Dick Ng'ambi

Ubiquitous Social Presence: Context-Awareness in a Mobile Learning Environment

One of the most fundamental facets of learning is the social interaction in which learning is an outcome of individuals sharing experiences. There are three locations where learners perform learning tasks: formal locations such as classrooms or scheduled computer laboratory sessions; semi-formal locations such libraries or walk-in laboratories; and informal locations such as residences or non-academic settings. As a learner moves across different learning contexts, a learner does not have access to the same social networks for consultation and hence receives information of variable quality depending on where they are. In this paper, we propose a learning environment that provides ubiquitous social presence awareness for the purposes of facilitating interactive consultation as a learner traverses the various learning contexts. The paper concludes that social presence through the synchronous instant messaging provides learners with continuous awareness of available support and encourages sharing of learning experiences

Editorial: Massive open online courses (MOOCs): Disrupting teaching and learning practices in higher education

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the special issue, which is on the topic of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in higher education and the ways in which these online courses qualify as a disruptive technology in higher education teaching.

Editorial: Emerging technologies and changing learning/teaching practices

An introduction to this special issue is presented, focusing on the use of emerging technologies (ETs) such as social media and mobile communications systems in higher education, as well as the need for further research into the impact of ETs on educational quality.

Leveraging informal leadership in higher education institutions: A case of diffusion of emerging technologies in a southern context

In the last decade, emerging technologies and transformative practices have diffused into higher education social systems in ways that formal leadership styles are increasingly stretched to both keep abreast of and to manage. While many scholars have argued for the importance of the role of leadership styles in shaping the strategic direction of institutions, there is a paucity of research on the role that informal leaders, and more particularly opinion leaders and change agents, can play in enabling wide-scale adoption of innovations in higher education institutions. This paper focuses on the ways in which leadership in higher education can best extend their influence to accelerate the diffusion of transformational educational practices using emerging technologies by leveraging informal leaders. To illustrate how this could be achieved, we report on a study of 22 public higher education institutions in South Africa involving 259 participants who responded to an online survey. The survey focused on the uses of emerging technologies to transform the teaching and learning practices and the nature of institutional support such initiatives received. The findings reveal that for emerging technologies to be diffused in institutional social systems, more transformative and less transactional leadership is required. The paper proposes a model for accelerating the diffusion of emerging technologies in higher education institutions and concludes that leveraging informal leadership is particularly critical in accelerating the uptake of emerging technologies practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards building a productive, scalable and sustainable collaboration model for open educational resources

This paper reports on a case study of a Health Open Educational Resources (OER) project in order to examine how to facilitate cross-institutional collaboration for OER production. This study assesses collaboration needs, identifies social and technical barriers, and builds a collaboration model to facilitate OER production. In doing so, we make three contributions to the GROUP community: (1) Whereas previous studies on distributed collaboration tend to focus on well-developed collaboration, in this study we research collaboration in Health OER at an early stage of development; (2) By studying collaboration involving both developing and developed countries, we identify components that are particularly critical for collaboration between teams spanning differently resourced nations; (3) By studying the Health OER project, we better understand factors that affect distributed collaboration when participants are not externally funded and are constrained by their local organizations.

Collaborative Questioning: A Case of Short Message Services (SMS) for Knowledge Sharing

Whenever a class is invited to ask questions, it is individual learners who ask and their questions do not often represent the questions of the whole class. The benefit to those present during the questioning session is usually by osmosis. It could be disruptive for several students to interject a question because they want to add to a question asked just before a teacher responds. This paper argues that collaborative questioning, which is a form of group interjection in a question is a useful learning tool. It exploits the ubiquitous SMS texting coupled with the power of the web to create an anonymous collaborative questioning environment. The paper reports on the case study in which students interrogate an academic text and collaboratively ask questions using SMS.

MOBILect: an interactive mobile lecturing tool for fostering deep learning

Students at Higher Education Institutions HEIs in developing countries face challenges not limited to large classes and inability to quickly understand lectures as these are delivered in English language which is adopted in most higher education as a medium of instruction. This challenge is compounded for students who speak English as their second or third language. Although podcasts and vodcasts are increasingly becoming popular in HEIs as a means of augmenting face-to-face f2f lectures, their limitations are well documented. In this paper we report on a MOBILect, an interactive mobile lecturing tool that aimed to mitigate the limitations of podcasting or vodcasting and fosters deep learning. The tool was evaluated at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. This paper describes MOBILect, its architecture, design and implementation and also its ability for enhancing learning in higher education.

Students’ use of computers in UCT's ‘walk-in’ laboratories

Introduction In a time of decreasing resources for higher education, South African universities are required to respond to the myriad inequities of the past while simultaneously ensuring participation in an Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled future. As pressure mounted at the University of Capetown (UCT) to extend student access to computer laboratories, build bigger and better laboratories, wire residences, improve networks and provide faster computers, we asked what students do with the computers they already have access to, and whether they are using those computers to support their learning.

Using question-based chat rooms to negotiate varying meanings in non-static knowledge environments

In this paper, the authors describe the use of question-based chat rooms to negotiate dynamic meanings associated with questions in nonstatic knowledge environments. Meanings associated with questions are themselves nonstatic and when these questions are coupled with nonstatic contexts in nonstatic knowledge environments; extraction of meaning from questions is nontrivial. The paper describes the problems associated with interpretation of questions and how this problem is being addressed using a computer based critical questioning environment tool. They describe the meaning negotiation project undertaken as an intervention for honours students at the University of Cape Town to teach students critical engagement skills with academic text and reports on how questions were used as a teaching tool.

Using a Participatory Action Research Approach to Design a Lecture Podcasting System

Although podcasting is popular in higher education, there is limited research on podcasting in developing institutions or resource constrained environments. There are fragmented implementations of podcasting projects by enthusiastic faculty but the tools used are often proprietary, imported from the West by administrators without any consultation with the lecturers who eventually use them. Similarly, many of these tools are used on a trial basis. The authors hypothesize that involving academics through user centered approaches to the design of educational applications will encourage them to use the tools. This paper reflects on a Participatory Action Research approach adopted in the design of a podcasting system. The research study incorporated a cyclical action model with four distinctive stages designed to guide the constituencies involved in the study to design, test, and possibly enhance the tool. The findings reveal some of the contextual phenomena that create both challenges and opportunities for a podcasting model.