Laura @ CET

Openness has been on my mind. It’s coming from all sides, at the moment, a confluence of events and possibilities. We have an Open Education Resources Project here in CET (OER UCT), which is speeding up to the launch in February 2010. Our Opening Scholarship Project (ie access to research outputs) came to the end of its funded period, but lives on in the form of advocacy work and another grant proposal. We at the university are talking about Open UCT, and what that might mean and what form it would take. And next week Tony Carr and I are presenting at a seminar in Barcelona called Open Social Learning, where we will be reflecting on e/merge, the online conference we have hosted bi-annually since 2004 (e/merge 2008 being the last one). It seems ironic but we are thinking about how a “traditional” online conference might respond to and be changed by the broader social trends and expectations about openness, sharing, immediacy, and widening of community presently being enabled by social software.  

Like other universities in the world, there are many reasons we are engaged in these projects. For us there is an additional reason, an especial imperative to address imbalances; the righting of the direction of the global flow of knowledge production.  

This graphic (from worldmapper) graphically illuminates the imbalances. Although it visually represents percentages of book publishing in different parts of the world, it’s also a kind of proxy for all outputs including academic research, teaching resources and contributions to conferences.

 There are many excellent reasons for advocating open. And we do.

At the same time, the guru of open access Lawrence Lessig, sagely warns against what he calls “naked transparency”. (He is writing about government in particular but I think the principle applies to us in education.*) I like the way he comments that reformers always focus on the good and think that the bad is someone else’s problem. It’s a useful reminder that we have to consider the “horribles” as well as the “blessings” of openness. All bits may not need to be open. Some spaces should not be open. Closed may not always be a negative word, it may also connote positive attributes such as a safe space for risk, privacy, a trusted community…...  

I am finding it more useful to think about degrees of openness on a continuum, rather than open/closed as a binary. My colleagues Cheryl Hodgkinson and Eve Gray beautifully demonstrate how this can usefully be applied to open educational resources (in a thoughtful piece in IJEDICT at http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/include/getdoc.php?id=3695&article=864&mode=pdf). 

This is helping me think through CET’s current and planned Open projects, as well as openness in general. I think the tendency towards openness is right, and generally hugely beneficial. But I think that a nuanced view of developmental work in differentiated contexts is also necessary. So rather than a blinkered view of openness, rather it’s about openness at different times, for different people, for different reasons. Sometimes about semi – openness, partial openness, on a gradation, about opening up bit by bit, about being ready. It makes it more difficult but hopefully we can avoid some of the “horribles” by taking all these complexities into account, and going into all this with eyes wide open!

* Lessig, L “Against Transparency”, in The New Republic (http://wwwtnr.com) 9 October 2009

Here in CET we are recruiting. We are looking for an exceptional someone with a wide range of capabilities: what is becoming the usual learning technology competencies, some specialist skills, and a commitment to and track record of research, oh and please teach on our post-grad programme (and supervise as well). I thought it was a big ask until I saw a similar advert for a position in New Zealand at http://www.otago.ac.nz/vacancies/vacancy.php?vacancy=1107. Similar level but even more demanding: a Phd and a tertiary qualification in Computer Science, web development, supervision…the whole bang shoot.

Both of these are academic positions, neither of them are "typical" academic jobs (ie undergrad teaching etc and a research day). Yet when we advertise these positions we have to choose between two conditions of service: academic and general (or non-academic or PASS as they are known in my university [Professional and Support Staff]). Those are the choices and it seems to me that they work less and less well for us. We run the danger of framing the position around the conditions of service rather than the needs of the job itself.

Its always interesting when there is a coalescence of observations; I have noticed this issue arising in a few places of late. So, a piece by Marcia Devlin in University World News (http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20091023103130927) on what Australian universities might look like in 20 years time includes an endnote which says "Nowhere in this article is there a reference to the majority of staff in institutions - the professional staff - and how their roles and functions may change over the next 20 years. By then, I hope, we will have 'university staff' as the accepted terminology so there will be no more nonsensical conversations about 'academic' and 'general' staff, and who runs universities."

Then I read an illuminating paper by Celia Whitechurch, called Shifting Identities, Blurring Boundaries : The Changing Roles of Professional Managers in Higher Education (Research & Occasional Paper Series: Cshe.10.2008 , University Of California, Berkeley, http://cshe.berkeley.edu/. It is really worth a read even though it focuses on "managers" as her suggestions of new identities resonate for the field of learning technology.

She posits four categories of Professional Identity

Categories of identity	Characteristics
Bounded professionals	Work within structural boundaries (eg function, job description)
Cross-boundary professionals	Actively use boundaries for strategic advantage and institutional capacity building
Unbounded professionals	Disregard boundaries to focus on broadly-based projects and institutional development
Blended professionals	Dedicated appointments spanning professional and academic domains

It is these last two which are of special interest; are our job and that at Otogo not blended professionals? Yes they are academic positions with academic obligations, but they are more than that. And those additional professional competencies are something to name, and to praise are they not? We know that where and how positions are located influence the focus and nature of the work.

And of course just to muddle things a little more, we are higher education professionals. My colleague Duncan Greaves suggests the following typology for professions and their relationship to the academe:

1. Profession Type 1: Emerges outside the university and then moves into it eg law, accountancy and medicine

2. Profession Type 2: Emerges outside the university and remains outside the university eg estate agents. Such types have professional bodies and a knowledge domain, but it are not studied as a scholarly undertaking.

3. Profession Type 3: "Near professions" eg trades with tacit knowledge, accreditation and professional bodies, eg artisans and traders boiler makers fitters and turners

4. Profession Type 4: Emerges inside the university, gains status and moves out eg business studies through modern business schools

5. Profession Type 5: Emerges inside the university and stay inside – this results in a close relationship between communities of practice and scholars eg higher education studies, higher education leadership studies.

Learning technology has sites outside the university of course, but the confluence of roles and sites in the university make these even more complex positions.

What is encouraging is that there are recently several conversations and studies beginning to engage with these issues. The fundamental tenets of academic rigour, scholarly commitments and sound knowledge bases are not being questioned. But hopefully all this attention will coalesce into some concerted change and acknowledgement about the changing nature of academic work. (And that will be good for the emergent scholarly and professional field of educational technology.)

Last week I spent in Dakar at the Acacia Learning Forum. IDRC funded, the programme with its focus on ICTs for Development is just past half way through a funding cycle, marking a good time for reflection and considering the future. It was a stimulating time, and definitely not an ordinary conference.

Premised on the principles of communication and connectedness, the event was facilitated to ensure participation and engagement. With almost 150 people, there were numerous interesting development interventions, research projects and networks to be discussed and discovered.  There is so much I could mention; here I only focus on highlights: the small group events, the effective bilingualism of the whole affair and the excellent communication strategy.

(It goes without saying that it was encouraging, and often inspiring, to hear of innovative projects in diverse contexts, and to get a sense of current trends and debates. Specificities for another blog posting.)

Normal academic conferences impart a lot of information fast, but their format is rigid and makes finding and talking to people with whom one shares specific (and sometimes obscure) interests difficult. At the Acacia Forum, I experienced the Open Space methodology first hand for the first time, and if it is always this useful then I am a convert! One morning was devoted to discussions on issues determined by participants. In this case 150 people, 22 topics. The facilitator was adamant that there are as many topics as needed, that topics should not be clustered because differences of emphasis are relevant, and that the number of people in a group is irrelevant. If you only find one other person interested in your issue, but it’s the right person, then that is an achievement. I went to a group discussion on Youth, Creativity and ICTs convened by Marie-Hélène Mottin- Sylla from Senegal and was absorbed by an in-depth conversation which included concepts of “hyper-modernity” about the juxtaposition of deep seated cultural practices with the affordances of new technologies. The other session I attended was on Theorising ICTs for Development and there were only three of us (don’t know what that says) but it was useful and included research sites such as e-government and public access to information, as well as consideration of the role of theory in enabling and understanding practice.

I now think that every academic conference should reserve a half day of the programme for participants to create discussion spaces of their own choice.

Also useful were the “speedsharing” sessions. Like “speed dating” these sessions had 12 “stations” where 12 projects were reported on, in five consecutive 7-minute long slots. The concise format forced one to be succinct and to the point, which is perfectly do-able as I found after giving the same presentation five times in a row (I got better each time!). It meant talking to smaller groups, and it meant participants could capture a flavour of several projects within a short space of time.

Another highlight of the event was being part of successful bilingualism in action, a real pleasure. This was achieved in several ways including bilingual facilitators who moved seamlessly between languages, slides and posters in 2 languages, simultaneous translators and “whispering translators” who could quietly translate in small group discussions. This went a long way to overcoming the Francophone / Anglophone divide allowing challenges, strategies and outcomes across the continent as a whole to be discussed by all. I knew in theory but experienced in practice that there is a qualitative difference in conversations when people are able to talk in the languages of their own choice.

The last highlight to mention here was the exemplification of an open and wide ranging communication strategy in action. A website- http://www.acaciaforum.net/- was set up in advance in order for conversations to be enabled even before the meeting. Throughout the event, bloggers kept a running update on the site, podcasts were made of presentations and were immediately made available, webcasts were uploaded to YouTube and linked to the site, participants were interviewed and their views shared, and of course pictures were uploaded and shared. Most of the website is in the public domain providing access to an audience beyond the Forum participants, as well as an archive of the events themselves.

These highlights are not accidental and they don’t come cheap. An experienced facilitator Allison Hewlitt was responsible for the overall event design, was on her toes and fully focused at all times; the African Commons team worked hard to ensure the recording and communication; and the translation facilities are an expensive resource.

Are there any downsides? The challenge for this kind of event with communication as a central objective and large numbers is ensuring sufficient depth. While it was a matter of some pride that this was a paperless event, I did wonder whether some supporting documents would have been useful. Perhaps I am too much of an academic but I would have liked a background document which contextualised ICTs for Development as a whole in terms of literature, trends and debates. And a knowledge repository on the site where participants could upload and share documents might have been of value. Maybe I just get antsy with no papers at all (smile).

All in all, I came away having learnt much and in ways quite unanticipated. Ideal.

Why is there so much fuss about cell phones? And why especially in education? How come mlearning is a buzzword and there are now Mobile Learning professors in the academe (see for example http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1990/)? Are cell phones nirvana and the promised land? Is it really such an extraordinary opportunity? Why are there such anxieties and why are many educators and parents getting their toes in a tangle?

This is an enormous conversation with many answers and debates. But briefly, I think the exceptional  pervasiveness and the unique affordances of cell phones are the two main reasons for all the fuss. And although cell phones are a big deal globally, they are an especial big deal in developing countries.

It is worth spending some time considering the access issue alone, although it is hard to separate this from the affordances because the matter is not merely about access to digital technology per se, it is about access to what is afforded by those technologies.

I have asked various people of late what they imagine the percentage of cell phone penetration is globally. The answers vary widely- from 20% on the one end to 80% on the other. The answer is 61%- yes that is sixty one per cent, almost two thirds of the world’s population owns a cell phone. (Yes, I know use is different but lets stick to ownership. Use is probably more.) So, the total mobile subscriptions in 2009 are over 4 billion. And 1.15 billion new phones were sold in 2008.

And yes, ownership is slippery because we know that some people own sim cards but not the actual devices (as Kreuzer 2009 notes for example in his study where 4% of the students own the sim cards only), and there are “public’ mobile phones, and there are handsets shared amongst friends.

My last two blog postings provided sobering statistics on growing digital divides especially connectivity divides. Cell phones are startling different and it is this potential for digital democracy that gets everyone steamed up with excitement. This ITU graph highlights the stunning growth in cell phone subscriptions globally, and shows the concomitant decrease in fixed line subscriptions.

The implications for developing countries are dramatic as shown in these graphs which break down the penetration in terms of developed/ developing countries and show the shift over just a few years. These ITU graphs highlight why cell phones are such an opportunity in developing country contexts, especially when seen in the light of computer divides.

The overall global decrease in fixed phone lines is echoed in South Africa where the number of households with phone lines dropped from 20% in 2007 to 18% in 2008 (according to AMPS figures). But what a low starting base- only one fifth of households with phone lines (with no doubt a serious difference between rural and urban areas).

The comparison becomes interesting when comparing South Africa with the UK and the USA. Unsurprisingly the differences in terms of fixed lines are stark. What is much more surprising is the fact that South Africa has a higher cell phone subscription rate than the United States does. 

South Africa has 966.1 mobile phone subscribers per 1000 people, and is ranked 42nd out of 222 countries, according to siteatlas's 2007 figures, whose map puts South Africa in the unusual position of being highly ranked for something other than oft- reported negative measures.

Interestingly the South African advertising industry household survey figures for cell phone penetration are much lower as the AMPS graph below shows. Their figures state that the population penetration percentage is 67%. (Such a large discrepancy from reputable sources implies there are significant differences in precisely what is measured and how it is measured.)

Nevertheless, even the lowest figures show that more than two thirds of the South population overall have cell phones, and then even when this is considered across socio-economic groups, the figures are encouraging.

 The situation becomes even more interesting when mobile Internet is considered.

Consider:

·        Of all cell phones in use today, 92% have a basic browser (Ahonen 2009);

·        South Africa has the third largest mobile  internet using population in the world;

·        South Africa ranks 6th in the global Top 10 for mobile internet usage, ahead of both the US (7th) and the UK (9th) (Opera 2008);

·        South Africa has double the number of mobile internet users compared to desktop users (Joubert 2008).

Unlike other forms of technology which focus on either content or communication, cell phones are able to do both. And unlike one-to-many media, cell phones enable interactivity.

Of course there are challenges and threats, including the rise of smart phones and the danger of another dimension of the digital divide manifesting in the mobile world. And although the figures are startling, they are not yet completely pervasive which lends weight to James and Vesteeg’s 2007 comment that the digital divide that really matters is about those who live with access to a mobile network and those who don’t.

There are also important issues to be considered about digital literacies which presently tend to pertain to networked computers (although of course mobile literacies are also forms of digital literacies); about the extent to which research about computer use can be transferred to cell phone technologies; and about the potential "merging" of different kinds of devices (such as PDAs, laptops and cell phones). These are beginning to receive attention.

The point, though, is that the opportunities for mobile affordances to be exploited for learning ends are already being demonstrated with wonderful examples of creativity and imagination often in difficult, diverse and complex conditions. This blog post hopefully contextualises why this is the case.

I have been musing about an article by Bill Thompson on the BBC website (at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8257152.stm). He was in Nairobi watching trenches being dug in busy roads for fibre optic cables, and he was musing on what broadband will mean in Africa. It was a thoughtful and careful piece, which reflected that there are both dangers and opportunities ahead. He warned that the technology being rolled out is largely developed and patented in the USA, that new patents and new offerings are largely Western, and that indeed the model of the world that informs these technologies is largely Western.

He was covering the story on the premise that broadband is coming and that things are going to change. Until now the only story has been of deficit and have-nots.

Broadband has been on a steep upward curve in the developed world, and a great deal lower (both numerically and in terms of speed of take-up) in the developing world as this recent ITU graph shows.

ITU 2009 Measuring the Information Society

Stark differences become even more dramatic when shown by continent.

ITU 2009 Measuring the Information Society

On the South African broadband scene, broadband subscriptions as a percentage of the total population remain small as but the trajectory is steep.

Goldstuck 2008

In education, the possibilities for designing interactive interventions on the basis of broad access to broadband are numerous. These are being explored in tantalising bits and pieces already both here in CET and beyond, just enough to provide an exciting sense of the possibilities....

Bill Thompson concludes his piece by reminding British readers that they should not expect the networked world to be a club to which Africans are now gaining entry, and where the rules, the expectations and the content are pre-determined by the developed world. He is right. Local take up will be moulded to local conditions and shaped by local creativity. Although technologically conditions have been relatively resource-poor, ideas-rich innovations have also flourished.

It might be hard to imagine how excited we in CET are at the possibility of serious changes in the broadband environment, for us and for our students both on and off campus. Our appetites have been whetted…we can’t wait for the feast to begin!

 “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” William Gibson’ s comment* is more pertinent than ever at this time of ongoing digital changes, especially in relation to internet access, broadband and cell phones. Which of the new technologies might distribute the future more evenly? Which might worsen existing divides?

I had reason to dig up the most recent facts and figures I could find, for a talk I gave at the Elearning Update at CPUT last week. One of our fabulous CET interns, Annette Lombe, got me going, and after several hours perusing and scratching about, I put together the best recent picture I could.

This blog posting is about access to computers and to the internet, next time I will look at broadband and at cell phones.

The most recent World Bank figures, in 2009, state that there are 8.5 personal computers per 100 people in South Africa.

According to the ITU in 2008, there are 10.75 Internet users per 100 people in South Africa.

The following table, combining 2007  ITU figures from three countries  show that fewer than one twentieth of South African households have Intenet access, unlike households in the region of two thirds in the UK and USA.

	Proportion of households with computer	Proportion of households with Internet	International Internet bandwidth per Internet user (bits/sec)
South Africa	14.8	4.8	852
UK	75.0	67.0	55281
USA	70.2	61.7	15341

 

Considering the total number of Internet users in Africa comparatively is sobering:

From: www.Internetworldstatistics.com

The following graph of 2009 shows how numbers are starting to plateau in developed countries,  and are still rising in developed countries (also shows the discrepancies of course).

From: Manuel 2009

Interestingly, South Africa’s internet penetration rate per population is not even in the top ten Africa countries as the  following graph shows. (How does Zimbabwe manage a higher internet % per population than South Africa???)

From ITU 2007

Of course, even within the country , there are divides, and 2008 figures show how advantaged the Western Cape and Gauteng provinces are compared to other South African provinces.

From: Goldstuck 2008

As Arthur Goldstuck comments “The clearest indication of a connectivity divide in South Africa lies in the discrepancy between population of a province and number of Internet users. When proportion of Internet users in a province is compared with proportion of population who are in that province, it becomes clear that Western Cape is the best connected of the provinces (bearing in mind the skew towards home  users), with a ratio of twice as many users as its population proportion would indicate. The only other province with a positive ratio is Gauteng” (Goldstuck 2008, p.119).

Finally, Internet penetration by age shows how steep the drop off of Internet users is after the age of 50. (The percentages here are as proportions of Internet users within each age group). Thus the 45-49 age group has almost the same penetration of Internet use as the 16-19 age group.

 

From Goldstuck 2008

One last point. An interesting aspect of these findings the way that they contradict current beliefs about so called “digital natives” being the young and being the Internet users.

Why does this all matter? Believe it or not I am not an Internet evangelist. But as Manuel Castells emphasised at a talk at the Centre for the Book here in Cape Town recently, the digital technological revolution has happened whether we like it or not. It is how we make sense of it and what we do with it that matters. The bit of sense-making in this blog highlights ongoing digital exclusion. 

 -------------------------------------------------------

 * According to Wikipedia, his actual comment was "As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." and was said during an NPR interview (30 November 1999 Timecode 11:55)

We in CET are known for some strange reasons which are not directly work related, although they are all work enabling: particularly TrendCETters dress up days, great coffee from many places, and Any Excuse for Cake. But maybe that is because there seems to be some bemusement about what we actually do.

I thought I would put pay to that once and for all by asking everyone in CET today, Monday 31^st of August, to list three things they are working on right now, today. So here is the full list in all its unadulterated almost entirely unexpurgated diversity. No academic analysis, no themes, just telling it like it is.

What is daily life about in a centre devoted to supporting and investigating and teaching about education with technology? Excluding our colleagues who are sick or on sabbatical, this is what we in the office here on the beautiful slopes of Devils Peak are all doing right now:

• Organising the Show and Tell Health Sciences event ( Topics- two on using video in teaching, one on collaboration with Stellenbosch and one on using MCQs)
• Talking in online chat to students from Telkom about technology as part of their Diploma in Education
• Preparing for the next Teaching With Technology grant applications
• Utilizing my user interface skills to improve the SMS tool interface,
• Working on Vula Help queries
• Preparing and creating content for the Online Learning Design course with Cheryl HW.
• Final edits, after a long process, for a publication with Shaheeda in a CREE special issue: Reframing pedagogical relationships in the collaborative design of educational technology interventions.
• Preparing a second pilot of the Citation Awareness Tutorial this week with an Engineering Masters course
• Interviewing students at a university up north about ICTs (very rewarding talking to students who are so willing to tell you all about themselves)
• Coordinating interns and student assistants and visitors to CET.
• Planning & marketing the PGDE/MEd in Education (ICT) for 2010
• Writing up a concept paper on a Knowledge Audio Repository (KAR) - transcending traditional teaching with new ways of learning using 21st century tools.
• Exploring ways sharing artefacts (images, audio, video & ppt) from 10th CHED Research Day held on 27 August 2009
• Planning focus groups (logistical endeavour with 5 universities across the country all within the month of October, trying to phone / email people to check availability)
• Assessing software for the OER directory project. In the past couple weeks we have demo'd Drupal, Plone and EPrints as possible software options.
• Working on a local instance of the UMich OERca software which facilitates the copyright clearance process on OER.
• Working with Cheryl B to find useful ways of helping a MEd student (who lives in Tanzania) to analyse her data using Excel
• Working with the Plant Conservation Unit (in the Botany Department) on publishing some of their reports as OER.
• Working with Creative Commons representatives on a joint workshop we will be running in October.
• Setting up the OERUCT project website and finalising our brochure.
• Returning to ongoing animations as soon as that the grants pamphlet goes to print (and hoping that he won't want 4 rivers now that I've done 3)
• Working on my on-going projects which include the Vula mobile survey
• …creating a screencast for the Vula Course Evaluation tool which is proving tricky but fun!
• Annette and I are now the keepers of the CET newsfeed thanks to Tony so updating that
• A lot of wrapping up loose ends like final SMS bug fixes and general open issues (mostly production related stuff)
• On the horizon: multiple routing for SMS  and better handling of guest user addition for Vula
• … pretty normal 'officy things'
• Finalising the scoping of a project for the IDRC for more effective and open African scholarly publishing
• Writing a blog to persuade the Minister of Higher Education that if he really wants equity in higher education, his department needs to look at the neo-colonial scholarly publishing reward system they support.
• Revising a chapter for a Country Study of SA for the Yale Internet and Society programme's Global Academy for Access to Knowledge.
• Investigating Vula issues related to synchronization between PeopleSoft and Vula
• Investigating difficulties reported by Jonny using WebDAV to copy a large set of files onto Vula
• Sending emails to the hundreds of people on our database about next year’s ICT in Education post-graduate programme
• Putting the articles for the Special Issue of IJEDICT into the standard template
• Following up all the recent visits from funders.
• Talking to Unity who is spending a week with us from her university in Zimbabwe, and to Marcus who is here from Rhodes.
• Preparing for the review of the paper Cheryl B and I have been writing for a Special Issue of JCAL - Debunking the “digital native”: beyond digital apartheid, towards digital democracy

 We live in exciting times.

 

  

In a magazine article I was recently reading, five Economist writers were asked which they thought was the most important year ever in history. Two of the suggestions related to Christianity (5BC, the birth of Christ, and 1204, the time of the Crusaders) and two related to technology. The year 1439 is the estimated year of the invention of the Gutenberg’s printing press, and 1791 saw both the birth of Samuel Morse, and the invention of the telegraph by the Chappe brothers.

The choice of the year 1791 reminded me of the first time I realised the extent to which the telegraph was the precursor to email and sms, all those enablers of “the global village”. It was after reading a delightful book called The Singing Line, written by the great grand-daughter of the man who laid down the telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin in Australia. It was a charming account of what one could reasonably expect to be a boring read, and got me thinking of the vision and persistence it took to create the infrastructure for something whose effects were very hard to imagine. How time and space would be altered by that telegraph line was pretty much like science fiction at the time.

All of which is a circuitous way of historically contextualising the launch here in CET of the sms tool for Vula, our online learning environment. Cell phones are ubiquitous in higher education in South Africa, and the use of sms is very common indeed, thus offering numerous opportunities for learning both alone and in combination with web-based environments. Although the development of the sms tool was complicated and expensive, one of the advantages of belonging to an open source community is that the tool will be immediately available to all in the Sakai community.

We in CET have been exploring and developing the possibilities of mobile learning in interesting ways for a while now, as can be seen on the CET web site (see Mobile Project at http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/projects and Dick Ng’ambi’s work on the research output page). I look forward in coming months to sharing the ways that the sms tool is being used. We know immediately of its administrative value and take-up, which is not insignificant given how it frees up busy academics. But there are also exciting and un-thought of pedagogical and research related uses which will no doubt surprise and interest us all.

 

 

 

Search for “digital native’ online and you will have 101 000 possible web sites to peruse, demonstrating how pervasive the term is. Without having analysed all these sites, I would bet that most of the uses are either positive or unproblematic, although there is a growing chorus of dissent and concern to which Cheryl B and I are adding our  voices. I am really curious about the “stickiness” of this term. What is it about it that attracts? Does it roll off the tongue? Does it suggest something easy or comfortable?

 

Does it promise membership of a club? According to wikipedia the term merely means someone who was born into a world where digital technologies exist. That is clearly not it, or all of it - all sorts of other things exist in the world and we don’t all want to be members of those clubs. The concept is often used in a deterministic fashion, especially when it comes to students coming into and studying in higher education…because they have been born into a digital milieu we in educational institutions are supposed to assume that they are online producers, have digital skills and multiple forms of access, don’t need training as they use informal networks etc etc. The problem is that our data does not bear out these assumptions out- in fact our findings across several higher education institutions pointed to a small digital elite and on the other end of the spectrum, a group one might call digital strangers if we applied the criteria used so often regarding access to both technologies and networks, experience and computer-mediated practices.

 

In fact, with broadband growing we are seeing a form of digital apartheid based on connectivity. These issues feed into and form part of our research project on student experiences (which we are musing about at http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/researching-students-voices). And we have been writing about these matters for a Special Issue of JCaL interrogating the concept of the net generation. These gloomy observations are countered by our findings and those of others about the use and possibilities of cell phones, something we have also started writing about (eg in the latest issue of AlT-J) and which we are currently researching.

 

But back to this sticky term. In the process of reviewing the literature and the critiques, we have been pleased to notice those which object to the dichotomies being created by the terminology (such as by Sian Bayne and jen Ross who urge against dangerous oppositions at http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/natives_final.pdf) but have yet to find voiced the concerns we feel about the term itself. In the South African context, and indeed in many post colonial contexts, the term is loaded with baggage and problematic connotations. There exists another whole set of discourses to do with natives and settlers, native laws etc to which we do not wish to be party. And indeed, while the term has been reclaimed in some instances (such as The Native Club), there seems to be no sense of irony in the present use of the term digital native.

On a light note to start with (maybe) is a blog entry I have just read by the VC of Macquarie University Steven Schwartz who had noted that the spellr.us annual online content survey found that the websites of high-ranking universities are riddled with spelling errors. So he challenged his blog readers to find spelling errors on his own University website. Fabulous way to get the best kind of proofreading done, and it worked! A brave man!

 

 A passion for proofreading and a fear of errors might have kept the erstwhile team of the OpenScholarship Project from ever declaring the Project ready for publication. Thanks to the funders, the Shuttleworth Foundation, for insisting on a final deadline! Of course in this fast changing area, there is no final, or complete, or even really up to date - not possible! But what is possible and what they have achieved, is an illuminating overview of the central issues of ICTs and open dissemination, a synthesis of the debates, a comprehensive scan of the terrain, and a fabulous set of examples of the cases.  I admit it, I am biased.  

Which is not to say I was uncritical, as I have had lots of suggestions along the way. And along that journey the team have done their best to educate me as I hope they will succeed in educating and influencing many others with the 29 outputs they have produced- all available at http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/OpeningScholarship . 

The Executive Summary puts it better than I could …(By the way the spellchecker corrected my Executive summary to Eruptive Summary) I think I like that better J 

What makes a study of a South African university particularly interesting in this regard is the seldom-noticed conjuncture of the rise of the internet as the dominant means of communication in the world and the advent of democratic government in South Africa. When South Africans went to the polls in 1994 to vote in the first democratic government, the internet was in its infancy, right at the beginning of its phenomenal growth curve. Post-election, the South African higher education system sought to transform itself in order to acknowledge its African context, shed its apartheid heritage and provide more democratic access to the benefits of learning to the majority of the population. In parallel, the internet was transforming higher education across the world, offering more open and more democratic ways of accessing the knowledge produced in universities and challenging some of the traditional hierarchies and authority systems.  

Thus, just as UCT addressed ways of aligning its research with African priorities and the needs of the South African community, and sought to enhance its teaching and learning to empower previously disadvantaged students, internet communications were changing the face of research and offering new modalities for effective learning.

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Here in CET the last week has been dominated by the wretched performance appraisal reviews, written to the standard institutional form. It is an opportunity to record and gasp in amazement at the work achieved over the past year, and to have a reflective conversation about where one is at and where one might be going. Hopefully there is a moment of that, and for a person to considers in disbelief what has been done in only one year And yet it is vexed and difficult. Why is this? Is it always like this in every part of the university? Or is just, or mostly our field? A big part of the problem is that the work we do does not fit neatly into the standard format of teaching, social responsiveness and research. Added to that is that there is a whole lot of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing that happens which does not express itself neatly in the form of ISI listed journal output. So if it is not in the form of an ISI listed output does that mean that knowledge creation and knowledge sharing did not happen? Of course not.

Take the Sakai conference I recently attended. It is a place of developers and users and designers in higher education who are at the fore front (avoiding that tired term, the cutting edge, but perhaps it really is the cutting edge) of understanding of new technologies, new social practices, changing educational practices, changing possibilities for different institutional practices, alternative ways of working together (and not the kind that gets you brownie points on the forms, but why not when collaboration is one of the key words of the day), and above all it is the space for the fusion and muddle between all of these aspects of a changing higher education sector and its overlap with society in general. How does one capture the knowledge production that happens in this space? Is it through the “products”, is it only through  the products? How does one capture and share the design knowledge that is generated? And how does one transmit that to a form?

It seems to me that the field of educational technology is one where practice and professional knowledge and design and tacit knowledge are often ahead of research and more formalised knowledge forms and outputs. Bang goes the research informs practice assumption that is the foundation of university work. Where does this leave one with the performance review process? Surely this is an opportunity to do more than the workload/are you justifying your salary thing? Is this not an opportunity to capture and make explicit that very real and very slippery process of making and share new knowledge and new practices in a context that is fast moving and so transient and so emergent?

At last I have managed to get a blog together- better late than never. I am planning to share bit and pieces about life and work and projects and excitement and worries here at CET. Also part of my Good Intentions to update the CET website. (Have a fabulous new intern, Rulisha, with just this sort of background who is going to be working with me.)

So much interesting stuff happening here at CET! The day to day stuff is never boring and in fact rarely day-to-day: the curriculum projects, and the Teaching with Technology Grants, and the Vula support and growth and development, the many staff development events...and...and .... And then there are all sorts of projects; the Open Education Resources Projects (OER UCT) and the project with SAIDE working with 7 other African universities on Educational Technology Initiatives (ETIA), and...and...and..

As it is said -  Watch This Space!

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