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By Pule Rakgoathe on
4/23/2009 7:56 AM
What are your teenage charges doing during your lessons, do you know? This week I got a peek into the wild world of teenage communication via social networking services and sites. It all happened because with the economic hard times upon us I thought I should start using the Mxit service (www.MXit.com) and avail myself to the super low costs on text messaging. While working out how the service worked on my cell phone I thought I would stop by a soccer related chat room to see what was being discussed. Below is an edited version of the ‘chat’ I experienced. I have isolated one conversation thread in what initially looked like total chaos but was in reality a number of different conversations all running concurrently. I have to admit I did not contribute! I was totally immersed in trying to work out what was being said!
KINGLGENERALKIR: Word up son...wat it do
Lu>[N]+: nun mch dad, im jc in da skwl library, yo syd?
KINGLGENERALKIR: nothing much son... u mom dnt want me 2 work Over time.
QUEENLGENERALK: “silence”
Lu>[N]+: lol, y nt
KINGLGENERALKIR: bt son ... its cool my side. Hwz school son
QUEENLGENERALK: lunga hows zinzi|
Lu>[N]+: she iz gr8 mum J
Soccerzone: QUEENLGENERALK hugs Lu>[N]+ .. ok then ..
QUEENLGENERALK: Ppl i must go.. got lots to do..
Lu>[N]+: ima skip ma nxt clas..
QUEENLGENERALK: lunga u wont L
Lu>[N]+: bt its borin
Soccerzone: QUEENLGENERALK gives KINGLGENERALKIR a Kiss on da lips!!!
Lu>[N]+: l8tr parents
QUEENLGENERALK: chat l8tr, me g2g.. Tataz
KINGLGENERALKIR: yeah... we got alot 2 do people, peace.
On reflection and further monitoring this thread proved not to be a case of happy families but rather a group of friends ‘lording’ it up as a royal threesome. Comments posted by the chat room’s other users revealed KINGLGENERALKIR and QUEENLGENERALK to be minor celebrities within the chat room environment. And soccer? Not a word for the duration of my time there. Later I posted a comment about who was going to be the favourites to win the World Cup next year but my perfect spelling and sound grammar marked me out as an alien, an imposter.... a weirdo? My question was ignored.
Mxit is a South African global phenomenon with a presence in Malaysia, India, Indonesia, UK, USA, Nigeria, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Its popularity as a messaging service amongst teenagers is because it offers an extremely cheap deal. It bypasses SMS technology by using GPRS Internet to forward chat messages. Consequently a MXit message costs 1c in comparison to 75c for a normal SMS. It’s not a small concern either. According to ITWeb MXit has a registered user base of over 11 million and sends over 250 million messages a day.
MXit has, however, not escaped controversy in the past. In 2006 it was criticised by You & Huisgenoot magazines who indirectly implied that MXit enables access to pornography and allows paedophiles to contact minor users. This seemed to be confirmed when the News/Actuality programme, Carte Blanche, broadcast a segment where a young girl explained how an alleged paedophile contacted her via MXit.
On the pornography charge the reality is that any Internet enabled phone can access undesirable sites. This is compounded by the fact that unlike your computer there are no filter programs available to screen Internet content on cell phones. Parents and teachers concerned that their charges will go astray should consider having their Service Provider block data services to that particular number.
The paedophile charges are possibly more concerning and MXit has created rules to protect both the users of their system but also themselves. As a user you are encouraged to obey the rules and are exposed to various safety tips. For example MXit advises users to never reveal their mobile number, never give their real name, don’t tell anyone where they live or where they go to school, don’t reveal the personal details of their friends and to keep online relationships online and NOT to meet anyone offline. They have also built into the MXit system some safety features...
· All teenagers' chat rooms have profanity filters. Swear words are replaced by ##### symbols. · A network of MXit and community moderators monitor the rooms on an ad hoc basis.
· No user profiles are shared.
· Users are completely anonymous while in the chat room, and as long as they don’t reveal personal information they remain safe in this anonymity.
· Users can report abusive behaviour. By typing .rat the previous thirty lines of the conversation are sent to a MXit moderator to act on.
My short visit into the soccerzone chat room revealed no obvious threat. Its true there was some suggestive comments made by the learners themselves but the conversation was in the most part innocent. My real concerns were that here I was the outsider and easily excluded but perhaps more pertinent was that these conversations were taking place during class time. Keep an eye out for cell phones and dexterous thumbs during your lesson!
An edited version of this blog post appeared in The Teacher
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By Pule Rakgoathe on
2/22/2009 6:01 AM
As a young history teacher I was guilty of hoarding my stuff. Now that I’m older I consider it a terrible waste. I remember being particularly proud of a ‘Middle East Conflict’ worksheet that contained numerous pieces of historical evidence: political cartoons, quotes from politicians of the time, diary entries, lyrics from a Palestinian song and some photos from a feature film. These were accompanied by what I believed were a set of insightful questions aimed to encourage the learners to sift the evidence for historical truths. The sad thing was only my few classes ever benefited from this little masterpiece.
I believe this hoarding mentality is widespread and has developed in part as a consequence of our copyright laws. In an effort to protect ‘intellectual capital’ copyright laws have developed a ‘restrictive’ framework that places control of how our work is used squarely in our own hands. Today you don’t even have to register your work for it to be copyrighted. By law the ubiquitous © symbol is assigned to everything unique you create, be that a worksheet, lesson plan, blog entry, forum comment etc. Knowing this some schools make teachers sign a statement in their employment contract that says anything created during the course of their employment belongs to the institution in an attempt to wrest control of these educational materials. Many teachers also believe that at some point their materials will become sources required in writing a textbook, which when published will provide them with the royalties! These type of concerns create a mentality where most teacher’s are reluctant to share their materials. And the reality is that only a select few of us ever get published or derive any commercial benefit from our work. I would, therefore, like to suggest a copyright middle path where we can all derive some benefit from our creativity: The Creative Commons copyright system. (http://za.creativecommons.org)
One person who has already embraced this middle path is the US president, Barak Obama. Have you been to his Flickr page recently (http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/)? While his snapshots taken during his election campaign are not going to win any photographic competitions what is significant is the way he has copyrighted these snaps. Instead of employing Full Copyright: All Rights Reserved, synonymous with the © symbol, he is using the Creative Commons (CC) system where he has reserved some of his copyrights. These snaps can be used by others as long as you respect the three rights he has reserved: Attribution, Non Commercial and Share-Alike. Let’s take a closer look at these rights. According to Creative Common licensing you can copy, distribute and transmit his photos. You are also allowed to ‘remix’ or adapt the photos to your own use. (This is great news for us teachers as we can adapt them to suit our worksheet or test/exam paper needs!) However, we have to identify the author/photographer (Attribution) whenever we distribute the photo, we may not make any cash out of the distribution of these pictures (Non commercial) and whatever derivatives we create from these photos we have to copyright the new material in the same way the photos were originally copyrighted (Share Alike).
There is a fourth CC copyright which the president has decided against using: ‘No Derivatives’. It is possible to also reserve this fourth right. If invoked it means that users of this material may not change it in any way. The original may be used by others but not manipulated from its original state. From a teacher’s point of view this would be most disadvantageous. For example imagine an exam copyrighted in this way. It would mean that the exam would have to be used in its entirety. But us teachers would want to chop out questions outside of our localised curriculum, add in new questions and perhaps change the mark allocation... No ways if it carries the ‘No Derivatives’!
So let’s have a think about how CC impacts on us teachers. Imagine this middle road where we could reserve some of our copyrights and also encourage a wider distribution of the materials we create? ‘Attribution | Share Alike’ for example would allow us to be known as the creators of an evidence worksheet on the Middle East Conflict and have that locked into any variations of that worksheet in the future. That way our work would garner us recognition but also help address the dearth of materials in some of our schools on that topic. Rather than squirrel away our best work we could find it a wider audience. Want to use and share materials in this way? Go to Thutong and search for and upload educational materials copyrighted with Creative Commons licensing.
Essential Links:
Obama on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/
Creative Commons, South Africa: http://za.creativecommons.org
Thutong Repository: http://www.thutong.org.za
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By Pule Rakgoathe on
10/27/2008 3:52 AM
Teacher Tools
This month we review a number of web tools for teachers. That is websites that have been made for teachers and often by teachers to help us in our work. Some of them offer us resources, others templates to create lesson plans. Some have the facility to allow us to upload our materials and share them more widely. First up, TeacherTube
TeacherTube: (http://www.teachertube.com)
This site is structured very similarly to the more well known YouTube but has as its focus educational videos that have been posted by teachers and their students. These videos are not developed by professional publishing houses and vary in quality. The range of videos, however, is extensive. Teachers can search for videos appropriate to their courses by looking through organised channels of clustered titles. A quick peruse will identify channels dedicated to Fine Art, Physical Education, Social Sciences, Reading, Writing, Mathematics, Science and Health amongst other titles. Even though the site has only been operational since 2007 there are already over 3000 videos in each channel.
Registered users can also make use of the community features that are available in the site. You can form or join a group that has similar interests to you. As a history teacher I was particularly impressed by a group set up for my very needs. It contains 88 members and has pooled together for easy access some 61 videos. This makes searching for a specific video very easy. For example I was looking for some Cold War videos and came across visual material on the Nagasaki bombing, the Berlin Airlift, Cuban Missile Crisis and a teacher’s general introduction to the main themes. Some of the materials were old news reels while others were teacher presentations or video work.
A word of warning, though, is that the site is bandwidth heavy. I was viewing the site recently on a home ADSL line and the videos ran seamlessly but I would imagine that on a 256k modem or on a heavily used institutional line it would take some time to download the stream. If you intend to teach with these materials then you might want to start the video and pause it at the beginning of your class (allowing the stream to download in the background) so that you can show it to the learners at the end of your lesson.
From a teaching and learning perspective, however, the passive viewing of an educational video, no matter how good it is, is problematic. As TeacherTube is a Web 2.0 community it makes much more sense to encourage our learners to create educational videos and then post them up onto the web. Creating assignments for a world audience often motivates learners to go the extra mile. My experience is that they craft excellent work when they realise the exposure their work will get. So using digital video cameras, still cameras, PowerPoint and other editing software encourage the learners to research, author and present a segment of your lesson in a visual format. One of my criticisms of the TeacherTube database of videos is that it is currently predominantly American in bias or Eurocentric. I feel our learners should provide the world with a slice of the African perspective!
Teacher Tools (http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/tools/index.html)
This American site is compiled by Jefferson County Schools and is really a comprehensive list of links to both curriculum and technical tools. The curriculum tools cover Reading, Science, Social Studies, Physical Education, Maths, Art, Music, Drama and Driver education amongst other specialised topics. The technical section offers tools for creating materials: Sounds, Clip art, interactive web sites, PowerPoint etc. Some of the links are disappointing but others are quite stunning. I investigated the Visual Arts section and was amazed at some of the engaging interactive tutorials available on subjects like Power of Colour, Colour, Contrast and Dimensions, and the Physiology and Theory of Colour. I also had a good look around in the PowerPoint section of the technical section and was impressed with the tools and tutorials on how to use the presentation package effectively in your teaching.
Thutong (http://www.thutong.org.za)
Don’t forget good old Thutong. Besides all the new communication tools that allows you to express your views they also have a CD cutting tool that allows you to receive your selection of favourite resources from the curriculum database. This is especially useful to those teachers who struggle with poor bandwidth. Another tool allows access to a list of Department of Education approved textbooks. This allows you to choose a South African text for your class that has been given the green light by subject experts within the Department.
We have only just scratched the surface of what is available for us teachers on the Internet so if you have a particular favourite and would like to share your find with other readers send me an e-mail (andryn@iafrica.com) and let me know why you think it’s great. I will compile a list of your responses and publish your recommendations
An edited version of this blog appeared in the The Teacher
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By Pule Rakgoathe on
7/28/2008 5:28 AM
 MP3 players are becoming ubiquitous. Even the latest cell phones are being promoted on billboards around the country as multimedia centres that happen to have a phone attached to them. The must have attachment is a shiny set of earphones that give the phone the ability to provide a ‘soundtrack’ to our lives! Amongst the youth, however, it seems a dedicated audio player is still the coolest way to go. Fortunes have been made at Apple because they developed the minimalist MP3 player, the iPod. It remains the hippest accessory despite a plethora of imitators. But can we teachers harness this device and others like it to improve teaching and learning?
The answer is “Why not!”
The iPod and its namesakes have introduced today’s youth to audio content. We might have grown up in the golden age of radio but this is something new to our learners. Podcasts, available for free download to an MP3 player or appropriate cell phone, are basically potted radio shows. The advantage is that you listen to them when you feel like it. You don’t worry about broadcast times. In fact the ideal is to subscribe to a podcast and as new episodes are published they are automatically downloaded to your device.
“What content is available?” you might wonder.
Podcasts are popping up on many subjects. Yes, there is news, comedy, celebrity and sport content but there are also many topics that relate directly to the curriculum. Recently, I collected together a catalogue of FET appropriate History podcasts. I am amazed at the scope of titles. Predictably General History is much better represented than Local or African History. However, there are episodes that span ancient times, medieval history as well as the World Wars and the Cold War. There are also some excellent audio content that records the narratives of individuals who experienced first hand the evils of slavery. These podcasts relate directly to the FET History syllabus. Languages, science and technology are other subjects where there are lots of options.
So how might we use these materials that support the learning process? Two strategies come immediately to mind. Firstly use them as either introductory, lesson support or revision materials. Allow those children who struggle with text materials the option of listening to the content they need. Distribute the MP3 files to the class and assign them the task of listening to the content as they walk home or ride the bus or taxi.
An alternative strategy would be to make the class construct their own podcasts. Above I complained about an apparent lack of materials on African History so it makes sense that the class should script and record their own episodes on these topics and offer them to the global community. It’s not as ludicrous as it might sound. A podcast called Hank’s History Hour is freely available from iTunes. Hank, a US high school student, has made a series of recordings originally aimed at his peers that summarise a number of sources available to them, the textbook, class notes and some library references. The podcasts are a success, however, and now have a global audience. The reason might have something to do with Hank’s accessible delivery and informal tone. The episodes are rich with student slang are told with an unassuming attitude and are in simple English. Hank is quick to break down complicated historical terms into straight forward language. Why can’t our classes have a crack at making podcasts that might help students of African History?
“How do I go about getting podcasts for my classes?” is a question you might now be contemplating.
The easy route is to download free software called iTunes and install it on an Internet connected computer. Navigate to the iTunes store using the software and then click on Podcasts. An extensive directory of podcasts is contained within. Identify something that is promising and subscribe. The vast majority of podcasts are free. Attach your MP3 player to the computer and the latest edition will be downloaded to your MP3 player.
Another way is to search the Internet for podcasts using a search engine. There are many sites that link to podcasts. You click on the link and the MP3 file is saved to your computer. Then you must use the file transfer system on your computer to move the file to your MP3 player or phone. This sounds easy but can get a bit technical at time. For the innovative teachers reading this you might ask, “How can I learn about recording and distributing podcasts”. Despite the fact that it sounds very involved it is surprisingly easy because the process has been automated to a large extent. Use the links below to start the process.
So, can podcasts help in the teaching and learning process? I think so. Use the following links to see if you agree.
Podcast Subscription Software
1] iTunes – Apple Software - Free - http://www.apple.com/itunes/overview/
2] Juice – Open Source - Free - http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/
Making a Class Podcast
1] Learning to Podcast from Suite101.org - http://podcasts.suite101.com/article.cfm/learning_to_podcast
2] Podcasting Tools from Podcasting Tools.com - http://www.podcasting-tools.com/how-to-podcast.htm
3] How to Start Your own Podcast from WikiHow - http://www.wikihow.com/Start-Your-Own-Podcast
4] How Podcasting Works from How Stuff Works - http://computer.howstuffworks.com/podcasting.htm
5] Tools for Podcasting from Free for All - http://www.feedforall.com/tools-for-podcasting.htm
Additional Information about Podcasts and Education on the Internet
1] Podcasts for Colleges, Schools and Learning from RECAP - http://recap.ltd.uk/podcasting/
2] Education Podcast Directory from Learn-On-the-Go - http://www.learn-on-the-go.com/directory/
3] Podcasting and Education from Shambles.com - http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/infolit/edupodcast/
Andrew Moore (andryn@iafrica.com)
An edited version of this blog post appeared in the
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By Pule Rakgoathe on
6/24/2008 2:04 AM
Have you ever wondered why the government doesn’t just produce a generic set of history resources for each topic and then share them with us? There is a plethora of different textbooks, charts, study guides, videos, worksheets etc. for our subject. Affluent schools can afford to acquire the best of these resources and the learning environment they create for their learners is supposedly rich and engaging. Less affluent schools might wonder why the government strictly sets out the curriculum yet leaves each school to scramble around looking for suitable resources limited by their meagre budgets and availability in their district. This begs the question, “Why isn’t there at least a set of quality resources available to us all?”
You might also take this question and expand it. Why do affluent universities and educational institutions throughout the world create their own course materials and then hoard them? This means that each institution that wants to offer a 1st year Historical Studies course has to develop its own learning programme from scratch. Talk about re-inventing the wheel! Should they not take a course being offered by a respected institution elsewhere in the world and then adapt it so that it considers local needs and differences?
I think you can guess the reasons why. Motivators such as institutional prestige, academic rivalry, and of course economic benefit lie at the heart of this traditional set of behaviours. The publishing of textbooks is in itself a multimillion Rand industry and publishers, while they want national endorsement from the education departments, don’t want to be locked out of this lucrative market. But does it need to be like this? Not everyone thinks so.
Open Education Resources, or OER for short, might offer the solution. The thinking on how we should handle the creation and sharing of educational resources in the future is being shaped by a similar debate being waged between proprietary software vendors (Microsoft is an example) and the Open Source community. In this debate the Open Source community argues that core sections of computer code should be offered free to the wider community. Developers should take this code and add value by building additional functionality to the source code. Over time the free code is improved and expanded because of the large community that supports it. Proprietary software vendors on the other hand argue that code they have developed belongs to them and is used to create revenue. They hoard and protect their code.
The new thinking in education circles is that we also need an ‘Open’ community of materials developers. We should build up a store of quality education resources that are free for any educator to take, customise for their learners and then share the enhancements. Certain initiatives have already been set up to coordinate these efforts. The Open Courseware Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ) is a group of universities who are trying to do just that. Members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Open University (UK) and our own University of the Western Cape. Various university courses and even whole learning programmes are collected by the consortium and then offered free to other institutions to use, adapt and then share again. A quick look at the repository shows a growing library of materials with courses ranging from Photography to Polymer Physics.
So if the universities are getting themselves organised why don’t us schools? Well, Thutong (www.thutong.org.za) is doing something similar. Each subject or Learning Area has been allocated a ‘Learning Space’ that contains a set of tools to encourage the sharing of materials. We need to start the OER movement at school level right here and now using the resources we produce every day to support our lessons. Does it really make sense that every history teacher creates a lesson plan and materials to teach Grade 12 Globalisation from scratch! Surely we should pool our materials and when we start a new section we can first check the Thutong database for materials already developed by our colleagues. It will be our task to adapt and enhance them before we put them back for other to use.
Previously we were always restricted from sharing materials because of strict copyright rules. While most published materials are still subject to ‘Full Copyright – All Rights Reserved’ denoted by the ubiquitous © symbol there is now an alternative way to copyright our own materials. Now, however, Teachers can copyright their work using the more flexible Creative Commons Copyright system (CC). This system protects your work by reserving some rather than all rights. It’s worth having a look at their website at www.creativecommons.org to understand the various combinations. The Attribution-Share Alike copyright condition does allow others to change and adapt the work to suit their purposes. This is perfect for the OER school movement.
Feeling rebellious and want to champion improved teaching and learning in South Africa? Join the OER schools movement and share your lesson plans, worksheets, tests and exams. Upload your resources now and have a look to see what is already there!
Andrew Moore (andryn@iafrica.com)
An edited version of this blog article appeared in the
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By Pule Rakgoathe on
5/25/2008 10:20 AM
Blogs, blogs, blogs! The term has been getting a lot of attention lately. Everywhere you look someone is trying to get you to look at their blog. I must confess I loved the recent TV advert where an ‘Internetlessness’ person misunderstands her suitors intentions when he asked her to take a peep at his blog. Slaps ensue.
Blogs are supposedly very hip, very in... very Web 2.0 at the moment and if you want to be where it’s happening on the Internet you have to have one or at least subscribe to someone else’s. Maybe, as educators, we should be considering if this technology can support teaching and learning? We teachers have being harnessing the fashionably hip and cool ‘things’ for decades in an attempt to make our subjects relevant and engaging to a younger audience. We now teach parts of the History syllabus as if its part of a Film Studies course, Maths now embraces the calculator, once considered the tool of lazy youth and so on. So can we harness blogs as part of our teaching arsenal?
Well, yes, is the easy answer. A blog is no more than an online interactive journal where a blogger’s public ponderings are put on display with an invitation for others to comment. On the web the more interesting the blogger is the more traffic it attracts. When the film director Peter Jackson was working on the remake of King Kong he kept a daily blog. Film buffs and fans flocked to the blog for the low down on the daily frustrations of making a block buster as well as a good dose of ‘skinner’ about the stars.
But let’s face it, neither you nor I are a Peter Jackson or some busty starlet. No kid is going to flock to our blog on the finer points of teaching Historiography. We need to reinvent the use of the technology if we want it to work for us as an education tool.
Outcomes Based Education posits the responsibility for learning with the learner. They are supposed to acquire self reflective skills that help them understand what it is they still need to learn in order to gain proficiency. As facilitators of this learning process we try to make them keep journals for assignments, always unpopular with the students, and even allocate marks for this activity to motivate them. One criticism is that the students write up the journal entries but never really spend the time to interrogate the content of their entries.
This might be a good time to bring on the blogs. Blogs are online public journals where others have an opportunity to comment. Let’s make the learners the bloggers and their critical class mates can help them focus on what they have written by making suggestions and offering solutions. The teacher would be the moderator but most of the discussion would be between peers. This means that the blogger would be a bit more vigilant in making themselves clear if they know others will read the blog entries. It will still be necessary for the teacher to devise a set of open questions for the bloggers to respond to so that issues around learning will be tackled by the class. It might also be necessary to divide the class up into ‘critical friend’ groups to ensure that everyone gets some comments on their blog. The bottom line of course is that what was a tedious exercise in journal writing has been transformed into a fun learning about learning experience using blogs.
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START A BLOG
So where can you sign up your class to start their blogs? There are a number of free blog
services on the Internet where anyone can register and start. The most famous ones are:
Blogger:
http://www.blogger.com/
WordPress:
http://www.wordpress.com/
As blogs are all automated you do not have to be a power user to get going.
Choose a colour scheme and then start writing.
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Happy Blogging.
Andrew Moore (andryn@iafrica.com)
An edited version of this blog post appeared in the
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