of Education published the first National Assessment Report of the NEIMS, an electronic planning and management tool, which allows for 'real-time' access to information about the condition of infrastructure and facilities at each of the 28 742 public schools across South Africa. Following a comprehensive audit of each school, the report has detailed information, including digital photographs, about every school - the land and buildings, the condition of these, as well as teacher and pupil numbers. The information is also mapped by means of GIS, which provides a useful overview of the spatial location and distribution of schools. According to the report, substantial progress has been made since 1996, including the following:
The report concludes that 58% of assessed schools are in an excellent condition, 16% in a good condition, 15% in a poor condition and 11% in a very poor condition. In 1996 the respective percentages were 7%, 77%, 11% and 5%. However, it is also evident that substantial backlogs still persist in relation to the provision of facilities, and the standard of these. Regrettably, in some cases, once good facilities have been degraded due to vandalism, neglect and inadequate maintenance. Some of the most concerning backlogs relate to the provision of water and sanitation to schools. In addition, only 7% of assessed schools have adequate libraries, while 68% of schools have no computers and only 2% of schools are equipped for disabled learners.
The Education Laws Amendment Bill was recently passed by the National Assembly despite being opposed by opposition parties. It still has to go through the National Council of Provinces before it is signed into law by President Mbeki. The most widely publicised aspect of the bill is the powers it gives to school principals to randomly search pupils 'on the basis of a reasonable suspicion of finding a weapon or drugs'. According to Education Minister Pandor, "the bill is unambiguous (on) our resolve to fight the evil of drug abuse. Schools are supported to act, the rights of learners are protected, and our determination to put an end to drugs in schools is communicated".
The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) has released the findings of its second research report on maths and science education in the country. "Annual passes in higher-grade (HG) maths are falling short of the Department of Education's stated targets 2004-2008 for achieving the doubling goal, and from 2005 to 2006 they actually declined," said CDE executive director Ann Bernstein. In 2004, 467 985 learners wrote the senior certificate examinations, with 39 939 writing HG maths.
Of all those writing the examinations, only 5% (24 143) passed HG maths. Further, only 7 236 passes (or 1.5% of the total) were obtained by African students. The report showed that more than half of South Africa's secondary schools failed to achieve a single HG maths pass, while 81% of schools achieve one pass each on average. A list of measures compiled by the CDE to improve maths and science performance at secondary school level includes the following:
Commenting on the link between economic growth and education and training, director and chief economist of Econometrix, Dr Azar Jammine, highlighted the teacher shortage in SA, and pointed out that the number of people in South Africa with just grade 10-11, leaving school before they had finished matric, had increased to 48.5% from 34.5% in 1995. He also said that even though the unemployment rate was far lower for those with tertiary qualifications, people were also not studying in the fields currently critical to the economy.
Thus, there are high unemployment rates for graduates in humanities and arts and law, while science and engineering graduates have lower unemployment rates. "There is a reluctance among South Africans to take on the difficult subjects," said Jammine. "Particularly disturbing is the proportion of Black Africans with tertiary qualifications which also declined." He also showed that the number of Black Africans with higher grade maths was at just around the 1 000 mark, pointing out that "It is a major constraint and has a lot to do with the schooling system," adding that only 11.4% of Black Africans were getting university exemptions. "How do you then facilitate BEE?" he asked.
Following an agreement reached during a recent visit to China by Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, 50 South African high schools will soon teach Mandarin, the most widely spoken language in China. In terms of the agreement, China would provide the teachers, while the education department would decide on the logistics, including selecting the schools that will offer Mandarin. SA is China's biggest trading partner in Africa, exporting R14b worth of products to China and importing goods to the value of R47.7b.
Even developed countries are concerned about the quality of education and education outputs. In Britain, many lessons are taught by teachers with no relevant qualification. In 2002, reports The Economist, approximately a quarter of those teaching maths to 11-18 year olds had not studied the subject beyond A-level themselves. Only half of the lessons were taught by someone with a maths degree. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy recently expressed his concern in a 30-page 'letter to teachers' about too many school drop-outs, not enough respect or authority in the classroom, too little value placed on the teaching profession, too little art and sport in the curriculum, too much passive rote-learning, and too much 'theory and abstraction'.
These concerns come in the wake of a government-commissioned report which found that in France 40% of pupils leave primary school with 'serious learning gaps' in basic reading, writing and arithmetic, while 20% finish secondary school with no qualification at all. Moreover, by the age of 15, 38% of French pupils have repeated a year, more than in any other OECD country. And yet French 15-year olds spend an average of 1 042 hours a year in the classroom - 150 more than German pupils, and 282 more than English ones.
According to the Global Education Digest 2006 by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the number of mobile students (students who study in foreign countries and are non-permanent residents) world-wide increased by 41% from 1.75m in 1999 to 2.46m in 2004. The report states that this does not mean that more students are travelling. Rather, it reflects the rapid expansion of higher education overall, with tertiary enrolments also increasing by about 40% during the 1999-2004 period. The largest number of mobile students come from East Asia and the Pacific (701 000 or 29% of the world total) and Western Europe (407 000 or 17%). Tertiary students from sub-Saharan Africa are the most mobile in the world, with one in every 16 students (or 5.6%) studying abroad, while North American students are the least mobile with only one in every 250 students (or 0.4%) studying abroad. Sub-Saharan students mainly go to Western European countries, with France receiving 21% of African students, the UK 12%, Germany 6% and Portugal 5%. Six countries host 67.4% of the world’s mobile students, viz, 23.3% in the USA, followed by the UK (12.2%), Germany (10.6%), France (9.7%), Australia (6.8%) and Japan (4.8%). South Africa hosts 2% (or 50 000) of the world’s mobile students, while only 5 600 South African students studied abroad in 2004.
The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2007 by UNESCO states that ‘time is running out to meet the EFA goals set in 2000. Despite continued overall global progress at the primary level, including for girls, too many children are not in school, drop out early, or do not reach minimal learning standards’. According to the report, 77m children of primary school-age are still not enrolled in school – more than three-quarters of them are in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. The children most likely to be out of school and to drop out live in rural areas and come from the poorest households. On average, a child whose mother has no education is twice as likely to be out of school as one whose mother has some education. Among the measures identified by the report to foster inclusion of all children are: abolishing school fees,
providing income support to poor and rural households to reduce reliance on child labour, teaching in children’s mother tongue, offering education opportunities for disabled children and those affected by HIV/AIDS, and ensuring that youth and adults receive a second chance at education.
Teacher shortages in Africa will bedevil Africa’s quest to achieve universal primary school education in 2015 as the continent will need five million new teachers to achieve this.
Another UNESCO report Teachers and Educational Quality: Monitoring Global Needs for 2015 states that more than 18m teachers will have to be recruited over the next decade in order to provide quality primary education to all children. The greatest challenge lies in sub-Saharan Africa, which will need to expand its teaching force by 68%.
In the past ten years, distance education for teacher training has become widely used in many developing countries. A study by the International Extension College in Cambridge has examined how training teachers by distance education reaches beyond the students themselves and aids development in the wider community. The research which was conducted in Guyana, Uganda and Nigeria found that:
change and development in the teachers, their schools and communities.
A 2004 survey of Educator Supply and Demand by the HSRC and MRC estimated that 12.7% of the 350 000 educators in South Africa were HIV-positive, of which 22% (or about 10 000 teachers) are in need of life-prolonging anti-retroviral therapy. In the absence of a coherent plan to provide anti-retroviral drugs to all educators in need of it, an estimated 10 000 educators in South Africa are expected to die of AIDS within the next two years. Government appears to have sidestepped a recommendation by the study to implement a specific HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programme for teachers and is instead preparing a general ‘wellness’ programme that focuses on all health aspects.
A R700m bursary scheme, Fundza Lushaka (FL) (teach the nation), has been launched to students of quality to train as teachers to replace those teachers lost to HIV/AIDS and the private sector. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NFSAS) said the cost would average R40 000 per teacher and it will ring-fence a further R36m for the same purpose. Priority areas of study for the FL bursary are:
Corruption has been identified as a major drain on the effective use of resources for education. In some countries as much as 80% of the total funds allocated to schools by education ministries are lost to ‘leakage’. The International Institute for Educational Planning which conducted research into ethics and corruption in education, has made recommendations for policymakers and educational managers to create and maintain transparent regulatory systems, strengthen management skills for greater accountability and increase ownership of the management process. Among them are:
framework is needed to stop corruption.
Between 2007 and 2011 The Netherlands will contribute R69m for a joint literacy and numeracy research programme by the HSRC, JET Education Services, the Education Policy Consortium and the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa. These organisations are regarded as the leading experts in literacy and numeracy research in SA.
Despite the availability of excellent children’s books, reading has become increasingly unpopular among children. A love for books not only translates into a lifelong pleasure of reading; it is also a good predictor of future educational success. Research in the UK in 1997 showed 23% of children interviewed said they did not like reading at all. By 2003 the number had grown to 35%. As a result a national programme, Reading Recovery, was implemented to help those children who were struggling the most with reading. It is aimed at six-year-olds and entails 4 months of individual daily half-hour sessions with a trained teacher costing £2 000 per child. Why? Because each child who leaves primary school unable to read will go on to cost government at least £50 000 in the form of specialist teaching in secondary school, dealing with truancy, paying social benefits to adults who are more likely to be sick and unemployed, and the fall-out from increased crime.
Pre-occupation with pressing immediate problems or just seeking more efficient ways of maintaining established practices are keeping educationists preoccupied and are leading to neglect of the long term. This is making it increasingly difficult for educationists to meet today’s challenges of complexity and change. The message from the OECD’s Schooling for Tomorrow series is that educationists at all levels should start looking beyond their immediate constraints and start rethinking education in the long term.
ICT can have profound implications for education because it facilitates new forms of learning and because young people must master ICT to prepare for adult life. A survey of computer use by learners in OECD countries revealed that some learners still lack access to a computer at school and that the number of learners per school computer varies greatly. Learners are also more likely to use computers frequently at home than at school and about half played games frequently, with about the same number using computers to look things up on the Internet and to do word processing. There is also a visible gender gap between boys and girls using computers for high-level tasks. What was clear was that learners with limited access to computers, who used them little and were not confident in using ICT were not performing well.
The colourful Super Silly Science Game is a competitive board game that combines science and English learning with public speaking specked with the ridiculous and high drama. It was received positively when tested by schools at the annual national science festival, Sasol SciFest, in Grahamstown and Dinaledi maths and science schools have said it works best for Grades 7 and 8. Visit www.tlabs.ac.za for more information.
A Cape Town-based NGO, Gold Peer Education Development Agency, has designed a programme for the youth to educate their peers on how to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Gold (an acronym for Generation of Leaders Discovered) has a vision to see a generation of young African leaders confronting the root issues of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through uplifting their communities.
The department of education is drafting a new funding framework for public schools to subsidise well resourced schools that enrol children who cannot pay school fees and who they cannot turn away. The department was not only worried about the top-end public schools but also middle-range schools struggling to maintain standards and resources without parental involvement, that are often inferior to the funding of top-end schools.
40% of SA’s learners will benefit from fee-free schooling in 2007. Features of the pro-poor legal framework include:
Fee increases between 6 and 10% are being charged at SA’s private schools this year as they try to attract and retain top teachers who are their biggest drawcard. About 400 000 learners (4%) attend private schools, with black learners making up 58% of this total and Indian and coloured learners 12%.
The Limpopo education department announced that schools with a shortage of classrooms will be provided with mobile classrooms while new schools were being built. 500 mobile classrooms have alreadybeen distributed.
While only two-thirds of learners who wrote matric in 2006 passed the exam, only one in every five learners starting Grade 1 this year will pass matric in 12 year’s time. Educationist Eric Atmore says part of the answer to this problem is to start with early education, and not only with small children but also with their mothers and other caretakers. Money alone will not solve the problem but the way schools are managed and the quality and commitment, or lack thereof, of the teachers should be looked into. He sees political leadership as key to turn around the education system. There is a ‘reluctance to allow the best public schools to thrive and rise above the rest instead of trying to bring them down to the lowest common denominator’. The powerful trade union representing teachers is also standing in the way of attempts to incentivise the best teachers and to penalise the worst. Just as ASGISA had identified the six binding constraints to economic growth and has proposed special initiatives to tackle these constraints, so should the top constraints holding back SA education performance be identified and tackled.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) proposed a 6-point plan to monitor the performance of principals, teachers and pupils in the country’s under-performing schools with a pass rate of less than 20%. The team of ten will visit these schools and investigate all circumstances at the schools and produce a report to the national education minister with the reasons why each school is failing to produce. The minister would then be responsible for ensuring that the recommendations are implemented and remedial action is taken.
In 2006, 60 303 adults enrolled in Abet courses and 34 067 wrote their exams. Pass rates in the 13 fields of study ranged from 18.3% in mathematical literacy to 77% in arts and culture. Most of those enrolled were matric repeaters.
According to a new study, poor pay is a key factor in the decision of many South African teachers to seek work in the United Kingdom. The as-yet-unpublished study by Oxford research fellow Dr K Ochs, surveyed 192 teachers recruited from other Commonwealth countries to jobs in the UK. 90 % of the South Africans who responded said they did not consider financial packages at home attractive enough, compared to a figure of just 60% in Australia.
One thousand teachers in the Western Cape were absent during the first two months of 2007 due to, amongst other reasons, stress. Teachers feel alone, unsupported and disillusioned. The department said it would no longer accept doctors’ certificates for stress unless they were issued by a psychiatrist. Teachers are under pressure from high work loads, violence and undisciplined learners. Since the introduction of the new curriculum which depends on continuous assessment, teachers have been complaining that they spend more time keeping up with paperwork than teaching.
Other factors that are inhibiting successful teaching are class sizes, a discipline system where the rights of ringleaders seems to be prioritised, the rights of teachers that are being ignored, lack of in-service training for the new curriculum and weak departmental administration. A shortage of 50 000 teachers is foreseen within the next three years if government does not urgently intervene to improve the working conditions of teachers.
In yet another incident of school-related violence, a Grade 2 Eastern Cape educator died after being shot three times by a man masked in a balaclava. In expressing his condolences with the family of the murdered educator, Johnny Mankato, MEC for education in the Eastern Cape, stressed the importance of the speedy implementation of the education department's security programme for schools. This programme, he hoped, together with the co-operation of the community, would bring an end to violence at schools.
The number of teenage pregnancies in South Africa is increasing rapidly. According to the Department of Education, more than 72 000 girls aged between 13 and 19 did not attend school last year because they were pregnant. Official figures from the Provincial Departments of Education reveal that 5 868 learners in KwaZulu-Natal and 1 748 in the Free State fell pregnant last year, while about 5 000 teenage pregnancies were reported in Limpopo. Gauteng recorded 2 542 teenage pregnancies in the past two years. In the light of the severe HIV/AIDS epidemic that is reaping havoc in South Africa, it is a very disturbing fact that so many teenage pregnancies occur, and questions arise such as: How many of these girls are infected with HIV and what does the future hold for these girls and their babies? According to Steven Levitt, writer of the international bestseller Freakonomics, ‘growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child’s propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother.’ Educators should ensure that learners are equipped to enter adulthood with the potential to make a living and provide for a family. However, this cannot be done without highly qualified educators, and the wholehearted support of government, the education department, business, society and parents.
The Minister of Education recently launched the Higher Education HIV & AIDS (HEAIDS) programme. The challenge faced by the higher education sector with regard to HIV/AIDS is succinctly captured in the following statement from the Association of African Universities: ‘To a greater degree than ever before, African universities must renew their commitment to help Africa find effective solutions to its perennial problems of hunger, poverty and disease. In particular, the HIV/AIDS crisis poses a serious threat to African societies within which universities are situated. We need to recognise that the solution to this problem might well lie in Africa. African universities must, in any event, be in the forefront of research, education and action in this matter.’ As a nationally coordinated effort in the fight against HIV/AIDS, HEAIDS seeks to strengthen the capacity, systems and structures of all higher education institutions in managing and mitigating the causes, challenges and consequences of HIV/AIDS in the sector and to strengthen the leadership role that can and should be played by the higher education sector.
According to the minister, one of the first activities of the HEAIDS programme will be a national survey involving a sample of 25 000 staff and students, to establish HIV prevalence on the campuses and to understand the beliefs and behaviour of students as they relate to HIV/AIDS. A second area of activity that will take shape soon is the focus on equipping student teachers to deal more effectively with the challenges they will face as they enter the classroom. More detailed content on HIV and AIDS in the teaching curriculum will be developed and more time will be spent on developing the skills that teachers need to respond to learners living with the virus or affected by its impact on their families.
Business and educational institutions are increasingly using online instruction/distance education as a teaching method. In 2000 investment in e-learning in the USA was $2.2b and was estimated to exceed $23b by 2004. However, very few empirical investigations of this method of teaching have been done so far. One investigation into the high drop-out rate of students attending e-learning courses shows that student’s satisfaction with e-learning is a key indicator in their decision to drop-out, while the academic focus of control seems to have no impact on their decision. As e-mail forms an important medium for Internet-based education concerns exist about the care students put into writing their e-mail messages.
In an effort to improve SA’s poor matric results the DoE will, for the first time, set mathematics and language exam papers for Grade 11 pupils. National exam papers will also be set for all the other Grade 11 subjects and some schools will be selected to write these papers to enable the DoE to benchmark standards.
The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education has reportedly instructed schools to promote grade 11 pupils who failed last year to matric. The reasoning seems to be that normally, failed grade 11's opt to repeat grade 11 at school; however, this year that means that these pupils are doing the New Curriculum Statement with all the changes that accompany the introduction of the new curriculum. As a result, most pupils are not coping with this shift. Moreover, some schools are not able to provide additional assistance to these pupils. A spokesperson for the National Teachers Union has described the decision as a ‘good formula of disaster’, contributing to a continued decline in matric results in the province. The KwaZulu-Natal directive follows an earlier statement by the director-general of education that the department will not allow 38 000 failed Grade 11 pupils in the Eastern Cape to be pushed through to matric this year.
The Department of Education announced that South African learners would not be participating this year in an international maths and science test in which it has twice come last, the Sunday Times reported. The test is conducted every four years. In 1999 South Africa came last out of 38 countries, and in 2003 last out of 50. The reason given for the decision was that the department did not want to ‘over-test’ pupils, as they would already undergo one domestic and one Southern and Eastern African regional test this year.
According to an article in The Lancet world wide at least 200m children younger than 5 years fail to reach their potential in cognitive and socio-emotional development, because of: malnutrition leading to stunting, iodine and iron deficiencies, and inadequate stimulation in their first five years of life. These children are likely to fare poorly in school and subsequently have low incomes, high fertility, and provide poor care for their children, leading to an intergenerational transmission of poverty. As there are effective and low cost actions to prevent the damage and remedy these deficiencies, this lost potential is preventable, but the problem is the lack of professional and political commitment to mobilise action.
South Africa is facing a serious IT skills deficit due mostly to a lack of training. ‘We are not seeing a big enough inflow into the economy of IT and engineering graduates,’ said director of black empowered IT training company IT Intellect, Peter Denny, who also claimed that the problem is getting worse. Denny also pointed out that there are just not enough young adults coming out of school with the ability to move on into the tertiary level and undertake IT, engineering or science-focused degrees or diplomas. Moreover, like the UK, South Africa was losing skills to other countries ‘as young people opt to leave the country to work overseas, due to perceived higher levels of employment, overall opportunities and, frankly, considered safety factors’.
The Shuttleworth Foundation is committed to open philanthropy: using community, transparency and other open source principles to create a better world. How We Work is a series of occasional articles that take a critical look at one aspect of our open philanthropy practice. Our aim is to reflect and improve upon our efforts while also sharing what we've learned with others.
The Shuttleworth Foundation believes in open innovation. It is core to the society we want to build. Early on, we made a decision that what we do and fund should be under an open license. Our goal was to make it easy for people to use, adapt and improve whatever our staff and partners created. We wanted maximum viral impact, and we saw open licensing as the first step in this direction.
As it turns out, making open licensing work isn't easy, and going viral is even tougher. In the three years since embracing open licensing, we've bumped up against confusion over IP [this is the first time this is being used so rather "intellectual property (IP)"] ownership, partners who are not willing to share, and lawyers who don't 'get' open. Also, in many cases, we've simply lost track of materials our partners have created. They may be open, but no one can find them. Not even us.
The good news is we're pushing past all of this, putting in place more systematic open licensing and archiving policies. As we do this, we thought we should write down how things have gone so far and explain where we are headed in the future. Hopefully, this will help others move into open licensing more quickly and successfully in the future.
Insisting on open licenses is partly about walking our talk. We are committed to openness in principle, and believe that open innovation can facilitate economic and social progress. It's important for us to have policies in place that are built on this principle. We also need mechanisms that model how these principles and policies can work in action.
However, the big opportunity with open licensing is far more practical: it has the potential to dramatically increase the impact, reach and scale of the ideas we invest in as a foundation. Good content, technology and research released under an open license is far more likely to be picked up, used and recirculated than materials that require permission to use. Simply having to ask for permission either deters or slows people down when they are looking for materials to use. Open licensing takes this inefficiency away and increases the likelihood that your materials will be used. This is especially important for small bits of research, blog postings, podcasts, photos and the like which, over time can help build up a global pool of open knowledge that others can use to build great things.
There is also a hope that open licensing can increase quality and speed up development for some of our bigger projects. For example, open licensing - combined with networking and community building - will make it possible for teachers all across South Africa to contribute to our Siyavula free textbook project. Each teacher can build and improve on the work of those that came before. Over time, other groups of teachers from other countries may take the materials for their own use, improving them further and sharing them again (our licenses require this). While it's far from certain that this collaborative Wikipedia-effect will take hold with our educational materials, we don't even have a chance unless everything is under an open license.
With this combination of principles and pragmatism in mind, the Shuttleworth Foundation implemented its first open licensing policy in 2004.
Initially, this was simply a tacit agreement within the team that all materials created by staff, consultants or partners (aka grantees) would be under an 'open license'. While there was no written policy, openly licensing was regularly discussed during contract negotiations with partners and consultants. In most cases, contracts stated that the partner and the Foundation jointly owned whatever was created through the project in question, and that both would release resulting material under an open license. Members of the internal team released materials they had created under open licenses as well.
While this looked good on paper - clear, simple, aligned with our goals - making it work in practice was another matter
One challenge was getting partners to actually open license their materials. In some cases, partners who were unfamiliar with open licenses would balk at the open idea up front in contract negotiation process, leading to long, drawn out negotiations. In others, they would say 'I didn't know that's what you meant by open' towards the end of the project, and then refuse to apply an open license. And, in one case, the partner agreed to use an open license, but then used restrictively licensed artwork in their materials, making it impossible to actually apply the open license at the end of the day. All of this was exacerbated by the fact that the Foundation and partners were 50/50 owners of most materials. This joint ownership approach created a deadlock whenever there was a disagreement on open licensing.
Another major challenge was simply keeping track of materials and software that were created. From the beginning, a good number of partners were happy to see their materials openly licensed. However, most partners didn't have a place to post these materials on the Internet. The Foundation only had a basic web site and did not have a specific policy to track and archive materials created by partners. The result: much of the research and content created using Foundation resources in the early days is impossible to find today, even if it is under an open license. It turns out that a good archiving and knowledge management policy is just as important as the license itself.
The bottom line is that we didn't have the kind of innovation or viral impact that we were hoping for. Not even close. In fact, we basically had an 'open licensing principle' (this is what we believe) and not a functional open licensing policy (this is how it will work). In 2007, we set out to fix this.
An overhaul of the Foundation's open licensing policy began in 2007 and went into place in early 2008. This written policy aims for a more cut and dry open licensing approach, making it easier for partners to understand and discuss our approach up front. There is standard contract language. Expectations on which licenses can be used are clear. At the same time, efforts to address archiving and access issues are also underway.
As in the past, the new policy requires that all resources created using our staff or funds must be 'open'. However, the details are much more concrete: software, reports, manuals, research results and other materials must be released under an open license and posted using an open format on a publicly accessible web site. While it is possible to motivate for other options, the preferred licenses are the GNU General Public License for software and Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike Generic 3.0 for everything else. These obligations are clearly stated in standard consulting and partnership contract templates, and are often a point of discussion as contracts are developed.
We've also tried to resolve the problems created previously by co-ownership, making sure that every piece of new intellectual property created has a single owner. While who this owner is needs to be decided on a case by case [rather "case-by-case"?] basis, it should always be a person or entity who is likely to champion and promote the idea in question. In the many cases, this is the author or originating organization. They have the the most vested interest in making sure that people know about, use and improve their materials. However, this isn't necessarily the case with massively collective works, like a wiki or collectively written piece of software. In these cases, a single owner like the Foundation or a network organization who will steward the idea on behalf of the whole group may be a better option. This stewardship approach is more and more common in the open source world and is standard policy at companies like Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu Linux).
It's important to emphasize that ownership here is not about access or use: the open licensing policy ensures that everyone has access. Ownership is about stewardship; making sure there is someone to run with and protect the openness of an idea for the long haul.
The final issue we needed to address was the accessibility and archiving of materials. The recently re-launched Shuttleworth Foundation web site will help with this, offering a more flexible and easy to use place to post materials. However, this is just a small piece of the puzzle. There also need to be policies in place and people checking to make sure that everything produced gets posted somewhere. This needs to be built around a simple workflow that will ensure it becomes part of the natural processes that staff and partners use when they are producing and publishing materials.
One possible approach would be to require that partners post everything they create somewhere public (their own site, Wikipedia, an existing open access research or software repository, etc.). The Foundation would in turn commit to pointing to this research and keeping a copy for archival purposes. All of this would be included in consulting and partnership contracts. The Foundation will develop and begin to execute a plan along these lines in the second half of 2008.
It's worth noting that there has been some early traction with these ideas, even if they aren't fully implemented. Simply putting open licensing in our standard contract language has led to many useful conversations with partners, deepening their understanding of the whole open innovation cycle. In turn, this has had a bit of a viral effect, with partners using open licenses even in unrelated projects and agreements with other parties. Also, on an operational level, discussions about licensing are much faster as our stance is clear cut. We are no longer reinventing the wheel with every contract.
See also: Shuttleworth Foundation Open Resources Policy
While there is a long way to go with all of this, it feels like we're getting closer to the right track. Requiring open licensing and rigorously archiving will ensure that all the materials created with Foundation resources will always be open and accessible. Picking the right owner or steward will increase the likelihood that the ideas we back are promoted, that communities form around them and that improvements are integrated and re-released. Hopefully, time and tweaking will result in an approach that really works.
We certainly believe that there is enough potential here that others - foundations, governments, research institutes, universities - should be looking at open licensing very seriously. The practical reasons are clear: increased likelihood of impact and scaling for ideas they fund, in ways that could never even be imagined by design. There are also less tangible but equally important benefits that come from the faster feedback loops and the promotion of open, collaborative ways of working. It's worth taking the time to ask: what are my reasons for keeping this or that idea closed? Unless there is a real bottom line reason, set your ideas free.
Of course, choosing to adopt an open licensing policy doesn't mean you won't meet obstacles along the way. The most common source of push back [rather "push-back"?] is foundation lawyers. The vast majority of these lawyers don't understand, or don't even know about open licenses. As a result, they often flag vague, unspecified risks related to going open. This has happened to us on a number of occasions. In the end, our legal experts have backed our interest in open licensing, underscoring our belief that the real risk is that resources created with passion, ingenuity and money, are lost, wasted or do not achieve the impact which they should. There is no real legal reason not to adopt an open licensing policy.
Another possible roadblock is foundation staff who are obsessed with 'tracking impact'. We've heard people like this say: if it's open and people can take it, I can't track the impact of what I've funded. We would ask in response: is it more valuable to loosely observe that you've had a huge impact because people are using and sharing what you've funded, or to rigorously track the fact that you've had almost no impact at all? Is it better to know all your possibilities for impact in advance, or to open things up so that people can evolve what you've funded into ideas and impact that you could never have imagined?
If you do decide to 'go open', it's important to take the time to be thoughtful about how it happens. Our experience suggests that there are three issues to pay particular attention to: license choice (choose a license like CC BY SA that has maximum viral impact); ownership (think about who has a stake in making ideas travel and keeping them open); and accessibility (make a clear plan for access and archiving). These are three areas we tripped up on, and that we're now working to improve. Watch this space. We'll be back with an update as we learn more along the way.
A set of policy proposals titled Revolutionary Morality: The ANC and Business was presented to the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) in March and will be distributed to the party’s branches for debate ahead of the ANC’s national policy conference in June. Regarding education, the draft proposals for tackling the woes of the school system are in line with Education Minister Naledi Pandor’s thinking. The document provides assessments of higher education, adult basic education and training and further education and training (FET) colleges, without the complacent attribution of all current problems to apartheid. Policies and practices that are not delivering are identified for their urgent revision. It is proposed that government ‘needs to consider a more centralised control of the funding of national priorities’ in schooling. It says provincial funding may be suitable for ‘normal business’ but that special initiatives, including additional teachers for under-performing schools, might need their own measures, such as ring-fenced funding and conditional grants.
A central problem is that, despite increased overall allocations to education, provincial spending as a share of provinces’ budgets has been falling. The falls have been from 45.7% in 2002/03 to 44.7% the following year, while a fall to 42.8% is projected in 2008/09. The policy document says too many children still lack textbooks, insufficient time is spent on teaching, and resources often do not reach the intended beneficiaries. It points to fee increases and overcrowding as key problems in higher education, but does not offer specific remedies. On the largedrop-out rate and the time many students take to complete programmes, it says there ‘is an urgent need to focus on academic development’. On Abet, it finds the current approach is not working and proposes that literacy training be separated into formal Abet for those who want to study further, and general literacy for ‘those who simply want to read, write and be numerate’.
The proposals also suggest that FET colleges (at the core of addressing the country’s skills shortages) could become a national function, rather than a provincial one. On the development of the ICT industry, the policy proposal calls for immediate infrastructure interventions to improve access to affordable bandwidth and cutting telecoms costs.
The country needs maths skills for future development. But the maths failure rate at schools is high, good maths teachers are few and far between, and most maths teachers in state schools have not been trained in the outcomes-based education (OBE) system. The government’s sector education training authorities (Setas) are perceived to be underperforming, and have not been spending millions of rands earmarked for education and training. In 2006, only 10% of learners took maths on the higher grade. Even more alarming is that there were 1 000 fewer passes on the higher grade than the year before. In a chapter, ‘The State of Mathematics and Science Education: Schools are not Equal’, in the Human Sciences Research Council’s State of the Nation report (2005-2006), Dr Vijay Reddy says by most performance indicators, South Africa is performing poorly in mathematics. And in her six-year trend analysis of the situation, she notes that in 2002 the department of education revealed that the national average for numeracy was 30% at the grade three level. In response, Penny Vinjevold, the deputy director general: further education and training in the department of education, says: ‘It’s a long-term project. You don’t produce maths on the higher grade overnight.
The [standard grade] results have been spectacular.’ Regarding the 2006 results she adds: ‘Yes, we are down by about 1 000 on the higher grade. I don’t know what happened.’ Vinjevold says the government will train 2 400 teachers in a special course in 2007. There will be 80 master teachers teaching these 2 400 teachers. ‘Yes, it is a worrying situation and we are concerned ... and it’s not just South Africa that has this problem, it’s the whole world’. Lynne Rivett-Carnac, principal of an independent school and a maths educator, said, ‘The reality at South African schools is that, at primary level, there are almost no teachers who have any tertiary mathematics training [at state schools]. To expect these teachers to teach mathematics constructively, without the necessary support material, is totally unrealistic.’ Maths educator Floyd Mathibela, a lecturer at Tsiba College in the Western Cape, feels that there are a few reasons for the dismal pass rate in maths. For one, maths is perceived as a language that can only be understood if one understands English.
Despite opposition from many quarters, Mathibela feels that a feasible solution lies in ensuring that the proposed department of education initiative to provide elementary education in the mother tongue is implemented with the greatest care. ‘Black learners are struggling with maths due to the double-whammy of first having to understand English and then the maths behind every concept.’ He also noted that not enough resources are being invested in a practical adult education system that would help in fostering a culture of learning.
The Royal Society of South Africa, the oldest multi-disciplinary science-based society in South Africa, has as its aim to further all aspects of science. It holds an annual science essay competition for learners. In 2008 it celebrates its centenary, and as part of its centenary celebrations it will honour outstanding science teaching at the Further Education and Training (FET) level by awarding nine prestigious Centenary Medals in Life Sciences, Mathematics and Physical Sciences. In each of these categories the Royal Society of South Africa will award medals to Life-time Achievers, Young Achievers (35 years and under) and Rural Teachers. The closing date for nominations is August 31, 2007, and the winners will be invited to receive their medals at a ceremony in Cape Town during April 2008
Plagiarism is a very real problem in South African schools and universities. Dr Derek Swemmer, registrar of the University of the Witwatersrand which has about 24 000 students, says not all schools teach their pupils how to reference properly the sources they use when they compile projects and essays, and many students end up at university unaware that plagiarism is theft. ‘It depends on which school the student has been at. There are some schools where good referencing is taught, and some where that ethos doesn’t exist. The upshot is that for Wits, plagiarism is the ‘growth industry’ of student disciplinary issues, although very few of the plagiarism cases it deals with are incidents of intentional cheating. Many students simply do not understand that the thoughts and opinions found in the public arena, and especially on the Internet, cannot be appropriated as their own’, says Swemmer. Probably at least 50% of all student disciplinary processes at Wits involve plagiarism. However, the new school curriculum is based on principles of teaching pupils to think for themselves and has created a space for research skills through its focus on what is called continuous assessment, with 25% of a pupil’s final mark comprising points for projects and essays done throughout the year. ‘It happens, but we don’t tolerate it,’ says Rob le Roux, headmaster of Cape Town’s Westerford High School. ‘It’s one of the critical parts of outcomesbased education (OBE) ... proper referencing skills,’ says Le Roux.
Prof David Benatar, head of the University of Cape Town’s philosophy department, said, ‘I am never seduced by the claim ‘we are engaged in OBE’. I am certainly not seeing it in the students.’ This means universities are spending a lot of time teaching pupils that plagiarism is bad, and how to reference the sources they use properly. Many South African tertiary education institutions, and some schools, use antiplagiarism mechanisms such as the website Turn It In, which allows lecturers and teachers to submit essays about which they have suspicions for cross-referencing. Plagiarism is not unique to SA, and other countries that use OBE in schools have faced hard questions on whether allowing course work has opened up a Pandora’s box. Penny Vinjevold, the national education department’s deputy director-general of further education and training said that ‘there is more opportunity for plagiarism, but teachers must set a task with a twist, something that requires a lot of application. Teachers must take plagiarism seriously. They must give zero if they pick it up ... but it’s nothing to panic about. We do our best to eliminate it’.
Microsoft South Africa has introduced a pioneering language programme that will give a massive boost to promoting multilingualism in South Africa. The Language Interface Pack will initially be available in Afrikaans, isiZulu and Setswana and may be accessed through Office 2007. Microsoft said that schools that are part of the programme will receive computers with software already installed in the language they use. The software will be free of charge and all teachers and learners could download it. The next languages to be developed are Sesotho sa lebowa and isiXhosa. The initiative echoes Education Minister Naledi Pandor’s sentiments about the need to develop and use the nine indigenous languages in schools. Speaking at a conference on language policy implementation at Unisa last year, Pandor said, ‘The role of language and access to language skills is critical to enabling individuals to realise their full potential to participate in and contribute to the social, cultural and intellectual life of the South African society.’
The project is a product of ‘partnership’ between various role players, notably the Pan South African Language Board (Pansalb), the National Language Board, various government departments, translators and the academic community. Microsoft started with Afrikaans, isiZulu and Setswana because they ‘are technologically advanced in terms of the use of [computer] phrases’. Siphiwe Ntuli, who teaches grade nine at Stanger Secondary School in KwaZulu-Natal, said the school started to use the software early last year and since then learners have shown great enthusiasm and drive to use the computers. ‘I found that learners enjoy working on the computer and have grown in confidence simply because it is in the language they understand. There is that sense of closeness to it and as a result they are free to explore and learn new things on their own,’ said Ntuli.
Says Professor Gertie Pretorius, director of the Institute for Child and Adult Guidance in Johannesburg: ‘Gifted children may present an entire continuum of behaviours. A gifted child may come across as uninterested because she is not stimulated and does not find the work challenging enough. On the other hand, a child like this may come across as fidgety, hyperactive or ‘naughty’, because she does not fit in on an academic level with the rest of her peers. Socially, gifted children are often seen as strange or different, with interests that do not align with those of their peers.’ According to the experts, the earlier the problem is detected and dealt with, the better for the child, the parents and, naturally, for the teacher. Professor Shirley Kokot is president of the National Association for Gifted and Talented Children in South Africa.
Constant pleas from parents led to her founding Radford House in 1996, the only school of its kind in Africa, and one of few in the world dealing exclusively with gifted children. ‘Our mission is the optimum realisation of intellectual potential as well as healthy emotional, social and physical development for the benefit of self and society,’ says Kokot. Professor Pretorius said that in the department of education, an inclusion policy is followed, which means that there are no government funded institutions [exclusively for the gifted child]. Radford House differs from mainstream schooling in that there is more learner involvement, says Kokot. ‘We instil thinking skills and research skills, using content or knowledge for a purpose. It’s simply good education. Every teacher who comes to Radford has to be retrained, and classes are, of necessity, small. Everything is taught thematically. Although schooling at Radford is largely centred on the primary grades, the school now caters for grades 5 and onwards, due to the reluctance of learners to leave the school. Children in the higher grades work towards the Cambridge examinations, choosing their subjects for O levels.
The government of Queensland is looking at training 200 South Africans as freight train drivers in a bid to contribute to the country’s skills development. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie said that there was a potential to build a training partnership, as there were many similarities between Queensland and South Africa’s railway systems as both were operating a narrow-gauge system. He said that Queensland could offer expertise in various areas, such as maintenance, signalling and freightforwarding systems. Beattie, accompanied by a business delegation, was touring South Africa to expand international partnerships and strengthen trade and investment ties.
Zambia will establish a centre to train researchers in information and communication technology skills for scientific research into the peaceful application of nuclear science and technology, and also in areas such as agriculture, communication, health and education. The centre, based at the National Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research (NISIR) in Lusaka, is backed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has provided $24m worth of equipment. Researchers from any African country will be welcome to use the centre for online research. Zambia is the second African country, after Rwanda, tocommission a centre to provide training in information and communication technologies.
The government of Botswana is seeking a private partnership to overcome delays in getting its longawaited science and technology university off the ground. The deadline for opening the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) has been moved from 2007 to 2009. Badumetse Hobona of Botswana’s Ministry of Education, the coordinator of the $1.5b project, says that a public-private partnership will make the 2009 target possible. So far both local and international companies have expressed interest. The private sector will not only be involved in the financing but also in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of the facility, and will also participate in the development and delivery of BIUST curricula to ensure its relevance to the needs of the country. The government hopes BIUST will produce a workforce capable of participating in technology transfer and facilitating economic development. Legislation for the establishment of the university is now in place, and a 1 700-hectare plot has been purchased in Palapye, halfway between Gaborone and Francistown.
The High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) has been awarded a one third share of the €1m 2007 European Union Descartes prize for excellence in transnational science projects, sharing the prize equally with two other winning teams. HESS has revolutionized existing astronomical observation techniques and increased knowledge and understanding of the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond. The HESS gamma-ray telescopes are operated in Namibia by a consortium of scientists from Germany, France, the UK, Ireland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Armenia, South Africa and Namibia.
IDC forecasts that laptops will overtake desktop PCs as the dominant form of computer in 2011. The demand for desktops will continue to slowly grow at a declining rate as portable PCs become faster and more efficient. The laptop market will grow by 16.1% year-on-year to 2011, compared to 3.8% for desktop PCs. World-wide, 82m portable computers and 140m desktop PCs were shipped in 2006. Compared to 2005, the numbers of laptops shipped rose by 26.3%, while desktops increased by only 2%. 2005 was the first year that laptops outsold desktop computers in the US. The shift away from fixed machines reflects the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce and the ubiquity of wireless networks.
China has overtaken Japan and the United Kingdom to become the world’s second largest producer of scientific research papers in 2006, after the United States. According to the Institute of Science and Technology Information of China, Chinese scientists published 172 000 papers in major international journals and international academic meeting proceedings in 2006, accounting for 8.4% of the world’s total. Cited papers first-authored by Chinese scientists – an important indicator of scientific creativity – increased by 25.3% in 2006, while the number of times they were cited increased 28.3%. However, China remains 13th in terms of total citation numbers. Chinese papers published in international academic meeting proceedings increased by 15.8% in 2006, despite a global decline of 9%. This suggests that Chinese scientists are increasingly cooperating with foreign scientists.
A competition offering awards for the most entrepreneurial teacher in every African country with a top prize of US$10 000 was recently launched by UK-based education charity Teach A Man To Fish in partnership with Educating Africa, a foundation committed to introducing cost effective and sensible education initiatives throughout Africa. According to Nik Kafka, managing director of the charity, ‘there are remarkable teachers across Africa – extraordinary individuals who ‘go the extra mile’ to find creative ways to bring education to their students. They transform limited resources into astonishing results, drive change within their communities and develop educational initiatives which are copied nationwide.
The 1st Pan-African Prize for Entrepreneurial Teachers will recognize those teachers, and acknowledge the huge contribution they make towards improving the lives of their fellow Africans’. Entries were assessed against four criteria of innovation, impact, leadership and creative use of limited resources. The 1st and 2nd prizes were awarded to teachers from Kenya, while the 3rd prize was awarded to a teacher from Cameroon. The country prize winner for South Africa was Steven Carver.
According to Ajaga Nji, deputy vice-chancellor for research and cooperation at Cameroon’s Dschang University, and one of Africa’s foremost thinkers on the causes of poverty, science education is the key to reducing poverty in Africa. ‘The problems of persistent misery and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are not caused by a lack of technology, nor an absence of capital’, he said. Rather, they are the fault of a ‘stifling environment’ in which Africans cannot ‘shake off the yoke of poverty’. According to Nji, the answer to poverty lies with educating poor people through schemes such as open and distance learning. ‘This type of education can reach many people at a low cost, as it needs little infrastructure, such as lecture halls and classrooms’.
The consensus of delegates at a Science, Technology & Innovation (ST&I) symposium recently held in Uganda was that the developing world must come up with new institutional working practices and structures if ST&I are to thrive and produce socio-economic growth. Philip Aduma of Maseno University, Kenya, said there was a great need to refocus practices at universities and ST&I institutions in Africa and the rest of the developing world, to better meet the scientific needs of society. ‘Most African countries consume products whose research and development have been done elsewhere, like the pharmaceutical products found in our chemists’. He said the majority of universities have no technology planning officers and scientific work was uncoordinated. Aduma added that lack of research and development funding was one reason for this, but that institutions are also to be blamed for not establishing the right internal structures to generate knowledge, promote their activities or apply their knowledge to society’s problems.
Yaye Kene Gassama, chairperson of the African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology (AMCOST) recently stated at the Third Ordinary Session of AMCOST in Kenya, that there is an encouraging emergence of goodwill towards science, technology and innovation among Africa’s political leadership, but what is now needed is collective commitment. Gassama urged the engagement of greater numbers of people in the implementation of national, regional and continental ST&I agendas, including scientists, policymakers and the general public. She also requested monitoring mechanisms to gauge success and ensure transparency and accountability. The Kenyan minister of science and technology called for a reward scheme for excellence in ST&I, as well as improved opportunities for young people. He also highlighted the need for more African women in the sector. He said African governments must make deliberate efforts to promote programmes to talented young women, and called for strategic partnerships to get more women involved in policymaking. Elsewhere at the meeting, UNESCO announced plans for three science capacity building projects in Africa to enhance the ability of African Union member states to deliver science and technology programmes.
Amazon.com has launched its own e-book reader, Kindle, with free wireless connectivity. Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said the online retailer spent three years developing the Kindle reader, which the company is selling online for $399. Kindle is thinner than most paperbacks and weighs 292g. Yet it can hold about 200 books, along with newspapers, magazines and an entire dictionary. Readers can buy anddownload books directly to Kindle – without a PC – through Sprint Nextel’s high-speed EV-DO cellular network without fees or contract commitments. They can also take notes on what they read and store them on Amazon’s servers. Sony already offers an e-book reader that imitates the look of paper by using innovative screen technology. The Kindle screen takes a similar approach and has no backlight to reduce battery use and eyestrain. Bestsellers and new releases will typically sell for $9.99.
Google is to supply computer software (Google Apps) free of charge to students and government workers in Rwanda and Kenya, in a bid to put them on the technical footing of more developed countries. Rwandan government officials and students in both countries will have access to free communications tools including email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing. Three Rwandan institutions (the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology) will initially have access to the Google Apps Education Edition, while the country’s government ministries will be using the Google Apps Standard Edition. During the first phase, around 20 000 users in Rwanda will have access to these services, while a broader countrywide rollout will follow shortly afterwards. In Kenya, the University of Nairobi’s 50 000 students will be the first to be offered Google Apps for Education. These services will be extended to 150 000 Kenyan students at universities across the country. Because Google Apps is delivered via a web browser and has few of the maintenance headaches of traditional software, Google sees the opportunity to reach millions of new users in emerging markets and grab an early share of this new business. The Kenya and Rwanda deals are Google’s first in sub-Saharan Africa.
A new Internet website, Iyaloo Shili Internet Project, to link up rural organisations, schools and small businesses was recently launched in Namibia. According to the project founder, Kashindi Ausiku, her organisation has already created 14 websites, some free for rural schools and others at reasonable fees. The sites that have been created are currently running on the Internet and can be accessed at: www.namtranslations.iway.na/iyaloo.htm. ‘There are great possibilities to be able to see all the rural villages and remote towns on the Internet. We just need to market the concept. And most importantly to transfer website development skills to the regions’.
MXit, the mobile instant messaging solution that offers users a simple and inexpensive way to stay in touch with one another, has further broken down the barriers to effective communication by launching the solution in three more official languages of South Africa, ie, Afrikaans, Xhosa and isiZulu. According to Paul Stemmet, general manager of MXit Lifestyle, ‘everyone wants the ability to chat to their friends and family members in the language of their choice, and making MXit available in several of South Africa’s official languages means that we can cater to such needs while at the same time increasing our user base’. As an example, he refers to recent research by TNS Research Surveys and the UCT Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing that suggests that the youth market, likely to speak Xhosa or isiZulu as a home language, is worth about R7b. Stemmet says that by offering the youth market a solution that speaks to them – and allows them to speak to their friends – in their own language, MXit hopes to further build on its already impressive subscriber base of 5.4m. He believes that the new languages, coupled with the inexpensive nature of chatting via MXit (at a cost of less than 1c, as opposed to approximately 80c for a SMS) will ensure that the current trend of about 10 000 to 12 000 new registrations signing up daily will continue.
The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has recently officially launched the YISS which was developed to (a) enhance science and technology literacy among the public in general and the youth in particular and (b) enrol more and representative youths with talent and potential into science, engineering and technology-based careers. Achieving these goals will go a long way towards addressing some of the skills shortages in South Africa. The target audiences of the YISS are mainly school-going youths and undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. To redress the historical legacy in these knowledge areas, youths from disadvantaged backgrounds (especially young people with disabilities, blacks and young women) are being particularly targeted. Set targets include, among others, doubling the number of youths who participate in the National Science Week activities; and identifying and nurturing at least 5 000 talented youths from disadvantaged background through DST’s maths and science camps by 2010.The implementation of the YISS will be monitored through a tracking system that will be managed by the Human Sciences Research Council.
Bursaries in physics and electronics are on offer this month (November) to postgraduate students across Southern Africa from South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope initiative, as part of a programme to strengthen their pool of expertise in these disciplines. Ten bursaries will be awarded to undergraduate students and a further ten to school-leavers. Half of the school-leaver’s bursaries have been set aside for applicants from South Africa’s poverty-stricken Northern Cape. Kim de Boer, manager of human capital development for SKA South Africa, said the bursary programme is aimed at encouraging Africa’s brightest youngsters to follow careers in astronomy and engineering. The SKA project will involve building thousands of satellite-like dishes of 10-15m in diameter to monitor the sky for radio waves. It should open up new areas of science and mathematics and eventually provide insight into the origin of the universe. South Africa’s Northern Cape province and Western Australia have been shortlisted as possible sites for the SKA radio telescope. A final announcement will be made in 2010 and construction work will start in 2014.
According Ann Bernstein and Sandy Johnston from the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), ‘the creation of the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) is a clear sign that the ‘skills revolution’ promised by the adoption of a comprehensive skills development strategy in 1997 has failed to materialise’. A recent examination of four key areas of skills development (ie, sector education and training authorities (Setas), artisans, public service skills shortages and Jipsa itself) by the CDE raised questions and issues from across the education and skills landscape that illustrate the range and depth of the current challenge.
Bernstein and Johnston argue that the country needs to move beyond crisis management measures. ‘We need to ensure that SA is not locked into an approach where we have to give each new generation a ‘second education’. We need to start from the harsh reality that in at least three-quarters of our public secondary schools, little if any learning takes place; we fail to produce the desired growing number of maths and science matriculants at a level necessary for tertiary education, despite the existence of a specialist maths and science school programme – Dinaledi – since 2001; and we have high unemployment rates for ill-trained graduates. We cannot shift the burden of totally inadequate educational performance on to employers generally and business in particular through the medium of skills development. It is important not to expect private enterprises to fill the enormous gulf left by a school system that fails most learners.'
Since the launch of Google Earth in 2005, the basic free version has been downloaded over 250m times. Microsoft has spent a couple of hundreds of millions of dollars on Virtual Earth, mainly to acquire imagery, which now totals 14 petabytes. These and other virtual globes are being put to a wide range of uses – some unexpected, such as the use of Google Earth to coordinate relief efforts in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Tax inspectors use Google Earth to establish whether people are correctly reporting the size of their properties. However, while geobrowsers are an effective mean construct a geoweb, which will inter alia combine virtual maps with other sources of data in ‘mashups’.
However, geowebs may also have bad uses. For example, it appears that Google Earth may have been used by Iraqi insurgents planning attacks on a British base in the city of Basra. The easy access to satellite imagery enabled the clear identification of individual buildings and vehicles.
It is an obvious and well-known fact that computers have become cheaper, more capable, faster and more commonplace over the last 25 years. The Economist, however, claims that much less progress has been made when it comes to ease of use; people often find computer control systems (user interfaces) too complex; consequently, the full productive potential of computers is not being realised. The solution may lie in gesture-sensitive multi-touch screens, which make computing feasible in new places (especially public ones) by dispensing with keyboards. Another alternative to the mouse as a pointing device is to use a gaze-tracking camera, which works out where the user is looking and moves an on-screen pointer accordingly. Of course, making computers simpler to use will require smarter software, such as context aware systems. The logical conclusion of new input devices, sensors and smarter software to anticipate users’ needs, will be for computing to blend into the background. In this ubiquitous computing model computers will no longer be used explicitly – they will simply be there.
The number of patent applications has accelerated in recent years, resulting in huge backlogs and lengthy delays in granting patent rights. In an attempt to overcome these problems the USA Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Britain’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and the European Patent office are exploring and evaluating a radical change – opening the process up to internet-based collaboration. The scheme, known as ‘Peer to Patent’, enables anybody who is interested to comment on a patent application via the internet. ‘Peer to Patent’ builds on the notion that practitioners and researchers within a particular field have all the relevant ‘prior art’ at their fingertips already (thus obviating the need for a patent examiner to find evidence that others have already done everything claimed in the patent, thereby proving that an invention is not novel). All the patent officer therefore needs to do is to get that community to tell it what it already knows. ‘Peer to Patent’ does this using the latest web-based collaboration tools. A one-year pilot ‘Peer to Patent’ scheme was launched by the USPTO on 15 June 2007. The scheme will scrutinise 250 patent applications in computer-related fields.
A new website, the Free Knowledge for ICT Literacy Portal has been launched that offers an information resource on free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) with the focus on the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) sector. It aims to provide free learning resources for ICT literacy using FLOSS and to improve access to online information. The portal is the initiative of the Community Education Computer Society (CECS) in collaboration with the Meraka Institute and with support from the OSISA. IBM has released a free office suite for Windows and Linux, Lotus Symphony, which can be downloaded from the Symphony website. Symphony is made up of three applications: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. Microsoft has announced that it was submitting its shared licences, which include the permissive licence, community licence and reference licence, to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for certification as true open source licences. Other companies that have had licences certified by the OSI include Apple, Nokia, RealNetworks and Sybase. Two of the more popular and better known OSIapproved licences are the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and the Mozilla Public Licence, which is used by Firefox.
Webkinz are essentially stuffed animal pets, but the difference between Webkinz and other similar toys is the business model behind them. By melding the old world of toy retailing with participation in an online community Webkinz shows a deep understanding of how to use the concept of virtual worlds to their full advantage. Children are spending more time online but still love old-fashioned stuffed toys. By buying a Webkinz animal a child gets access to a year’s use of the online Wekinz World where he feeds and take care of his animal, plays games, amasses ‘money’ to buy virtual products for the pets and chat to other owners.
SA’s first mobile e-learning initiative was launched at the Abel T Motshoane High School in Winterveld. The Classmate PCs used are mobile and capable of connecting wirelessly to the school’s network and the Internet via WiMAX. The project is expected to be rolled out nationwide in the coming years and was a collaborative effort between government and industry players such as Intel, IBM Microsoft and Telkom.
A new online tool called WikiScanner makes it possible to establish what edits have been made on Wikipedia. The free Scanner captures the Internet Protocol addresses used in anonymous Wikipedia edits in the past five years. These are then combined with public information about which IP addresses belong to whom to reveal Wikipedia changes made from computers assigned to many organisations. In reaction, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says ‘It is fabulous and I strongly support it.’
Microsoft has launched a pay-as-you-go computing system aimed at making its office software more accessible for people in emerging markets. Microsoft will charge R199 for a three-month subscription to use Microsoft Office 2007 and first-time users will get an extra three months for free. After that, customers will top up their subscription as they go. This will be more affordable forthose who can not manage the upfront fee. The technology is only available on new computers. The technology, which is based on the pre-paid cellphone model that has proved a hit throughout the developing world, may be available in other markets at a later date. The initiative is part of Microsoft’s push into developing countries where fewer people have access to computers. However, the company is facing competition from the free open source Linux operating system, and is therefore seeking ways to make its software more affordable.
American space agency NASA is offering generous prizes to anyone who can solve a new series of problems that their space engineers cannot. The aim is to tap the largely ignored – but knowledgeable – community of space junkies and garden-shed inventors worldwide, rewarding innovation and fresh design. Since the contests replace traditional research grants, Nasa is prepared to reward successful participants with large sums of money – and the inventors retain commercial rights to more money further down the line. Some of the current and forthcoming challenges include the following:
The One Laptop Per Child programme and Intel have settled their differences, with chipmaker Intel having now joined the board of the campaign and making contributions to funding. In terms of the new partnership, Intel and One Laptop Per Child will seek ways to package their computers together for overseas governments. For example, Intel's Classmate, which has to be plugged in, might be an option for urban settings, while the XO laptops, which use very little power and can be mechanically recharged by hand, could go into rural districts. The biggest benefit for the group could be Intel's work with the project on future technical developments, which will deepen the pool of software and hardware designers available to perfect the XO machines. Although several countries have expressed interest in the $175 laptop (not –yet - $100!), One Laptop Per Child's leaders have refrained from saying which governments will be first to officially sign contracts to buy the machines. The project needs orders for three million laptops for its low-cost supply chain to be economically viable.
Research released by Dimension Data shows inter alia the following:
In other words, people would rather email than speak to each other on the telephone. This raises issues and concerns about, for instance, how effective and meaningful email communication is when dealing with problem resolution and discussing complex issues. Moreover, email communication may be less secure, thereby having a negative impact on productivity as users wrestle with growing volumes of emails.
PC World has presented a prototype of what it claims is the UK’s first truly carbon-neutral massmarket PC. Due to be launched in October, it uses between 13 and 17% of the energy of a standard desktop computer. Lighter than a standard mini-tower, the PC (which does not yet have a name) is easily moved. It doesn't have a fan, which saves energy and also makes it very quiet. PC World intends to offset the carbon emitted in the production and delivery of the machines, and plans to offset some of its customers' carbon emissions by giving them an energy-saving light bulb or two. All the packaging will be produced from recycled materials, and there are no instruction manuals – everything has been put on CD. Computer manufacturers have long been singled out for their impact on the environment. A study carried out by the UN found that the manufacture of a 24kg PC burns 240kg of fossil fuels, produces 22kg of harmful chemicals and consumes 1.5 tons of water. By contrast, the manufacture of cars or fridges only consumes between one and two times' their weight in fossil fuels. According to the European Environmental Agency, the volume of electronic rubbish is rising three times faster than other forms of municipal waste.
Nicholas Negroponte, who launched the project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab two years ago before spinning One Laptop into a separate non-profit organisation, had as the main design motive the goal of stimulating education better than previous computer endeavours have, and with an affordable PC.
In November 2006 the first 10 units of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO-1 were hand-assembled to evaluate the system’s many custom components and to perform systems integration testing. The machines are being made by Quanta Computer Inc, and countries will get versions specific to their own languages. Governments or donors will buy the laptops for children to own, along with associated server equipment for their schools. The project has so far received $29m in funding from companies including Google, News Corp and Red Hat.
The laptop has been developed to be as low cost, durable and simple to use as possible. The aim is to sell the machine to developing countries for $100 but the current cost of the machine is about $150. By July this year, several million are expected to reach Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, N igeria, Libya, Pakistan, Thailand and Palestine. Three more African countries have expressed interest, and the Inter-American Development Bank is trying to get the laptops to multiple Central American countries.
India’s government originally expressed interest but backed out. Even though Brazil plans to take part, it is hedging its bets by evaluating $400 ‘Classmate PCs’ from Intel. To keep costs and power demands low, the XO uses a slim version of the Linux operating system, a 366-megahertz processor and no hard disk drive. Instead it has 512 megabytes of flash memory, plus USB ports where more storage can be attached. It has wireless connectivity, a built-in camera and a colour display that converts to monochrome so it’s easier to see in sunlight.
The first children to try out the XO are expected to do so in February, and when they turn on the small green-and-white computers they will be greeted by a basic home screen with a stick-figure icon at the centre, surrounded by a white ring. The entire desktop has a black frame with more icons. The ‘neighbourhood’ (not ‘desktop’) signifies the student at the middle. The ring contains programs the student is running, which can be launched by clicking the appropriate icon in the black frame.
When the learner opts to view the entire ‘neighbourhood’, other stick figures in different colours might appear on the screen. Those would indicate schoolmates who are nearby, as detected by the computers’ built-in wireless networking capability. Moving the PC’s cursor over the classmates’ icons will pull up their names or photos. With further clicks the students can chat with each other or collaborate on projects.
Negroponte said he deliberately wanted to avoid giving children computers they might someday use in an office. ‘In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is that children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint ... I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.’
Folders are not the organizing metaphor on the XO, because folders force users to remember where they stored their information rather than what they used it for. Instead, the XO machines are organized around a ‘journal,’ an automatically generated log of everything the user has done on the laptop. Users can review their journals to see their work and retrieve files created or altered in those sessions.
The open - source user interface, nicknamed Sugar, has received mixed reviews. Some have said that even as Sugar avoids complexities inherent in familiar operating systems, it just creates a different set of complexities to be mastered. Wayan Vota, who launched the OLPCNews.com blog to monitor the project’s development because he is sceptical it can achieve its aims, called Sugar ‘amazing, a beautiful redesign.’ Vota is director of Geekcorps, an organization that facilitates technology volunteers in developing countries.
One Laptop plans to send a specialist to each school who will stay for a month helping teachers and students get started. But Negroponte believes that children ultimately will learn the system by exploring it and then teaching each other. The OPLC XO-1 will be available to the general public in 2008, but buyers will have to pay for two, with the second going to the developing world.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ninemillion.org. global campaign, launched last year to provide sports and education for 9 million refugee children around the world, has received a boost from Microsoft. The software giant has announced that every Internet search performed at click4thecause. live.com using Microsoft’s Live Search facility will raise $0.01 for the campaign. Microsoft will guarantee a minimum donation of $100 000, with a maximum donation payable by Microsoft of $250 000, equivalent to 25m search queries. Ninemillion.org was launched as a new public and private-sector initiative. Two-thirds of the money raised will be distributed by UNHCR to support education in refugee communities.
An examination of emerging wireless technologies for developing countries by Gunasekaran and Harmantiz concludes that the network readiness of such a country indicates the ability of its principal stakeholders (government, citizens, businesses) to leverage the potential of information and communication technology. WiFi and WiMax are not only revolutionizing broadband communications in the developed world but they also offer to developing countries the opportunity to bridge or even ‘leap- frog’ the digital divide that may exist in their communities and to increase the number of people who are connected.
A quick adaptation to such next-generation wireless technologies will offer advantages over traditional wired infrastructures, and policymakers should actively seek suitable strategies to promote these vital broadband technologies. The review proposes a strategic wireless framework to address challenges in three different economic sectors of a developing country: the metro economy, which is well-urbanized and integrated with the global economy; the sub-urban economy, which has niche economic or development activities compared to the metro economy; and the rural economy, characterized by informal economic activity and poverty.
It is unfortunate that wireless connectivity (with the exception of voice communication) is largely the domain of the formal business sector and the well-off individual in South Africa, and that there appears to be no strategic wireless framework in place for the sub-urban and rural communities in South Africa.
The executive director of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, Mohamed H. A. Hassan, says that developing countries must build world-class universities to be serious players in the knowledge based global economy. Traditionally, technology has always flowed from developed to developing countries, with the scant resources and expertise in the developing world used to address apparently more immediate concerns, such as increasing agricultural productivity and providing greater access to safe drinking water.
But such thinking ignored the fact that many of these challenges could not be met without first building indigenous capacity in science and technology, and for the poorest developing countries, ‘outsourcing’ the development and assessment of technology and innovation has been economically catastrophic, with policies designed to alleviate poverty and to create wealth suffering as a result.
Hassan says that developing countries are now changing course and seeking to build their own scientific and technological capabilities, but if technology transfer is to truly benefit those most in need and contribute to making the global economy more equitable, much more effort is required. He calls on universities across the developing world to play a central role in technology transfer. They should provide not only training and research in scientific disciplines, but also in science and technology management.
Developing countries must also encourage internal technology transfer, from universities to the private sector, by creating incentives for researchers to apply their knowledge to technological and policy innovation. Strategically, this means changing universities’ culture from institutions that exist apart from their societies to institutions that are integral to them. Tactically, this means creating such mechanisms as technology transfer offices within universities. Increasingly, technology transfer aims to help alleviate poverty, create wealth, improve public health and ensure long-term environmental well-being.
Universities have an unprecedented opportunity to participate in this effort. But they can only do so if they engage in fundamental reforms to become, not only superior sources of information, but also unique mechanisms for promoting innovation.
In South Africa today the majority of learners and schools do not have access to ICT infrastructure. Only 3 in 10 schools (there are 26 000 schools for 12m learners) have access to ICT. Only 1 in 10 schools have access to the Internet, and this is mainly through slow, inefficient and expensive dial-up connections. The department of education has plans, together with the provinces, to place ICTinfrastructure in all schools.
The department of education is finalising an implementation plan for the National Teacher Development Framework where all teacher development is addressed, from initial training to continuing professional teacher development. Within this, the department is developing guidelines for teacher development in ICT so that teachers who wish to excel in the use of ICT for teaching and learning will be able to do so. To date the department has trained more than 22 000 teachers to use ICT in education. This has been carried out through partnership agreements with Intel, CompTia and Microsoft. A principal’s guide to implement and use ICT in schools has also been developed and distributed.
A quality science and mathematics education at the secondary level with adequate numbers of successful matriculants with good passes in these subjects is one of the prerequisites for a country’s ability to compete in the technologically-driven global economy. The poorest pass marks in South Africa’s 2006 matric exams have been recorded in science and mathematics. According to newspaper reports, South Africa is considering recruiting Zimbabwean science and mathematics teachers to improve pass rates in the two subjects.
A number of Zimbabwean teachers had applied for posts as science and mathematics teachers. ‘We don’t have a crisis, but we don’t have many trained maths and science teachers. We anticipate a crisis. If we can’t get enough maths and science teachers, we will look into this pool of Zimbabwean teachers,’ said Education Minister, Naledi Pandor. Critics have however said that South Africa should not exploit the situation in Zimbabwe by taking advantage of its ability to offer higher wages to lure its neighbour’s teachers. According to the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ), Zimbabwe lost 4 000 teachers to neighbouring countries such as South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia in 2005 alone.
The department of education’s Thutong project aims to connect schooling communities with theirteachers through the internet. Thutong is an online education experience-based web portal and means place of learning in SeTswana. Its purpose is to provide learners and educators with information for use in the classroom and ideas for projects, providing students and teachers with printable, quality-assured materials which support the outcomes-based education curriculum.
Specifically, the portal provides access to a range of curriculum and learner support materials; professional development programmes for teachers; and administration and management resources for schools. It also provides education policy documents and general information related to the latest developments in the country’s educational system. In total it has 21 000 learning objects for use by teachers and learners. The portal is interactive and is intended to be open to all. Priority is given to disadvantaged and rural schools. Users can download curriculum materials, create their own materials and share them with others, and interact with their peers throughout the country and abroad. Thutong carries news supplied by provincial departments of education, official news providers and organisations involved in the education arena.
All educational content contained in the portal has been cross-referenced against the National Curriculum Statement (NCS). The online resources are also designed to facilitate professional and lifelong learning. According to the portal’s organisers, ‘The content is highly relevant to the lives and learning contexts of South African learners, educators, education managers/administrators and parents. The portal aims to expand and become a representative of users’ interests and needs.’
A key partner to the Thutong portal is the Mindset Network, which provides assistance through a satellite-based technology platform that distributes high-quality multimedia educational content. Mindset provides educational materials as well as training in the use of the associated technology. The organisation has installed receiving equipment in more than 1 500 schools and 250 hospitals and clinics. Content is also available in 1.5m homes via satellite broadcast. In December 2006, Mindset Network was chosen from more than 160 nominees as the winner of the 2006 Development Gateway Award on the theme of youth. The award was presented at the International Telecommunications Union Telecom World 2006 in Hong Kong.
The partners in the Thutong project include the Department of Education, the South African Institute for Distance Education, Multichoice Africa Foundation, the Gauteng Institute for Education Development, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, SchoolNet South Africa, Mindset, Reusable Objects, SABC Education and M-Web.
The SCALE-UP project at some American universities is an effort to create studio classes that would be large enough to provide an effective, yet affordable alternative to large classes taught via the standard lecture/laboratory format. The Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) Project establishes a highly collaborative, hands-on, computer-rich, interactive learning environment. Research indicates that students should collaborate on interesting tasks and be deeply involved with the material they are studying. SCALE-UP promotes active learning in a redesigned studio- style classroom of 100 students or more.
Class time is spent primarily on hands-on activities, simulations, and interesting questions as well as hypothesis-driven labs. Students sit in three groups of three students at a number of round tables. Instructors circulate and work with teams and individuals, engaging them in Socratic-like dialogues. Rigorous evaluations of SCALE-UP find that ability to solve problems is improved, conceptual understanding is increased, attitudes are improved, failure rates are drastically reduced (especially for women and minorities), and performance in following (physics and engineering) classes is positively impacted.
For the past 10 years, the Loudoun County (Virginia, US) public school system has been a leader in introducing the latest technology into classrooms. One advanced-technology tool that Loudoun uses is the SMART Board, a touch-screen white board that eliminates the traditional chalk and erasers associated with teaching. A teacher writes on the screen with a finger, and whatever is written is stored electronically. Students can retrieve the information later by visiting the teacher’s Web site.
Betty Korte, a maths teacher, said the technology has made it easier to teach her grade 9 and 10 students. ‘In maths, where a lot of abstract concepts need to be understood, I can use a lot of the features to make it more real for the kids,’ Korte said. ‘I’ve been able to see the difference in their ability to understand these concepts before and after using the tool. In my mind, there’s just no comparison.’ Loudoun has equipped each of its 45 schools with one or two SMART Boards and aims to have a SMART Board in every classroom by 2010. Loudon offers online courses through a partnership with George Mason University.
Students who can’t complete classes because of long-term illness or scheduling problems, may register for online classes. The classes are self-taught and teachers answer questions via e-mail. The pass rate for online courses has been exceptionally high and students have given the service high marks. Loudoun believes the next big thing will be wireless connectivity at its schools.
An international survey (of 34 countries) conducted by Grant Thornton shows 48% of South African private businesses see lack of skills as the biggest constraint to business growth. The corresponding figure in the construction sector was 72%, while the figure for the services sector was 52%. It was clear from the survey that the skills shortage was a global concern – for the first time in the history of the survey workforce issues topped the chart as a global concern for growth. However, South African businesses were the hardest hit – about 10 percentage points higher than the global average. A lack of skills development, emigration and crime are some of the factors which contribute to this problem. When asked about the areas of regulation that had the biggest impact on the ability to grow, labour laws were ranked number one at 28%.
Since 2000, 340 promising young women scientists from 35 countries have received national fellowships from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the cosmetics company L’Oréal, as part of their efforts to foster global scientific cooperation. The fellowships allow doctoral and post-doctoral female scientists to conduct research in laboratories outside their home countries, and the research topics selected often relate to local populations’ needs or original fields of research. Four of the latest recipients are from countries new to the programme: Gabon, Mongolia, Nepal and Slovenia. The other countries of origin of the winners are Mozambique, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Italy and the Netherlands.
The New York Times reports that a New York City charter school, set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights, will examine an age-old question in education: Is significantly higher pay for teachers the key to improving schools? Teachers will be paid $125 000, plus a potential bonus based on performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, and some 21⁄2 times more than the national average teacher salary. The school’s first principal wishes to put into practice the view of a growing number of researchers, viz, that teacher quality, not outstanding principals or laptop computers, is the crucial ingredient for success. In exchange for their high salaries, teachers at the new school will work a longer day and year and take on responsibilities that usually fall to other staff members. The school will open with seven teachers and 120 students, most of them from low-income Hispanic families. At full capacity, it will have 28 teachers and 480 students. It will have no assistant principals, and only one or two social workers. Its classes will have 30 students. In contrast to the norm, the principal will be paid $35 000 less than the teachers. Michael Duffy, the city’s executive director for charter schools, said that some Education Department staff members were sceptical, wondering, ‘If you’re putting all of your resources into teachers in the classroom, are you shorting some of the other aspects of what a good school requires?’
Across the world, e-mail – arguably the biggest growth area in Internet usage today – is increasingly being used for everyday communication. If used effectively, e-mail can be a wonderful tool for learning because it allows usage with practically anyone, anywhere. It is now suggested that the use of e-mail will herald a shift in pedagogical methods, providing academics with an opportunity to make their teaching better, to allow them to teach in different ways and to reach more students; in other words, it allows for the maximisation of learning. For example, in one investigation of the effectiveness of e-mail as a communication and instructional aid between instructors and students, it was established that there was empirical evidence supporting the usefulness of e-mail as a promising aid to promote student cognitive growth pertaining to computer knowledge and skills. In another qualitative case study of undergraduate students in an online course, it was observed that e-mail allows for improved communication and gives students the opportunity to ask more questions to their instructor. The researcher observed that the use of e-mail could create a sense of anonymity that potentially allows for greater participation by students. However, for the potential of this new system of education delivery to be successful, educators must make the commitment to merge technology into the curriculum.
A report released by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows that the digital divide between rich and poor countries is growing. While developed countries are expected to reach a broadband penetration rate of 28% in 2008, the corresponding rate for developing countries is just 3%. According to UNCTAD official Anh-Nga Tran-Nguyen, the gap has widened for broadband ‘due to the fast pace of technological development and associated high costs.’ UNCTAD has highlighted broadband as a vital tool in economic development, going so far as to claim that it is so vital for businesses that it should be considered a utility comparable to water and electricity. UNCTAD did, however, note some progress in narrowing other elements of the digital divide since its 2006 report, particularly with regard to cellphone technology.
For 2008, it expects developing countries to reach a mobile penetration rate of nearly 50%, although this is still far behind developed countries which have reached saturation point. Cell phone subscribers almost tripled in developing countries over the last five years to comprise 58% of global subscribers. ‘Mobile handsets provide a starting point for digital literacy,’ Tran-Nguyen said. In SA the Digital Doorway project, recently launched at Ntshongweni, in the rural west of the eThekwini municipality represents a move that could provide the blueprint for the rollout of cheap, fast Internet access to all city residents.
Five Digital Doorway multimedia kiosks have been installed in the area, each comprising four computers clustered together wirelessly to give residents access to services. Four of the units have been installed in schools and one has been set up at the community's resource centre, providing thousands of locals with access to Open Office. They will also benefit from educational and scientific programmes, 10 000 books from the Project Gutenberg library, elements of the online Wikipedia encyclopaedia, and other software. The initiative is a collaborative effort between the Rural Area Based Management Programme, the national Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Meraka Institute. The Digital Doorway project was first successfully piloted in the rural area of Cwili, in the Eastern Cape five years ago. After the success of the initial project the DST supported the deployment of additional units in different parts of the country with the focus being put on rural and township areas.
A Russian schoolteacher, Alexander Ponosov, who was put on trial for using pirated Microsoft programs, has launched a campaign against the software giant's global domination. He has founded a lobby group, the aim of which is to reduce Russia's dependence on software produced by firms like Microsoft and instead promote so-called open source software.
Internet entrepreneurs Mark Shuttleworth and Jimmy Wales launched a formal declaration urging governments and publishers to make publicly funded educational materials freely available on the Internet, a move that could cause a revolution in education, given the fact that there are more than 100 000 ‘open’ educational resources available on the Internet, enabling a movement towards using the Internet as a collaborative tool in teaching.
Meanwhile, the European Union has announced that it will invest $1m in a study to find the best open source tools for use in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The grant was awarded to a consortium of 11 members, including Canonical, backers of Ubuntu Linix, and the University of the Western Cape. The aim of the research is to explore the use of free and open source software (FLOSS) as a development tool in these regions, and to investigate the technical, business and socio-political environment needed for the growth of FLOSS use in the target regions. The two-year project will be conducted by a project team of research institutes, government agencies, private companies and non-governmental organisations in Argentina, Cambodia, China, Ghana, India, South Africa, Spain, UK and the Netherlands.
BusinessWeek reports that many people are spending less time on social networking sites (such as MySpace and Facebook) or signing off altogether. The average amount of time that each user spends on such sites fell by 14% in the four months up to January 2008, while the number of users of MySpace fell from a peak of 72m in October 2007 to 68.9m in December. The main reasons put forward is that the MySpace generation may be getting annoyed with advertisements, and rather bored with profile pages. Analysts say that social networks have some of the lowest response rates on the Web – marketers claim that only 4 in 10 000 people who see their advertisements on social networking sites click on them, compared with 20 in 10 000 across the Web.
Meanwhile, leading Internet scholars at Harvard Law School will head a task force to explore the safety of users at MySpace and other popular online sites in the wake of growing fears that youngsters are becoming the targets of sexual predators. The group will have a broad mandate to explore technical ways to keep children safe - not only from sexual predators but also from online bullies and adult content. Procedures for verifying users' ages are expected to be among the task force's discussion. Schools of the future Mike Lloyd, Microsoft’s schools solution specialist, visited SA recently to introduce his company’s School of the Future project. Launched in the USA in 2005, the fundamental aim of the project is to ensure that education systems are attuned to the demands posed by the changing skills requirements of the globalised knowledge economy and the concomitant development in ICT. Thus, the Schools of the Future project espouses educating children by integrating technology with education, by making teaching increasingly computer-assisted, and by redesigning school buildings to create learning space more conducive to developing the kind of thinking and learning the digital economy wants.
A series of panel discussions was held at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show to explore whether electronic connectedness is valuable for children. A key question asked was: Are computers and electronic toys providing creative new outlets for children to play, socialise and learn; or does staring at screens all day curb the developing mind and impede critical thinking skills? The answer was mixed – but it does seem to be important for parents to intelligently monitor their children's use of computers and communication devices. For instance, parents should regard technology as another material that children have to learn to explore, much like a sandbox. There might be good reason to ban PCs from children's bedrooms, but arbitrary rules may be counterproductive. For example, limiting play on a complex computer game to an hour daily might be the equivalent of banning the game entirely.
Turkey. Teachers and administrative staff at a private school felt themselves to be competent in using the ICT available at the school, but that guidelines to bring about successful integration were lacking. Students reported that ICT is not utilised sufficiently in their classes. Clearly, continuous improvement and revision of a technology plan is important.
The Netherlands. Students in pre-university education, third-graders and non-minority students appear to have better Internet skills and a more advantageous home computer use than students in pre-vocational education, first-graders and minority students, respectively.
Australia. ICT is largely being integrated in ways that support and supplement existing classroom practices. Nonetheless, teachers need support to develop new approaches to teaching, and greater access to reliable technology before the potential of powerful learning environments is realised.
USA. The quantity of technology use alone is not critical to student learning. ‘How much’ matters only once ‘How’ is established. In fact, when the quality of technology use is not ensured, more time on computers may do more harm than good. More research needs to be conducted to identify which technology uses are most educationally meaningful; and to discover effective ways of promoting technology uses that have positive impacts in schools.
17-year-old Herzlia pupil Simone Abramson recently showcased her invention at the MTN ScienceCentre for National Science Week. She has patented a new means of identification by photographing the back of the eye. Abramson came up with the idea when her grandfather's optometrist used a camera to photograph the back of his eye, called the fundus, to diagnose his diabetes. She became interested in seeing how accurately conditions could be diagnosed using that method, and borrowed the optometrist’s camera for her research, through which she realised there were certain ‘landmarks’ of the fundus that stayed consistent throughout a person's life. Although each person had these landmarks, the distance between them was different. She identified them as locations A, B, C and D, and created formulas which produced a 12-number sequence, or ID number for the person, from these varying distances. Her invention is more accurate than fingerprinting and other methods of identification, and it takes only a few moments.
Abramson is one of 13 learners in South Africa who have been selected as Mark Shuttleworth's ‘Hip to be Square’ brand ambassadors, showing youngsters that being clever in maths, science and technology is ‘cool.’ She was also the only representative of South Africa at the International Science Expo in Beijing at the end of March. Four of the best SA computer programmers (two of them are brothers from Rondebosch Boys' High in Cape Town) will soon compete in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) in Egypt. The finalists were chosen from 34 000 participants. Over the course of 17 years, SA teams have won four gold medals, 13 silver and 18 bronze. About 80 countries send teams to compete in the IOI competitions.
Last December the Cape Town city council approved the fast-tracking of a city-wide fibre optic network in preparation for 2010 and committed expenditure of R400m over the next five years to cover the first phase of the project. However, the council has to rethink its plans after the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) reduced its commitment to the project from R51.6m to R30m. Nonetheless, while the latest turn of events had delayed the implementation of the project, the city's executive director of services delivery integration, Mike Marsden, said even though the break-even point would now only be reached at six years, the city still deemed the project viable.
Cape Town has now received a signed letter of intent that it will receive a total of R30m in return for 20 years' use of a portion of the city's broadband infrastructure. The portion of usage of the city's infrastructure would also be reduced as a result of the smaller financial contribution. The project team is proposing reducing the loop through Milnerton until Phase 2. The consequence would mean connecting fewer municipal buildings. The principal benefits would still accrue to the city in accordance with the original business plan.
Because Wikipedia is an open-source website, entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection. Typically, thousands or millions of people visit a Wikipedia entry, and each visitor is able to edit entries, or even flag an article considered unworthy to have it removed. Consequently, academics have been somewhat skeptical about the academic credibility and acceptability of Wikipedia. Now, in an attempt to reach its goal of academic standards, the Wikipedia website has set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as ‘Featured Articles,’ and run each day on the home page. To be ranked as a ‘Featured Article,’ Wikipedia said an entry must ‘provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.’ Of more than 10m articles in 253 languages, only about 2 000 have thus far reached ’Featured Article’ status. As an experiment, in January Professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia Beasley-Murray promised his students an A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article.
In May, three entries created by nine students in the course became the first student works to reach Wikipedia's top rank. Beasley-Murray said the projects took the students four months, and one entry was revised 1 000 times. The University of British Columbia entries are among some 70 academic projects now registered at Wikipedia, by institutions from Yale University to the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project announced recently that the OLPC’s green- and-white XO computers now can run Windows in addition to their homegrown interface, which is built on the open Linux operating system. That had been anticipated for months, but it amounts to a major shift. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the laptop project - which aims to produce $100 computers but now sells them at $188 (about R1 400) - acknowledged that having Windows as an option could reassure education ministers who have hesitated to buy XOs with its new interface, called Sugar. Negroponte had hoped to sell several million laptops by now; instead he has received only about 600 000 orders. But now beginning in limited runs, XO buyers will have the option of computers loaded with or without Windows. Versions with Windows will cost $18 to $20 more; $3 of that is for Windows, and the rest covers hardware adjustments, like an additional memory-card slot, needed to make Windows run.
The next step will be to sell just one kind of machine with a ’dual-boot’ mode, meaning users would have Windows and Linux and choose which to run each time. Because that will take advantage of a broader hardware redesign, the dual-boot XOs will cost about $10 more than today's versions, according to Negroponte. Despite the higher price, and Windows' inability to take advantage of some key features of the XO, Negroponte said his project would benefit from Microsoft's strengths in selling and deploying technology. ‘I think our goals are dramatically enhanced with Microsoft's decision and this partnership because we will reach many more children,’ he said. ‘There are now many more countries prepared to look at the XO and collaborative learning and some of the things we stand for.’ Has the solution been found to the OLPC’s hitherto problems in spreading inexpensive portable computers to schoolchildren?
The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) recently approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. This paves the way for business and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes, especially since ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The SA government has already adopted ODF as one of the standards for government communication. Bob Jolliffe of the department of science and technology (DST) says that while the adoption of ODF as a national standard is not of major significance for government – ‘this is a national standard not a government one’ - it will make ODF as a standard more visible and accessible to South African citizens. Moreover, he said that the adoption of ODF by government ‘will assist with general awareness raising around ODF.’ By September it is expected that all government departments will be able to read and write in the ODF. In 2009, ODF will become the default document format for SA government departments.
Founder and chairperson of the African Institute for Mathematical Science (Aims), Professor Neil Turok announced recently in Cape Town the intention to establish 15 Aims centres in Africa over the next five years. The first centre would be established in Abuja, Nigeria in July. Aims Abuja will be a postgraduate centre for mathematics and computational science, with a strong engineering focus, including petroleum engineering, materials science and computational science. It will be a parallel development with the African University of Science and Technology, which was initiated as a World Bank project and cofunded by the African Development Bank and the Nigerian federal and state governments. Other centres were planned in Ghana, Madagascar, Sudan, Uganda, Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Rwanda and SA as these countries had good human and natural resources with good prospects of developing into a centre of excellence to the advantage of the local populations, universities and governments. The intention is to open three new Aims centres each year. Each centre will accommodate 50 students a year, with most proceeding to Masters and PhD levels at a partnering university. The rationale for such an initiative was to develop African human capacity in the crucial area of maths and science. As far as financing is concerned, it was anticipated that the cost of supporting 15 centres would be some $150m over the next five years - less than 1% of the aid now given to Africa each year. And the entire cost per student would be only one-fifth of the cost of supporting an African student in Europe or the USA. To date, the initiative had received considerable support from international blue-chip companies. Over the past four years, Aims has graduated 160 students from 30 African countries and a further 53 students are currently at the Aims Cape Town campus.
An innovative cell phone based programme aimed at improving maths performance is being piloted in two schools in the North West Province. Known as ‘M4Girls’, the pilot project uses Nokia 6300 cell phones that are pre-loaded with educational material to help improve the mathematics performance of Grade 10 learners. The project is an official world first for Nokia. M4Girls was developed in conjunction with the Department of Education and Mindset Network, a not for profit organisation that draws on satellite technology to distribute educational materials on mass to schools across Southern Africa. The games were developed in South Africa with a specific focus towards the country’s mathematics curriculum. The project is in alignment with the Department of Education's drive to improve proficiency in key subjects like maths among students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, and in particular girls who tend to be weaker performers in this subject. Once the pilot projects have run their course the intention is to make the programme available for download to the public through the Mindset Network website.
A recent study in the USA shows that two-thirds of teenagers admit that emoticons and other informal styles have crept into their school writing assignments. Half of the teenagers surveyed say they sometimes fail to use proper capitalisation and punctuation in assignments, while 38% have carried over the shortcuts typical in instant messaging or email messages, such as ‘LOL’ for ‘laughing out loud.’ A quarter of teens have used :) and other emoticons. Richard Sterling said the rules could possibly change completely within a generation or two: Perhaps the start of sentences would no longer need capitalisation, the way the use of commas has decreased over the past few decades. ‘Language changes,’ he said. The study’s authors do not see this trend as being exclusively negative. For instance, says Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew: ‘It's a teachable moment ... they learn to make the distinction ... just as they learn not to use slang terms in formal writing.’
The study also found that the generation born digital is shunning computer use for most assignments. About two-thirds of teens say they typically do their school writing by hand. And for personal writing outside school, longhand is even more popular. Moreover, teenagers who keep blogs are more likely to engage in personal writing. They also tend to believe that writing will prove crucial to their eventual success in life. A study by Dr P Takayoshi, associate professor of English at the Kent State University in the US, together with a group of graduate and undergraduate researchers, has analysed the differences between instant-messaging (IM) conversations and Standard Written English. The team discovered that the areas in which IM chatter differed from the norms of the Standard were not mere deviations, but actually conformed to a written standard local to the IM phenomenon. This means that the structure of an instant message has little regard for appearance, opting instead to concentrate on meaning; and in terms of meaning, foremost is the expression of social relationships. ‘IM is not just bad grammar or a bunch of mistakes. IM is a separate language form from formal English and has a common set of language features and standards,’ says Takayoshi.
According to the minister of science and technology, Mosibudi Mangena, S&T has the potential to make a strong and positive impact on the African continent, but its profile needs to increase markedly in order for the impact to be felt. Under the umbrella of the African Ministers Council on Science and Technology, ministers from all African Union member countries have already set continental priorities and policies that are relevant to the development and application of S&T for Africa’s economic transformation. However, Africa’s stories and achievements in S&T have never been given the publicity they deserve. ‘The continent needs journalists to do its marketing and advocacy work ... in promoting its science and technology agenda’, Mangena said. In a recent study of 15 SA publications, by Stellenbosch University, it was found that, on average, less than 2% of editorial space deals with science. A large percentage of published reports (about 38%) originates from news agencies, while there are few in-depth articles.‘As much as we are agonising to find innovative ways of making mathematics and science interesting and fun to the learners in our schools, we are equally concerned that the South African public is adequately lobbied and informed about the value of science and technology in society. We need to recruit many more science journalists.’
In accordance with their support for open source software and technological independence, the Venezuelan government recently launched the ‘Bolivarian Computer.’ The computers, which are assembled locally, come in four different models, all of which run on Linux. The computer is about 40% cheaper than other similar brands, but has added value since it comes with open-source software and a three year guarantee, while other brands offer only a one-year guarantee. The Venezuelan government, which has taken a strong position in support of open-source software, hopes that this venture will develop local industry and work towards technological independence for the country. The Venezuelan initiative follows in the wake of Brazil’s declared desire to create a ‘continent of open source’. The new computers are produced as a joint venture by Venezuela de Industria Tecnológica (VIT), which is owned by the Chinese company, Inspur Group, and the Venezuelan ministry of light industry and commerce. This year, the factory is expected to assemble 80 000 desktop units and 6 000 laptops. The factory can potentially produce 150 000 units a year. The first units have been donated to the public sector, including universities and various government departments and missions, but the new computers will also be sold both inside Venezuela and on the export market.
Earlier this month open source veteran Dwayne Bailey, who also heads the award-winning Translate.org.za project addressed an Open Tuesday gathering on the topic of translating software. The rationale behind the importance of translating software was that, as South Africans with English as a first or second language, we tend to focus on the USA and the UK. For anyone looking to market their software beyond the South African market, it is to these countries that people generally approach first. The problem is that these countries have well established and highly competitive markets. Moreover, English is only the third most spoken language in the world, leaving vast opportunity for software in other languages. In particular, countries in the East have enormous potential as a rapidly growing market with an appetite for open source software (OSS). However, to enter these markets, a lot of careful attention must be paid to the format in which the software is developed. Many encoding formats are limited in their ability to represent some characters, such as the ISO8859, which is used in most South African documents. Bailey recommended the Unicode format as it allocates a specific code to each of the many characters used in the languages of the world. In his experience, it is the only format that can correctly represent Venda. Another issue in translation relates to the representation of dates and numbers. One example was the USA's 9/11 event, which did not happen on November 9, as our own dating system would suggest. Bailey is on the committee that will be meeting with the SABS to discuss and vote on whether or not Microsoft's OOXML document format should be accepted as a standard. Presently Microsoft is moving to have its format accepted as an international standard.
The world’s fastest residential internet connection has been installed in Sweden. The connection makes use of a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred between two routers up to 2 000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders. In theory the distance could be unlimited as long as the fibre is in place. The 40Gbps internet connection is over 10 000 times faster than the 4Mbps which is the fastest connection available in South Africa. With the bandwidth available, it would be able to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.
An early version of the Linux-based OpenMoko NEO 1973 has been released to allow developers to begin writing applications and device drivers. With the slogan ‘The clean form fits your fist. The open system frees your mind,’ the NEO has been optimistically punted by some as a potential iPhone killer. However, it is unlikely to compete with iPhone's popularity and trendy image built on the back of its worldwide multi-million dollar marketing campaign. It is perhaps more realistic to describe it as an iPhone injurer. The phone has been criticised by some for not being as slick looking as the iPhone; however, for the average Linux supporter its functionality and open-ended customisation are likely to make it attractive none-the-less. The consumer version will be available in October, with the addition of wifi, 3D motion sensors and graphics accelerators, at a price of $450 (about R3 100).
In Africa, few can afford broadband Internet services; nonetheless demand is so great among those who can, that mobile operators feel they have a viable business case for third generation technology in the continent's big cities. According to some market players 3G, which delivers high-speed data to cellphones, is the best way of providing fast Internet service in countries where viable fixed-line infrastructure is often scarce and millions of people are unable to access the web. At least 15 mobile operators in Africa either operate or have announced plans to launch 3G services, including existing networks in South Africa, Egypt and Tanzania and others planned in Kenya, Namibia and Nigeria. However, a chief executive of an African operator said the expense of rolling out a new network to run 3G services did not make good business sense on a continent with the lowest average revenue per user in the world. According to some estimates, only 5% of subscribers in Africa used 3G voice and data service by the end of 2006. But a Rwandan operator said demand for Internet access would rise in coming years as literacy rose and prices fell. He said Rwanda had already embarked on a project to connect 300 schools, most in rural areas, to broadband Internet service using wireless technology. This, says Chris Lundh, chief executive for Rwanda's Terracom and Rwandatel, is ‘the perfect road. Lots of people cannot read. What we are trying to do is kill two birds with one stone - provide Internet access for people to get an education on line.’
Despite a sharp increase in investment in recent years, Africa's communications network remains sparse and sluggish. This has prompted the UN's telecommunication agency, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to call for a ‘Marshall plan’ to boost ICT connectivity on the continent. While annual investment in Africa's telecoms infrastructure reached $8b in 2005, up from $3.5b in 2000, this has manifested mainly in a fivefold growth in cellphones, while overall connectivity to key communications networks, including the Internet, was lagging far behind the rest of the world, including Asia and Latin America (less than 4% of Africans had access to the Internet, compared to an average of 9% for the developing world). Access to high-capacity broadband – conventionally regarded as a key economic and developmental driver – is less than 1% in Africa. These shortcomings in telecoms infrastructure are becoming a major factor in raising the costs of doing business in Africa, since 70% of all Internet traffic within Africa has to be routed through networks outside the continent. The ITU is organising a Connect Africa summit in Rwanda on October 29 and 30, involving the private sector, governments and international organisations, to promote communications growth on the continent.
A recently-released study by World Wide Worx, entitled ‘Internet access in SA 2007’ shows that despite significant growth in broadband connectivity, the number of South Africans with access to the Internet will grow by barely 3% this year – the slowest annual growth since the advent of Internet in South Africa. This will take the number of South Africans with access to an estimated 3.85m, or a rather low 8% of the population. Businesses and government claim that high tariffs for phone calls and Internet use are deterring investment in South Africa, and obstructing the roll-out of communication services to the poor. The study also concludes that the entry of new major players such as Neotel, Vodacom’s own pending new ISP, and the effect of metropolitan city councils offering wireless broadband are likely to result in a substantially changed connectivity landscape by 2010, but not in 2007.
According to Rudi Jansen, chief executive of Internet service provider MWeb, South Africa's IT industry is facing a huge skills shortage and unless radical changes are implemented in its resourcing strategy, the industry will soon be left high and dry. Addressing the skills shortage crisis is the most critical challenge faced by the IT industry, he says. ‘We are competing for a scarce pool of resources ...Many IT companies cannot afford to compete at the same level as big corporations such as the banks and cellular providers when it comes to financial benefits, which means skilled staff are even harder to come by ...Traditionally, many companies see learnerships as a corporate social investment (CSI) initiative - almost a donation towards skills development...
For us, it's a strategic imperative, and part of our creation of a pool of resources. It's a feeder scheme for many of our strategic areas... We have approximately 80 people in learnerships throughout the business in 2007, and we would like to double this over the next year, as the sector continues to demand highly skilled people.’ As part of MWeb's learnership programme, participants receive classroom theory and workplace experience.
The department of science and technology’s 4th R&D survey shows that gross expenditure on R&D has increased by R2b since 2004/05, to reach R14b. As a share of GDP, R&D spending increased from 0.87% in 2004/05 to a new high of 0.91% in 2005/06. If current trends persist, the 1% target should be achieved by 2008/09. Whilst this figure compares favourably with those for Hungary (0.94%), Portugal (0.81%), Brazil (1%) and Russia (1.1%), it lags far behind countries such as Sweden (3.86%) and Finland (3.48%). What is encouraging about the South African figures is the fact that business sector R&D spending is growing at a brisk pace, now accounting for about 59% of the total. The government sector and the higher education sector each account for roughly 20% of R&D spending. The total headcount of R&D personnel, including technicians, PhD and post-doctoral students, stands at 39 000.
Despite a 10% reduction last year, the cost of fixed-line calls in South Africa ranks third-highest in the world; this continues to compromise the ability of South African organisations to compete in the world’s major markets. Andrew Skaap, MD of Skaap, a subscription-based reduced-rate international call company states: ‘Companies like Skaap are offering reduced rates overseas from cellphones at a fraction of the cost that Telkom charges in spite of a number of commercial challenges relating to the use of Telkom’s infrastructure for bandwidth and access numbers. Surely if Skaap can do it, Telkom can’.
Initiated by the department of science and technology (DST), the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) was recently officially opened in Cape Town by the minister of science and technology. The high-speed computational infrastructure, which has a performance equivalent to that of a few thousand standard desktop personal computers, would make scientific 'supercomputing' a reality for South Africa, the department said in a statement. It should be particularly advantageous to South African researchers in their quest for new knowledge and application. The project is the result of a collaborative initiative involving inter alia the DST, the CSIR, higher education institutions, government departments, major national projects, industry players, vendors and international HPC centres.
Described as a first for Europe, German public libraries recently began issuing audiobooks and e- books for loan via the Internet. As part of the pilot scheme, initially nearly 10 000 titles will be available for download from the public-library systems in the port city of Hamburg and the southern city of Wuerzburg to subscribers' personal computers. Users can ‘borrow’ titles online at any time of the day and night. After five days, the items expire and become unusable. The audio and video files employ Microsoft's WMA encoding and can be played on computers and other devices using Windows software. According to the director of the Hamburg Public Library System, libraries needed to compete with online retailer Amazon, offering loans to customers who did not want to buy.
Ioltechnology reports that Oracle has released Oracle School Express (OSE), which is software designed to assist in school administration. It is a data-capturing and reporting tool that enables school administrators to capture student statistics (eg, registrations, attendance, marks and school fees). By reducing the administrative burden of educators, it is hoped that they will be able to shift their focus to the delivery of education. The software release, which runs on a standard PC (but can be plugged into a larger database), is part of the Nepad e-Schools Demonstration Project.