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Hi everybody:) Please introduce yourselves here. Feel free to add why you wish to learn more about mobile adoption and diffusion in Afrikan countries. Perhaps you have heard of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations Theory? If you have, you may want to add if you think this theory provides us with a helpful lense.
I’m Nicola Pallitt and I’ll be facilitating for Tutaleni. I work as a lecturer in CILT at UCT. I’m interested in hearing his perspective on this topic more broadly. And yours too of course:)
Hello everyone,
My name is Tutaleni I. Asino, and I am excited to be leading the conversation for e/Merge Africa this week. I am a Namibian who is an Assistant professor of Educational Technology in the college of education at Oklahoma State University in the USA. I start out by saying that I am from Namibia because that has much to do with the conversation for this week, which is focused on examining and problematizing diffusion of innovation in Afrika.
I have spent the last 16 years working with in higher education as a teacher, researcher, and administrator. My areas of research, writing, and presentations include: Mobile Learning, contextually appropriate learning technologies, Comparative International Education, indigenous knowledge, and the role of culture in the development and evaluation of learning technologies. I am an active member of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) where we celebrated and formalized our partnership with e/Merge Africa at the conference that concluded last month in Las Vegas. I am also active in the Comparative International Education Society (CIES) where I chair the indigenous knowledge and the academy special interests group.
I am passionate about learning and teaching with technology, and contributions of Afrikan scholars and scholarship to the global academic discourse. I am looking forward to leaning from everyone this week as we discuss the adoption and diffusion of technology in Afrikan countries.
Happy to join the conversation. I am a colleague and friend of Dr. Asino’s from our time at Penn State. I am a Policy Fellow in the USA, where I conduct portfolio analyses on national grants for K-12 STEM learning. In my own research, I study how people learn in collaborative learning spaces with a focus on peer support networks and the role of materials within those interactions. I like to situate my work in culturally-relevant practices, and to that end, I am interested in learning from all of your insights. On to the discussion…
Hi everyone
I’m Schools Programme Manager for an NPO called the Buffelshoek Trust and bring to my job over 20+ years of experience as a University academic (Agriculture, Botany, ICT4Ed etc) as well that from the last 9 years working in the NPO sector as an Education Consultant. Whilst I have moved out of the formal HE sector I am passionate about how technology can be used to ‘unlock rural potential’ through education, something I am able to interrogate in my present job. Stable connectivity is still a big challenge in the deep rural areas where I work but a significant number of people have access to mobile technology eg phones and tablets. The challenge I face is how best to utilise these devices to facilitate teaching and learning in a sustainable manner. I look forward to learning from this event.
Alice
Nice to meet you Mike:) I have also been involved in portfolio work at UCT. For interest, see this position paper from last year. As an example, ePortfolios have been adopted in different ways across institutions in South Africa. I think the adoption and diffusion of ePortfolio pedagogy is perhaps more important than any particular tool, as it requires a particular mindset towards evidence of student learning. In spaces where implementation has been successful, the portfolios are part of formal assessments rather than voluntarily created. I have also co-authored a paper on vocational educators’ use of portfolios for professional development. Perhaps this is related to observability in the Rogers model – if lecturers see ePortfolios as useful for themselves, they may be more likely to see it as useful for students’ learning?
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