Laura @ CET

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!

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.