I came across this learning object via Tom Smith’s blog. It reminded me of a previous life when we used to get kids to think about what indicators best illustrated the relative changes in a countries quality of life and standard of living over a period of time. Then, with the trusty school atlas they could graph the relevant data to help with their analysis.
The 21st century version of this activity is worth 5 minutes of anyones time….
Re-conceptualizing “contact” education: a case of mobile learning at the University of Cape Town
Dick talked in general about his work and HE education in South Africa. He works for the Centre for Educational Technology which has a remit to:
- ensure all students have fair access
- address educational social inclusion
- enable all to participate in a new communicative order
South African HE education context
The DoE in SA wants to transform the HE system to serve the new social order, pressing national needs, and the new ‘global’ reality. A target set by 2013 is that all teachers and learners will be able to ‘use ICT’s confidently and creatively’.
In terms of access to HE in SA, pre 1994 social policies are largely manifest along racial lines, by contrast in the UK socio-economics are the determining factor.
A key issue for SA is to balance graduate demographics input with graduate throughput. Dropout rates are high and as the recruitment net widens so does the inclusion of poorly academically prepared students. In addition, there is a diverse student population with different learning preferences. Class sizes are also large which makes offering a personalised learning experience difficult particularly the giving of meaningful feedback.
A funding change to output rather than recruitment is designed to apply pressure to address the retention at an institutional level.
Dick talked extensively on the nature of contact between students and their lecturers painting a recognisable picture for those working in HE in the UK. He made the point that contact education forces a convergence of distance and time and that it is dominated by the lecturer. However education (learning) is more naturally independent of distance and space.
This leads to a position of de-coupling learning activities, interactivity, and intended outcomes from a model of ‘contact’ education.
A student quote exemplified the ‘suffocating’ experience that HE can be with a continual diet of new ‘stuff’ to learn. Personally, I think that the assessment tail wagging the learning dog has much to contribute to this.
Re-conceptualizing “contact” education: a case of mobile learning at the University of Cape Town
Dick talked in general about his work and HE education in South Africa. He works for the Centre for Educational Technology which has a remit to:
- ensure all students have fair access
- address educational social inclusion
- enable all to participate in a new communicative order
South African HE education context
The DoE in SA wants to transform the HE system to serve the new social order, pressing national needs, and the new ‘global’ reality. A target set by 2013 is that all teachers and learners will be able to ‘use ICT’s confidently and creatively’.
In terms of access to HE in SA, pre 1994 social policies are largely manifest along racial lines, by contrast in the UK socio-economics are the determining factor.
A key issue for SA is to balance graduate demographics input with graduate throughput. Dropout rates are high and as the recruitment net widens so does the inclusion of poorly academically prepared students. In addition, there is a diverse student population with different learning preferences. Class sizes are also large which makes offering a personalised learning experience difficult particularly the giving of meaningful feedback.
A funding change to output rather than recruitment is designed to apply pressure to address the retention at an institutional level.
Dick talked extensively on the nature of contact between students and their lecturers painting a recognisable picture for those working in HE in the UK. He made the point that contact education forces a convergence of distance and time and that it is dominated by the lecturer. However education (learning) is more naturally independent of distance and space.
This leads to a position of de-coupling learning activities, interactivity, and intended outcomes from a model of ‘contact’ education.
A student quote exemplified the ‘suffocating’ experience that HE can be with a continual diet of new ‘stuff’ to learn. Personally, I think that the assessment tail wagging the learning dog has much to contribute to this.
A neat application that for me will work as a replacement for the feature on Internet Explorer (no longer supported and getting very flaky with newer OSX operating systems) that allowed the downloading of whole websites rather than just individual pages.
A good way to retain a local copy of externally hosted services such as blogs that are composed through the use of web forms and compiled into websites automatically. This could be useful for students who wish to submit blogs/wiki/websites as a part of their assessment portfolios by first making a local copy and then compressing it for upload to drop boxes and audited submission tools.
Tom Smith put me onto xFruits, a web 2.0 service that for him is a “tool to help me ‚ÄòCompose my information system‚Äô”. After a few struggles I worked out that you need to be logged out when you try to view the xFruit you have created, if not you just get to see the edit mode and this is confusing. What does it do and what are the possibilities?
This example shows how the RSS feed from my blog is rendered into a PDF file and other formats are also available. When students use blogs and websites as a part of their studies and wish to submit them for assessment, the University gets bogged down by quality assurance regulations. If students retain control of the assessment product (website, blog, etc) how can we guarantee that is hasn’t been worked on after the submission date?
One possible answer is that they automatically generated PDF to satisfy the University regulations, then we can browse their blog, website, or wiki in situ and as intended for assessment purposes.
