The world’s leading expert on what’s wrong with school: John Taylor Gatto explaining the enrollment procedure at the top universities, and commenting on the value of diplomas.
Ramon Thomas
Psychology of Technology Blog
Using Skype for Teaching in Virtual Classrooms
The classroom has continuously experienced advances in the fields of computers and technology for decades. These technological advancements have even reached the education field, with numerous virtual classrooms emerging left and right. You no longer need to be physically present at the classroom in order to learn anything and everything under the sun. You can complete ordinary courses as well as university courses by using Skype, a computer software application that allows for voice chat, text chat and video chat between users in a global scale.
Using Skype to teach in a virtual classroom is very easy. This is due to the fact that this software has been developed in order to be as user-friendly as possible. Both old folks and young ones alike will be able to use it with ease. If you want to learn from a virtual classroom somewhere in South Africa then this is the perfect tool for you to use. The good part here is that more and more schools and universities in South Africa will credit all of the units and hours that you spend in a virtual classroom, allowing you to save on the travel time to and from the school.
Skype is now considered the teaching technology of the future. Children and adults alike will no longer be required to personally attend classes in the near future in order to save on the expenses. Skype is the first step through the numerous innovations to come in the near future since experts say that it will be around for a long time. Earning general education, further education and higher education in South Africa will no longer be a problem with the help of this powerful communication software tool. Use skype for anything and everything related to video communication, calls, text chat or voice chat in order to learn, study and absorb the teaching of your virtual teachers and professors alike.
Skype in the classroom is a newly developed feature of Skype that allows teachers, professors and educators alike to collaborate with each other during class hours. These educators can easily stay in touch with each other using the Skype application, allowing for a more interactive discussion not only between themselves but also between their respective classes as well. Typical examples that this feature provides is that it allows for global languages, joint projects and guest lectures by professors and their colleagues in South Africa and other parts of the world.
Currently, there are more than 7,000 users of this collaboration feature provided by Skype. In a recent exchange of information regarding earthquakes, a U.S. based classroom and a Chilean based classroom interactively exchanged pieces of data and information regarding earthquake safety tips and things to avoid during an earthquake. All of such information exchange is through the use Skype perspective. The best part here is that you will be able to earn all of the required certifications, graduate’s degree, master’s degree or even doctor’s degree in any Skype based university situated in any part of the world with the help of this powerful communicating tool.
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STAR SCHOOLS – Mobilising Education in South Africa
Johannesburg, 27 October 2010 – We could be entering an age where South African learners will not require a laptop or access to a computer laboratory – yet they will still enjoy inexpensive and rapid access to the internet and educational content. At a stroke the dynamic combination of mobile technology and inspired thinking provided an important solution for a severely under-resourced education sector. Star Schools CEO, Atul Patel has been the driving force behind the innovation.
By partnering a WAP-enabled mobile phone with a content-rich paper workbook, Star Schools have created a virtual classroom that can be accessed anytime, from anywhere. Using a 3-D barcode tag printed on a page and a mobile phone, with free-to-download tag reading software, learners can access additional content that ranges from a 3-D exploded-view video of an electric motor to teachers that comes on screen and provide lesson content just as they would in a classroom.
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Jonathan Jansen: Dear President Zuma. I am writing to you out of desperation.
This open letter is reprinted without permission from the Times website. I feel very strong about education, and Prof Jansen is one of the few voices that speak with authority about education in South Africa. For real practical solutions I highly recommend the work of John Taylor Gatto.
Desperation is an emotion I seldom feel, except in relation to education, for I believe very deeply that for most of our children, a solid school education represents the only means available for ending the cycle of family poverty. Skills come later. Economic growth even later. Social cohesion lies far in the distance. What matters is that children complete 12 years of schooling with the ability to read, write, reason, calculate and express confidence for purposes of further studies, skills training and higher education.
At various moments during your leadership, I have been encouraged, sir, by your standpoint on education. You are absolutely correct to insist on teachers being in school, teaching, every day. You are right, of course, to insist on materials being available for learning. You cannot be faulted for requiring performance contracts from the ministers who report to you on progress in education. Your own biography as a man who has sacrificed his own schooling in that broader quest for liberation, is something I admire.
The problem, Mr President, is the distance between what you stand for and the day-to-day operations of schools in our country.
Unlike most of your MECs for education, I do not for one moment believe the crisis in schooling lies inside the schools themselves. Having visited thousands of schools over the past decades, and having spoken to (and taught) thousands of pupils across the nine provinces, I can assure you that the children are the least of your problems.
With the right leadership and authority in place, with enthusiastic teachers ready to teach, and with organisational routines (starting on time, homework every day, solid teaching, and so on) running like clockwork, children anywhere in the world respond positively to the efforts of adults to educate them. So, I am not speaking about the children.
It is clear to me that at the moment the control of schools does not rest with government. It rests with the teacher unions. Until this simple fact is acknowledged, it is impossible to create the kinds of conditions in and around schooling that provide for predictable teaching timetables and powerful learning environments.
This is, I know, difficult terrain for public discussion. After all, the largest teachers’ union is part of the massive labour federation, which has a critical role in who stays in or comes to power in the next rounds of election.
But, Mr President, I believe you can and should look beyond the politics of succession that comes in five-year cycles, and look to the long-term development of the country and the prospects of tens of thousands of youth who routinely fail examinations every year and who fuel the numbers of frustrated youth who turn on society and themselves. This is the single most important challenge you face, and it cannot be resolved by pedagogical means, only through political intervention.
To signal your seriousness about this crisis, Sir, I propose you appoint an “Education Crisis Panel of Experts” to guide you and our government on how to resolve the education standoff as a matter of urgency. Please do not appoint activists to this panel, unless they are also experts; and do not see these appointments as ways of rewarding loyalty in the past or present; there are other commissions that can and have achieved such objectives.
Ensure, Mr President, that these are people who actually know how to turn around schools, and who are unlikely to tell you what you want to hear. You made an excellent start by hiring Dr Cassius Lubisi as your director general; I have worked with him for many years. You will not find a person of greater integrity, passion and insight. Perhaps he could chair the panel.
I propose, if I may, the following names: Linda Vilikazi-Tselane, Muavia Gallie, Anita Maritz, James Letuka, Brian Isaacs, Sibusiso Maseko, Nontsha Liwane-Mazengwe, Stephen Lowry, Sharon Lewin, Itumeleng Molale and Margerida Lopez. These are some of the most hardworking principals and education thinkers I have ever known.
They boast track records of success in changing schools. These are among finest South African educators when it comes to love of school and country.
They are fiercely independent in thinking, and unsentimental in their ideas about the bottom line: the learning achievements of our children.
Mr President, I wait to hear from you.
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Striking teachers are full of shit, allowing children to suffer
When I was in high school there was a massive teachers’ strike during 1990. This was my Standard 8 or Grade 10 year and we did not have a permanent principal at Uitenhage High School. This was also a time for massive changes in the South African political landscape with Nelson Mandela being released and the ANC with other political parties being unbanned.
It is a complete disgrace: new figures show how teachers failed. Strikes hit school children hard. How can we improve the situation of South Africa and the rest of the dark continent with adults who are not good role models to learners. It’s okay to voice your grievances, however, it’s not okay to drag innocent people down with you. And as for an education department who allows this nonsense to continue, your leadership is demonstrated to be poor.
We live in a world that demands a new approach to teaching children and a new way of thinking about the shifts that happen faster and faster. So when I read this utter bullshit about teachers still striking in 20 years since I was the victim of a teachers’s “chalk down” strike, it become extremely frustrating and angers me to say the least. This behaviour is totally unacceptable and it high time teachers decide if they want to teach or be leaches of the government for the rest of their lives earning a big pay cheque every month and still get loads of holidays unlike other business people who have to work 8-12 hours a day or more 5-6 days a week with maybe 2 weeks holiday in December. Most teachers in government schools are the worst examples today of how to do the absolute minimum, still get paid and fake it till you make it.
Did You Know / Shift Happens 4.0
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OpenLab Linux vs Edubuntu
Here’s some very interesting background to the educational platforms based on the Linux operating system by AJ Venter, a hacker programmer who is very passionate about open source developments. It was posted in response to the article Thin client OpenLab Linux 3.2 released on Tectonic, the biggest open source news publication in Africa. This comment is re-published with his permission…
OpenLab never finished the 4.Z release after the lead developer resigned *cough* *cough* :p
The biggest major differences back then were:
1) OpenLab was locally developed.
2) Edubuntu was based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. OpenLab was based on Slackware.
3) OpenLab’s educational content suite had 3 times as many apps and about 400 times as much actual content included (the suite came on a DVD-set which when installed grew to nearly 35gb of content)
4) Edubuntu had big money, OpenLab relied on a few customization projects to fund development.
5) In it’s day, OpenLab had the best hardware detection of any distro on the market (as vouched for by independent reviewers), on some systems it would get resolutions of 1600×1200 on the same hardware where Ubuntu 5.10 (then current) only got 800×600.
6) OpenLab had invested a massive amount of code in a complete admin suite with powerful features for teachers, such as bulk creation/deletion of users and had very powerful admin utilities for thin-clients. It was also the first system to offer thin-client support with local-device and sound support working out of the box.
But crucially, OpenLab did not ultimately survive. The people behind it all moved on to other projects. Karl Fischer is now the OpenSource head at the DTI, Denis Brandjes runs a popular cybercafe in Benoni, Uwe Thiem passed away recently (this is not so widely known but he was a major contributor to OpenLab) and myself started my own FOSS development company that creates clustering systems and cybercafe management software. (I also have a dayjob to suplement my income but that’s less exciting).
So that is the story today. I don’t normally talk about it much but the question was asked so here it is from the horse’s mouth. OpenLab was really cool in it’s day, it was an amazing project that was really great to work with, in it’s day 95% of the schools in Namibia had OpenLab powered classrooms, but the world changes and people change and the OpenLab project ultimately did not survive.
I would say the biggest single problem that plagued OpenLab throughout was that it’s target audience was young children, it was really good at that audience, but there is a problem with targetting that: the people who use it are NGO workers, teachers and children – there is a massive shortage of technically skilled people. So while OL had grown a very devoted user-community, it never really managed to grow a developer community and when the original developers moved on, there wasn’t anybody who could take over.
Myself and Uwe had a meeting last year with SNNA to discuss the possibility of reviving it in a new form with a much more open development plan that would try to fix that, some political issues delayed the project and then Uwe passed away so I guess the last hope for an OpenLab legacy went with him because I do not feel up to doing it by myself. I did it for 6 years and I know how hard it is. I chose instead to take over his position in the KDE community and keep that part of his legacy alive.
The good news is that OpenLab does survive in a way, a lot of what OpenLab pioneered have become standard features in many other distros – PCLinuxOS was one of the first, and more recent versions of Ubuntu have included many of our ideas (they may not have gotten it straight from us of course, as many other distros had it before them). None of these distro’s used our code, since the code is specific to the distro, but many of them did copy our designs and ideas (we created the first distro that shipped on a LiveCD by default and isntalled with one, and used the abilities of a livecd to ensure things like hardware worked perfectly, Ubuntu at the time had a livecd but it could not be installed and you needed another CD to install, this was the state of pretty much all other distro’s – that’s the most obvious but not the only example).
As for OpenLab code, only one project remains that is actively based on a piece of OpenLab code, that project is BW64Installer, which was based on the old OpenLab LiveCD installer. I created it for the Bluewhite64 distro and it’s now the default installer on that, it has become quite popular with other slackware like distro’s and has been added as an option on several others including darkstarlinux and blackdog64..
So that’s the whole story and then some 
Ciao
A.J. Venter
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Leadership in a Technology Driven World
Worldwide there is a crises in education and schools and perhaps even more so in Africa. All you have to do is open any newspaper and you will read stories like this letter from a very concerned parent in the Namibian. This keynote speech was delivered to over 240 Deputy Heads of Independent Schools at St John’s College in Johannesburg. There are a number of questions that I explored in this speech for the first time.
They include:
- Complexity > Clarity (Paradox of Choice, etc)?
- Confusion > Confidence (Leadership, Wisdom, etc)?
- Conflict > Collaboration (Web 2.0, Open Source, etc)?
Anyway enjoy the presentation from my Slideshare.net account here:
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Gauteng Online is a failure doomed from the beginning
What where they thinking when the Gauteng department of Education promised to connect all the schools in Gauteng to the Internet within 5 years? This is a rhetorical questions about the stupidity of infrastructure projects of this nature. The government themselves are the most inefficient users of technology and with this project they were meant to install computers and Internet access for all the schools in the richest province in the country. It remind me of my time in the United Arab Emirates. These Arab people had money coming out of their ears but did not know how to use it and relied on foreign workers from South Africa, India, Pakistan, Europe, UK and America to do their thinking for them.
Anyway back to South Africa. If you think about the lack of mathematics and science teachers we have in the country, it’s certainly no surprise that Gauteng Online has been such a dismal failure. While doing research for this article most media mentions and even blog postings date back from 2005. So that means people either forgot about it in the last 2 years or have blatantly ignored this project.
The original amount set aside for this project was R500 million! Now tell wouldn’t that money could not have been better used at the schools. For example to put in telephone lines to the thousands of schools with no telephones, or better yet fix the sanitation and make sure they all have running water.
A few years ago I came across Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He basically says that our physiological needs must be met, before we move onto safety, love, self-esteem and eventually self-actualisation. Now for kids to have Internet access is a need that most likely falls between love and self-esteem because it allows them to communicate with others, as well as express themselves by publishing websites. All I would like to say is that we should put pressure on the national Government to get its priorities in order.
It’s probably safe to say that this project is costing the Gauteng Provincial Government more than R500 million with all the disappointments from the previous companies involved. It’s no surprise they have re-issued the tender once again.
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Shift Happens – Did You Know 2.0
This video clip was first introduced to me through Vinny Lingham’s blog. I’ve since recommended it widely and also used it in a Social Media seminar I conducted at AAA School of Advertising in Cape Town back in May. It was a hit with the students. Anyway the back story to this presentation is now included in the new video version posted on Youtube. The presentation was created by Karl Fisch with assistance from Scott McLeod.
I really believe we have a major problem in South Africa because we are not doing enough to get ahead. What I mean is that the system is so convoluted and outdated, we will not be competitive with our peers. While if we listed to this kind of advice and learn from the best fastest growing countries in the world like India and China, we can accelerate our growth. Everything we need starts with learning and education.
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