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Visit to Kruger National Park: Inside the park

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on April 24, 2012

Categories: South Africa

Elephant stops and sidesteps

Took a day trip into the Kruger National Park to explore and view wild game. WE stuck mainly to the lower regions of the park near the Malelane gate. The park itself is tall and narrow and covers nearly 20,000 square kilometres of land bordering Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The terrain in the south is rocky with low mountains. On our visit we experienced overcast weather with cool temperatures, which is not ideal for game sighting, but I think we had a great visit seeing nearly all of the animals except the big cats.

: Crocodile River

: Crocodile on the shoreline

: Hippos!

: Our game drive vehicle

: Kruger animal sightings board

: Elephant in the bush

: Giraffes

: Giraffe grazing

: Male impala

: Biyamiti River

: Turtles coming to say hello

: Zebra on the road

: Zebra with amazing stripes

: Beautiful impala

: Elephant eating

: Rhino grazing

: Bushbuck

: Rhino close up

: Full size white rhino

: A saddle-billed stork

: Cape buffalo deciding whether to charge us

: Female kudu sighting

: Klipspringer on the rocks

: From the game drive vehicle

: A bush squirrel

: Chameleon

: Impalas

: Warthog

: A large elephant charges us on the road!

: Elephant stops and sidesteps

: And retreats into the bush!

: Elephants grazing in Kruger

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Visit to Kruger National Park: Kwa Madwala Private Game Reserve

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on

Categories: South Africa

Just returned from a few days vacation to Mpumalanga province of South Africa where I visited the famed Kruger National Park. I stayed at the lovely Kwa Madwala Private Game Reserve which has a variety of animals for viewing on their private farm. The accommodation was atop a lovely rock piled mountain and featured amazing rooms, food and lovely staff. The first evening I went on a game drive around the reserve where we spotted lions, rhino, giraffe and a variety of other animals. It was great to be back in Southern African nature and to see the animals once again.

: Accommodation at Kwa Madwala

: View from the room

: Typical room at Kwa Madwala

: View from reception

: View from the loo!

: Waterfall in the dining area

: Dining area at Kwa Madwala

: Game viewed from the dining room

: On a game drive

: First sight of the lions

: Lions being affectionate

: Young male lion resting

: Lion by the river

: Female lion

: Impala

: Sunset from Kwa Madwala game drive

: Rhino sighting at Kwa Madwala

: Pool overlooking the reserve

: Spider

: Monkeys hanging out on my room’s deck

: Braai area in the kraal

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My last day at the Centre for Educational Technology

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on April 20, 2012

Categories: Open Educational Resources, Research

With sadness, I report that today is my last day here with the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I have enjoyed the past three years immensely working on the open educational resource project here at UCT. Support for the project has grown quite steadily which I suspect will continue as OpenUCT takes off in 2012.

I initially come to Cape Town in February 2009 to complete my masters in educational technology. I believe I was very fortunate to find part-time work with CET just as the OER@UCT project was beginning in early 2009. At the time, the concept of open education was quite new to me, but I was interested in using technology to enhance educational experiences. It’s been an absolute delight to be a part of UCT’s move towards openness and knowledge sharing in education using the internet. I firmly believe that UCT is an institution to watch in the open education space and I wish the OpenUCT team the best.

I really could not have imagined working with such a wonderful bunch of colleagues. I really want to thank you all for being part of the experience! This includes CET as well as my friends in the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED), Information and Communication Technology Services (ICTS) and the array of open scholars and academics I was fortunate to work with throughout the faculties.

UCT will always hold a special place in my heart! Feel free to stay in touch on my personal blog, on twitter, Facebook or via email michael.paskevicius [at] gmail.com

P.S. This blog shall live on and will continue reporting on developments with open educational resources at UCT.

Now some magic moments!

Roger Brown, Michelle Willmers, Shihaam Shaikh, Michael Paskevicius and Stephen Marquard at the Launch of UCT OpenContent February 2010 (nice t-shirts)

Michael Paskevicius, Stephen Marquard, Glenda Cox, Shihaam Shaikh, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Roger Brown: UCT OpenContent moves from an external project to a CET core activity August 2010

Too many to mention: Fun times during a CET tea event! If you work at UCT and have not attended a CET Tea, you really must finagle an invitation by any means!

Michael Paskevicius, Thomas King, Michelle Willmers, Samantha Richmond, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Shihaam Shaikh, Laura Czerniewicz, Eve Gray, Stephen Marquard and Julian Kinderlerer just before DVC Max Price signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.

Cheers and best wishes!!

Novel Idea: Evernote as an Eportfolio Tool

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on April 3, 2012

Categories: General, Research

I use Evernote quite often to keep track of ideas, recipes, grocery lists and books/films I want to see. Evernote works pretty seemlessly between my desktop and my mobile which means I can acccess and edit my notes at anytime. I was interested to see the Evernote for education website and this interesting article on using Evernote as an eportfolio tool.

In all honesty, I never really even considered Evernote to be a candidate for eportfolios. However consdering the usability of the tool in terms of creating, organising and editing notes, fusing audio and visual media within the notes, mobile app integration and sharing individual notes as well as entire notebooks, I now see how it might be very useful as an eportfolio platform. I imagine that many students walking around with tablets and laptops are using Evernote for in class notetaking (I know that a number of my colleagues do so) so it seems Evernote notebooks could be set up to showcase students work.

The idea was written about in 2009 by Martin Hawksey at JISC. Since then a number of improvements have been made to the Evernote system which I believe could make it ever more appplicable to eportfolios. You can follow the implementation of Evernote eportfolios in an elementary school on Rob van Nood's blog.