Saide Current Awareness
24 July 2023

 

Distance education 

  • Distance Education under Oppression: The Case of Palestinian Higher Education Source: Education Sciences This paper draws from both empirical research on an EU-funded project in Palestine and from the lived experiences of Palestinian HE educators. The geopolitical situation is precarious at the best of times in Palestine, where Israel monitors and controls the Palestinians’ right to travel, live and work—even more so if they wish to accomplish these activities abroad—and their access to the internet is never free from surveillance. In these circumstances and under these conditions, distance education has played a crucial role in supporting Palestinian students to develop a global voice. This paper captures some of the educational challenges encountered by Palestinian students and teachers generally in their daily contexts and, more specifically, in their experiences of learning and teaching, and the methods used to overcome these barriers.

 

 Education: South Africa 

  • Sign language is now official in South Africa - how this will help education in Deaf schools Source: The Conversation South African Sign Language is now the country’s 12th official language. Parliament approved a constitutional amendment in a bid to “promote the rights of persons who are deaf (sic) and hard of hearing”. Claudine Storbeck, founder and director of the Wits Centre for Deaf Studies at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand, explains what the move could – and should – mean for Deaf education in the country.
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  • Fun and gaming – 10,000 SA kids show off coding chops in nationwide tournament Source: Daily Maverick Children from across South Africa competed in a ‘Code4Mandela’ tournament on Tuesday, using a gaming app designed to teach coding concepts in a fun and accessible way. It was organised by Tangible Africa, a joint project of the Nelson Mandela University computing sciences department and the Leva Foundation.
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  • School fees at the top of the stress class for South Africans Source: Daily Maverick Those earning less than R5,000 a month were most stressed about paying debts and school fees. Those earning R35,000 or more were most concerned about interest rate increases.
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  • Reimagine the future of education at MoodleMoot Africa 2023, hosted by Unisa Source: Moodel.Com MoodleMoot Africa is coming in August! The three-day conference, held between 20–23 August, 2023, will be organised by Unisa, Africa’s largest distance learning institution providing diverse courses and degrees to empower students with accessible educational opportunities.
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  • Sour note: classrooms in SA are heartbreakingly soulless Source: TimesLive Jonathan Jansen's opinion piece on how "Arts, music and drama might appear in the formal CAPS curriculum, but in reality these subjects are for the fancy schools"
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  • Oprah Winfrey in South Africa to talk about impact of trauma on learning Source:TimesLive Hundreds gathered in Midrand, Gauteng, for an inaugural conference with American talk show icon Oprah Winfrey...Hosted by the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (Owlag), the conference is titled “What Happened to You: Understanding the Impact of Trauma on Learning, Teaching, and Psychological Functioning”.
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  • Now corporates are paving the way for Africa’s education Source: The Independant Corporations in Africa are at the forefront of a transformative revolution aimed at addressing the challenge of rising education costs, particularly in tertiary education, by providing essential resources to foster innovation across the continent. 
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  • Afrikaans teacher making learning fun with song and dance goes viral on TikTok Source: IOL  An energetic dancing teacher has gone viral on TikTok for the way she’s teaching Afrikaans to her learners. What better way to learn than with a song? Teaching the “KL” sound in Afrikaans, she incorporates different words starting with the letters in the song and dance.

 

Language and Literacies

  • Optimi Mandela Day initiative: Reading with comprehension Source: ITWeb Optimi Group, which positions itself as a leading educational organisation, is excited to announce the launch of a new Mandela Day initiative aimed at motivating children to read. The programme will provide free virtual lessons to aid grade 4 children in improving their reading comprehension and ultimately enhance their reading scores. In the spirit of Mandela Day, the lessons will total 67 minutes.
     
  • William Steig’s Books Explored the Reality That Adults Don’t Want Children to Know About Source: The New Yorker Writers for young children have a nearly impossible task: to amuse both the kid being read to and the adult doing the reading. Doing one or the other is hard enough, and only a select handful of geniuses can manage both. William Steig is one. Read more about Steig and his gift for telling odd, complex tales:

 

Open Education and Open Educational Resources

  • The Paradoxes of Open Educational Resources - William Cope, CG Scholar Source: CG Scholar This paper focuses and OERs, while also ranging more widely to explore paradoxes in the idea and practices of “open.” On the one hand, the “open” movements make intellectual property freely accessible and reusable for all. On the other hand, this open-ness favours the Big Tech companies that base their search and artificial intelligence businesses on open content. When content is not open, they treat it is if it were, copying copyrighted material without permission. The paper explores the consequences of these developments for the economics of educational content development, contrasting such practices with traditional publishing models. 

 

Post Schooling

  • Minister hints at law change to fix university governance Source:University World News A rising tide of corruption and mismanagement at South African universities could prompt the government to propose legal changes in the coming years, the country’s higher education minister has said, writes Linda Nordling for Research Professional News.
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  • Toxic corporate culture in universities needs uprooting Source:University World News Through an extensive body of research begun at the onset of the pandemic and a health-test of UK university staff and their endeavours to convert online, the authors have sought to document the experience of the pandemic in the Global North and South and a variety of international higher education settings, such as Australia and South Africa, and, furthermore, according to different types of university staff including, for instance, learning technologists.
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  • Disruptive digital era demands a higher education rethink Source:University World News Education is both a powerful enabler and a significant divider. In a disruptive digital era, with growing global inequalities, a “fundamental rethink” of higher education is required, said Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, rector of the United Nations University, at the UN Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) Global Forum this week.
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  • Going viral – Dr Chivaugn Gordon on a medical school with a difference Source: Daily Maverick With humour and an occasional wig, Dr Chivaugn Gordon teaches medical students about serious women’s health issues. During the Covid-19 hard lockdown she delighted students at the University of Cape Town by making educational videos using household items as props. Biénne Huisman asked Gordon about her creative take on medical training, her love of teaching and sensitising students about intimate partner violence.
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  • University Of Cape Town Soars To 64 Places In Latest World Rankings Source: India Education Diary The University of Cape Town (UCT) has been ranked 173rd in the world by the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings 2024. This is an impressive rise of 64 places compared to the previous year. UCT shares this position with Qatar University and The University of Newcastle, Australia.

 

Skills and Employment 

  • Watch videos from WorldSkills and UNESCO-UNEVOC event to celebrate World Youth Skills Day Source: WorldSkills To celebrate World Youth Skills Day (15 July) WorldSkills and UNESCO-UNEVOC co-organized an event packed with insights and knowledge from youth on how to better prepare young people for the future of work. The hybrid event, hosted in collaboration with WorldSkills Germany, took place on 14 July in Bonn, Germany and online. It brought together former WorldSkills Champions and apprentices, alongside policymakers and diverse stakeholders within the skills landscape in Germany and beyond.
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  • Apprenticeships can help bridge the school to work gap Source: Engineering News Creamer Media Businesses can take actions to upskill young people and empower them with work experience that will better their chances of standing out in an oversaturated labour market, says electrical equipment manufacturer Eaton learning and development manager Melanie Riches.
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  • MiDO Academy and Nclose: Educating students about cyber security from grassroots level Source: IT Web Nclose is a proud funder and partner of the MiDO Academy, an organisation dedicated to promoting cyber security education. The aim is to empower students from a grassroots level with the knowledge and skills required to navigate the digital landscape securely and pursue careers in cyber security. The MiDO Academy was founded by Dale and Verity Simons of MiDO Technologies, a black-owned business specialising in creative, cutting-edge ICT solutions for educational institutions. 

 

Teaching and Learning- Local and Global

 

Technology Enhanced Learning

  • SNEAK PREVIEW: A BLUEPRINT FOR AN AI BILL OF RIGHTS FOR EDUCATION Source: Critical AI Critical AI 2.1 is a special issue, co-edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Matthew Stone, collecting interdisciplinary essays and think pieces on a wide range of topics involving Large Language Models. This sneak preview from the issue is by  Kathryn Conrad‘s important “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education”
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  • Principles of use of AI in education.Source: Russells Group The Russel Group of 24 UK universities have published their shared principles.
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  • AI literacy and Schrödinger's ethics Source: Helen Beetham Substack This post reviews the Russell Group's Principles for the Use of AI in Education.
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  • Transformative Learning, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and generative AI Source: Medium Laura Dumin, Professor of English and Tech Writing shares her musings on learning and teaching .She writes "Maybe the first things that you think of when you talk about teaching in the age of generative AI aren’t transformative learning (TL) or the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), but perhaps they should be. To me, these concepts work well together.
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  • Teaching: Preparing yourself for AI in the classroom Source: The Chronicle This week's post by Beth McMuthrie describes  an online training program to help faculty understand AI; shares more resources around AI and conferences on AI in teaching.

 

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