We are delighted to have our very own Laura Czerniewicz featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education as a 'Tech Innovator' who is 'Transforming Campus'! Laura has been profiled along with other global technology innovators such as Salman Khan from the Khan Academy and Jim Groom from the University of Mary Washington among other prominent educational technologists. We wish Laura congratulations on her showcase! You may read the article here.
A Creative Commons image by F. Montino
I was asked recently about elearning or educational technology conferences in South Africa in 2012. My colleague Tony Carr pointed me to a global list of conferences compiled by Clayton R. Wright shared on the eLearning Technology blog. I have extracted the conferences which are in the South African region below.
January 26-27, 2012 The Southern African ICT for Education Summit 2012, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. http://africanbrains.net/edusa/
April 2-4, 2012 South Africa Basic Education Conference, Durban, South Africa. http://www.education-conference.co.za/
July 2-4, 2012 African Education Week Convention and Learning Expo: Bridging the Skills Gap through Quality Education for All, 6th annual, Johannesburg, South Africa. http://www.educationweek.co.za/en/index.php
July 11-13, 2012 Higher Education Close Up 6 Conference: Challenging Dualisms in Higher Education Research and Practice. Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. http://www.hecu6conference2012.co.za/
July 22-27, 2012 International Conference on Psychology Education (ICOPE), 5th, in affiliation with the International Congress of Psychology (ICP) Cape Town, South Africa. http://web.mac.com/rvelayo/Div52Announcements/Upcoming_Events.html or http://www.icp2012.com/index.php?bodyhtml=home.html
August 1-3, 2012 E-Learning Update, 5th, Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa. https://sites.google.com/site/elearningatbase/
September (dates TBC) Emerge 2012 virtual online conference, hosted by the Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town.
Any more to add? Please leave me a comment. Last updated January 17th, 2012
The OpenContent UCT project at the University of Cape Town tries to encourage academics to create resources which can be shared and reused by their colleagues as well as other educators or self-learners. These resources, shared openly on the internet, can then be discovered, used and remixed by teachers around the world.
In order to make resources openly available we must adhere to issues of copyright. We encourage academics to source and use works licensed under Creative Commons whenever possible so that we can legally share the resulting materials more widely. Creative Commons provides an alternative legal framework for specifying conditions for reuse of creative materials. Creative Commons provides the vehicle for content creators to specify a licence for reuse of their content with “some rights reserved”, thus providing an alternative to the “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright.
This video attempts to bring awareness to some of the implications in sourcing materials online without considering the copyright on the material. If we can transform teachers practice so that they use Creative Commons materials exclusively, we can legally share much more of our teaching and learning content!
How do we make rights real for students in the Health Sciences?This was the burning question that led me to explore ways of teaching human rights to future health professionals beyond the traditional assumption that assessment drives learning.It seemed that students were finding difficulty in making the connections between real life experiences and the legal instruments that contain the standards for human rights entitlements. There appeared to frequently be an emotional detachment from the harshness of inequality and discrimination.I began with an infographic of a wheel supported by a foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This developed into the head of the Key which then took shape into its present form. Feedback from students and guest educators was positive. They liked the visual learning tool and the connectivity of the different concepts.With the assistance of graphics professionals and with funding from the Centre for Educational Technology, the Key has moved from paper templates to animated visuals placing more emphasis on the agency that each student has in their potential to advance the rights of othersand promote transformation.Open Educational Resources offered me the opportunity to publish my teaching resource without gatekeepers and time lags. I am now able to share it with others and update my information easily, and can market the resource through social media and several communities of practice.Veronica MitchellSchool of Public Health & Family MedicineUniversity of Cape Town
