Laura @ CET

 

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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