Tag: south africa
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Time to look for hope somewhere else
To the best of my knowledge I’ve never written about politics on this site and I don’t think I will again. But I felt like this post was something I needed to do. Every weekend I try to spend a half hour or so reading the news over coffee with varying degrees of success, depending…
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Comment: Eskom is in a death spiral, so it’s time to change the energy ballgame.
This combination of public, private and community-based delivery of renewable energy is an advanced, sophisticated vision (consistent with practice in a number of countries), that breaks from the simplistic view that renewables can only be efficiently delivered by IPPs in a highly competitive market. We must avoid a pure market solution that incentivises a race…
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Five Reasons Why CAPS is Harming Our Children
Five reasons why CAPS is harming our children, by Marina Goetze CAPS is the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement that describes the South African national curriculum for Grades R – 12. I don’t work in the basic education sector but I have friends who do and this is something they talk about all the time. You could probably say…
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Emerging ICTs in South African higher education
For the past few years I’ve been involved in an NRF-funded research project that looked at the use of emerging ICTs in South African higher education. In addition to the range of conference presentations, publications and postgraduate student progression, we also recently saw the first draft of a set of guidelines for South African lecturers…
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Yet another T&L blog?
Yet another T&L blog (Unteaching) We thought there was room for something a bit more…playful. Something less formal. Maybe even irreverent. We think that there’s space for a group of like-minded South African educators to get together and shoot the breeze without needing to worry about who is watching and who you represent. A place…
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CHEC course: teaching and learning (day 3)
Yesterday’s CHEC session was presented by Jeff Jawitz from UCT, who looked at tools for addressing diversity in the South African university classroom. I’ve seen Jeff present before at conferences and he’s got a really relaxed way of introducing and working with often highly controversial topics, like race and gender. I was especially excited to…
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Research plan for 2011
I’ve just been asked by one of my supervisors for my research goals for 2011. This will include my own work, as well as planning how our undergraduate and Masters students’ work might feed into some of the bigger projects. The first goal I have for 2011 is to submit 2 articles based on my first…
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Ethics CPD lecture
As part of our commitment to continuing professional development (CPD) in South African healthcare, we’re required to accumulate 5 ethics credits every year. Yesterday I gave a presentation to the staff in our department in order to fulfill this requirement. It went quite well, although being my first time I felt pretty unprepared. I learnt a lot…
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Reflections on SAAHE 2010
The SAAHE conference has come and gone for the 3rd year running. It’s been an interesting and engaging 3 days, and since I’ve already posted all my notes, these are just a few thoughts on what it’s like having a conference in South Africa. And it’s the last post, I promise. To get the negative…
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A national core physiotherapy curriculum
I had a great conversation with a colleague today, that stemmed from an ongoing discussion we’re having in our department about moving our practical assessments towards an OSCE-type format. We’ve been thinking about standardising on our assessments for a while but have never had dedicated time to work on it…not that we have any now,…
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Assignments
assignment, community-based healthcare settings, education, ethics, Google, google sites, healthcare system, human rights, Ireland, learning outcomes, management, module, online presence, physiopedia, physiotherapist, physiotherapy, Royal College of Surgeons, south africa, university of the western cape, Western Cape, wikiOver the last week I’ve given my fourth year physiotherapy students 2 assignments to be completed over the next few months. Here is a basic rundown of each. The first assignment is part of the continuous evaluation for the Management module I teach. The students must create a website for a (fictional) private physiotherapy practice.…
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Opencourseware Consortium panel discussion at UWC
Andy Lane, Archbishop, Chancellor, derek keats, Desmond Tutu, ethics, internet superstars, lecturer, Neil Butcher, OCW Consortium, oer, oer africa, open university, Opencourseware Consortium, p2pu, peer 2 peer university, Peer University, philip schmidt, south africa, United Kingdom, Vice-Chancellor, Wits UniversityLast Friday I was fortunate enough to attend 2 panel discussions on the use of OER in higher education. It was a bit of an occasion as one of the panels included a few board members of the Opencourseware Consortium (on a side note, UWC is a member of the OCW Consortium). This post is…
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Third year ethics assignment
I just wanted to send out a quick post to highlight the great work that one of my third year students has done as part of her ethics assignment. The idea was to discuss the topic of human rights in South African healthcare using any method that the students wanted to. I’m getting some great…
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Faculty writing workshop
I just got back from an academic writing workshop at the Houwhoek Inn (their site needs some serious work). The point was to go there with an idea of an article you were going to write, spend 3 days writing it and getting feedback from the other participants and to end up with a draft…
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Mozilla Open Education course and other thoughts
I was unable to participate in the second session for the Mozilla Open Education course due to local Internet problems that meant I had no sound. While it was frustrating to begin with, I realised that this is the reality of the situation in most countries and that while we talk about open this and…
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Research at South African universities
I just read an interesting short article discussing the research priorities of certain South African higher education institutions. While some institutions rank highly and excel in specific areas of research, government does not seem to adequately support these institutions in terms of pushing those research agendas. With the move towards a more scholarly approach to…