Are we ready for Blended Learning?

Technologies for teaching and learning are a part of the current and proposed Teaching and Learning plan at Wits. If Wits is indeed going to be tech savvy, going beyond EdTech “solutionism”  and explore how a range of different modes for course provision can best be used, then it is appropriate that a range of …

Making ICT a part of a school’s vision

The primary school where my children are enrolled have taken steps towards preparing the school for the introduction of information and communication technology (ICT). The governing body are thinking of equipping teachers with laptops and Gauteng Education department have equipped the school with a set of tablets. These are exciting moves for our school and …

Digital Divides & Participation Gaps

Wits has made it explicit in its vision 2022 that it would like to known as a “tech savvy” intuition. On our digitally equipped connected campus, academics and students do make regular and expert use of digital technologies to meet their communication, scholarship and teaching needs. Ability of staff to access and use the network …

Differentiated Tasks

William M. Ferriter’s article is Why Teachers Should Try Twitter is more about differentiated instruction than Twitter. When I read it, I thought – here’s a note to self – time to explore how technology can be leveraged so that  “students of different abilities, interest or learning needs” can use  different learning paths so that …

Wordled & taguled my thesis

I hauled out the old thesis and copied & pasted the text into Wordle. Yishay persuaded me to take it further and submit it to the I wordled my thesis group on Flickr. The thesis seems more accessible as a tag cloud and, when enlarged, it visually summerises the key words and ideas contained in …

Discover Microblogging

Microblogging (the act of broadcasting short, real-time messages) allows people to express themselves in new ways. It offers people a new communication channel to broadcast and share updates about what they are reading, thinking, experiencing, watching and doing. Educationalists that choose to incorporate Microblogs into their courses could refocus Microblogging as a peer to peer …

Your progress and your opinions of my progress

Well done to you all. We are more than half way through the course, and many of you are on track with task submission. 68 students have submitted task 1, 63 have submitted task 2 (still waiting for the outstanding 13 to tell me which group they are in), 65 have submitted task 3, 41 …