Fundamentalism, Legacy, Implosion,Explosion, Fact and Fiction: Perspectives on LearningTechnologies for the South African landscape

1. Fundamentalism, Legacy, Implosion,
Explosion, Fact and Fiction:
Perspectives on Learning
Technologies for the South African
landscape
Duan van der Westhuizen
University of Johannesburg
12 September 2012

2. The creation of the Technopoly
The god Theus was the inventor of many things, including writing
He boasted to Thamus, king of Egypt, about improving the
wisdom of the nation when he invented writing
Said Thamus: “What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection,
not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the
reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of
information without proper instruction, and in consequence be
thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite
ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom
instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to Society”

3. Web 3.0? Web 4.0?
2004 - Web 2.0/FOSS
2003 Mobile learning
1989 - The Internet
1982 - Computer Multimedia
19xx VCR/ Laser
Discs/Television
1960 - Teaching machines
1930 - Radio
1922 - Film
1450 - Printing press
BC - Writing

4. Education surrenders to the Technopoly
• 1975: Seymour Paper - Logo – Microworlds
• “Technology …. going to displace school and
the way we understand school”
• 1985: Apple Classroom of tomorrow
• No empirical evidence > greater achievement
• Higher Education: Online education became
“educationally seductive”
• Learning Management Systems 
• Digital Diploma Mills (Noble, 1998)
• Commodification of knowledge (Amory)

5. So much going on …
Web
Analytics 2.0

6. So much going on … locally
But currently in our schools?
Teachers? Learners?
E-Education policy: 2013 looms: “by 2013 every learner
and teacher will be ICT capable”

7. What’s else is hot?
• MOOC (e.g. mobiMOOC)
• Webinars
• Tablets & mobile learning
• The ‘flipped classroom’
• Digital storytelling
• Publishers and LMS vendors collaboration
• Making e-Books
• Cloud computing
• Crowdsourcing
• Badge-based learning
• Megatrends: http://goo.gl/dqHaB

8. Google in Education
Google +
• Hangouts
• Multiple Administrators
• Direct Connect

9. Learning Technologies: Mashups

10. Learning Technologies: Curation
Digital curation is the selection,
reservation, maintenance, collection
and archiving of digital assets, generally
referred to the process of establishing
and developing long term repositories
of digital assets for current and future
reference by researchers, scientists,
historians, and scholars.
Wikipedia

11. Learning Technologies: Curation
Pearltrees.com

12. The knowledge of the world in your
pocket?

13. Learning Technologies: Resources

14. Welcome to the new Internet
http://www.project10x.com/
Welcome To The New Internet: Simple Design, Short Names, No Ads
Svbtle, a Stripped-Down Blogging Platform
Branch, a Free-Floating Comment/Discussion System
App.net, An Infrastructure-Level Version of Twitter

15. The Internet is still a very White place
(for Web 4.0)

16. What does RESEARCH say?
The positive impact of ICT use in education has not been proven
In general, and despite thousands of impact studies, the impact
of ICT use on student achievement remains difficult to measure
and open to much reasonable debate.
“There is neither a strong and well-developed theoretical case
nor much empirical evidence supporting the expected benefits of
ICT …”
Contrasting evidence: BECTA (2002) and Machin et al(2006)
found positive effects, while Fuchs & Woessman (2004), Leuven
et al (2004) and others found no real positive effect

17. Lack of large-scale meta-analyses
• Most prior meta-analyses were conducted on
Distance Education
• Kulik & Kulik pre-1980
• Most recently by US DoE: Evaluation of
Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning:
A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies
• Project RED: THE TECHNOLOGY FACTOR

18. Insufficient local research
• Van der Westhuizen (2002), there is little research
addressing and locating specifically local concerns
• Annotated Bibliography on e-Learning and Application of
Educational Technology in African Countries, or in
Contexts Relevant to Africa (Carnegie)
• Deficits in Academic Staff Capacity at African Universities
(Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, 2010)
• Growth in student numbers not met by growth in staff
• Lack of female staff
• Low numbers of PhD and M students
• Staff qualifications
• SA: CHE Report on Higher Education Landscape

19. What has been done recently?
• USA: One to One

20. What has been done recently?

21. Why did technology not live up to its
promise?
• Perpetuation of fundamentalist views on:
– Knowledge
– Teaching
“The Assessment that is missing is the understanding of the
– primary thing
•possibility. Most people cannotlike and what it this new kind of
learning look envision what put books on
Most e-software willis an attempt to means.”
educational
a computer: duplication or virtualisation of
(Schank)
the classroom
“The leadership decisions you'll make in the exercise may
•differ somewhat from your real- life circumstances, but most
Lack of authenticity
of the principles and ideas can easily be transferred and
Lack of activity (learning by telling)
•applied to your job.” (Schank)

22. The Fundamentalist Teacher
• Is an experienced teacher
• Protects the status quo
• “It works, it always has worked (for me – look, I’m
OK)”
• Student performance is a direct consequence of
diligence
• Failure is the result of (laziness/ability)
• Absolves the fundamentalist from responsibility
• Inhibits reflection on teaching

23. Social Darwinism
Deriving
‘ought’
Herbert
from ‘is’
Spencer
The strongest/fittest will survive and prosper, the weak will die out
Belief: Not all students can succeed – adherence to the bell curve
Previous ill-informed reforms killed the dream of being a teacher

24. The case for technology
“Technology is an essential component of human agency—culture
provides the ‘tool kit’ of technologies, techniques and procedures
with which different groups and communities learn about, respond
to, act on and manage their experience of the world” (Bruner, 1996)
“.. [it] is not likely that the current methods of teaching and learning
will suffice to prepare students for the lives that they will lead in the
twenty-first century.” (John Seely Brown, 2008)
It is not really possible today to be relevant, nor
effective if you teach without technology.

25. Seriously?

28. Connectivity

29. Internet usuage

30. South Africa

31. Web 2.0 is also about
• Accepting that you are already digital
– Digital footprint (calculator @ www.emc.com)
– Spezify
– Mendeley
– Publish or Perish
– http://personas.media.mit.edu
• Building blocks of a networked , digital scholar
• Creation, Curation, Collaboration, Communication
• Going “open”
• Teaching digitally (“techno expression”)

32. Duan van der Westhuizen is “Digitally Distinct”

33. Contemporary views on learning
– Ken Robinson
• Learning institutions as factories
• Killing creativity
– Jerome Bruner: Learning to be
– Knowledge exchange vs knowledge creation
– Authentic learning and assessment
– Teaching as learning activity design
– 21st Century Skills

34. 21st Century themes
Learning and innovation skills
Information and media skills
Life and career skills

35. Open Educational Resources
• Creative Commons Licensing
• Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org)
• OpenDoar (www.opendoar.org)
• Sherpa/Romeo (www.sherpa.ac.uk )
• Project Gutenburg

36. Innovative spaces

38. The Enquiring Mind
www.enquiringminds.org.uk
Enquiring Minds is .…
- A response to
modern challenges
- An approach which
takes seriously the
knowledge that
students have

39. Blueprint for –learning success

40. Blueprint for –learning success

41. Beware of the rhetoric
• 21st Century skills: are the 4 C’s and the 3 R’s not
also 20th Century skills?
• Technology won’t fix bad teaching, fixing bad
teachers will
• We dare not use technology to perpetuate past
practices 50% first year
• Technology is NOT cheaper intake 0% ICT
skills!
• Technology is NOT the answer for poorly
performing institutions
• Technology use HIGHLIGHTS equity issues

42. Sources
• Did you know
• http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
• http://edutechdebate.org/ict-in-schools/there-are-no-technology-shortcuts-to-good-education
• http://www.devaindustries.com/articles/ITProm.htm
• http://www.learningtimes.com/what-we-do/badges/
• http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/
• http://www.edutopia.org/core-concepts
• http://www.socraticarts.com/docs/Educational_Technology_-_The_Promise_and_The_Myth.pdf

43. Tools