October has been Open Access Week. It’s an event that I have been celebrating for the past five years. This year, my commemoration lies beyond the ivory tower. Although I’m not an academic or a researcher, as an ed techie who is interested in evidence based practice, I value the many open contributions to scholarship …
Category archives: Unfiled
Wits-e/Sakai developers have been redeployed
Sakai is an open source platform and developers from the higher education community are key to service, manage, maintain and develop Sakai. In late 2013, Prof Crouch instructed eLSI management to move the Wits-e / Sakai developers out of the unit and into CNS for operational reasons. The impact of this redeployment of developer support Wits-e / …
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Duct Tape
Incomplete advice, incompetent assistance and unavailable service are three of the most frustrating experiences when needing tech support. It doesn’t have to be that way (and sometimes support actually surprises you)
Connected Course
Spent Friday afternoon listening to Jim Click Groom, Alan Link Levine and Howard Embed Rhinegold introduce Connected Courses in a session entitled Pre-course: Orientation: Registration & Setting up your Network. I only listened for the first half an hour but “Click”, “Link” and “Embed” did have some good points about online learning. These were the …
Sharing Nicely
That big annoying purple beast was right. Sharing is caring (I never thought I’d start a post by quoting Barney). Sharing nicely, especially when educational materials are concerned, is a natural impulse. But many education related organisations seem intent on curbing this generosity. If you are part of a larger education related body (a publisher, …
My parents and ed-tech
Learning analytics treats students as numbers, invades privacy, and doesn’t elevate education. Originally published in IT Web 4 April 2003 When I was about 6 months old, my well-meaning and sleep-deprived parents bought me an indispensable and comprehensive education technology: the multivolume, all-inclusive reference source known as the Encyclopædia Britannica. The salesman convinced them that …
It’s official – Sakai is the new LMS at Wits
The wheels of Wits take a while to turn…but a decision has been made. Wits is going to move from KEWL and WebCT to Sakai. A copy of the press release is below. At the Senate meeting on the 10th of November, Prof Ballim, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, formally announced Wits’ decision to adopt Sakai as …
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Bootcamp Lingo
As one of the last of the generation of white South Africans, who were conscripted to a wasted two years in the “”defense force”, the term “bootcamp” doesn’t site well with me. It conjures up an image of drilled troops, marching around while, a buzz cut officer barks orders to compliant recruits. Instead of creating …
QR codes in class
I’m often teaching ICT to students in a small computer LAN. Students usually out number the available desktops. For example, last years UKZN AV class had only 70 students. And we had access to only 12 desktop computers. Edtechies assume too easily that “one person, one computer” is the norm in schools and higher ed. …
Re-arranging the deckchairs
My “multi-tasking”, “threaded”, “distributed”, “distracted” world tends to make concentrated work and thought rare. This year, I’d like to see if I can look up, look inside, take time to breathe, talk to myself, be still and mindful before I jump straight into the vast connected chamber that I work in. Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author …