Laura @ CET

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.