Cape of Storms or Cape of Good Hope? Educational technology in a ...

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British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004. ... Education Group, focuses on educational technology at meso- and macro-levels, with ...
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British Journal of Educational Technology

Vol 35 No 2 2004

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Cape of Storms or Cape of Good Hope? Educational technology in a changing environment

Laura Czerniewicz Laura Czerniewicz ([email protected]), Director of the University of Cape Town’s Multimedia Education Group, focuses on educational technology at meso- and macro-levels, with interests in policy formulation and implementation, and in institutional transformation in diverse, divided and changing environments.

Abstract This article locates and describes the work of the Multimedia Education Group (MEG) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). This work is contextualised by three national and international challenges, these being (1) the need to increase access to new technologies and overcome the digital divide, (2) the need to respond to a new communication order, and (3) the urgency of transforming higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. Operating in a fragmented policy environment, MEG has focused on developing educationally appropriate low-cost interventions, supporting academically disadvantaged students, and understanding the relationship between online and contact educational interventions. MEG’s experiences suggest that this kind of emergent work requires new ways of working, contributing to transformation within the institution itself. The work also creates epistemological challenges because it is interdisciplinary and because educational technology is a field that is not yet firmly established.

Introduction The ‘new’ South Africa was born in 1994 with enormous optimism and hope. There were high expectations that the country would be able to put right the institutionalised wrongs of apartheid. Many people anticipated that new policies and firm measures of redress would contribute to the creation of a more equitable and fair society, and enable South Africa to become a player in the global community. The climate at the Cape of Good Hope was one of considerable euphoria, although everyone knew that navigators also call this the Cape of Storms. Even as South Africans set out to remedy mistakes of the past, the world community’s fundamental nature was being changed by globalisation and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Carnoy, 2001; Castells, 1996). Old and © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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simplistic concepts of a neat north–south divide were replaced by new geographies of power and access that have reconfigured the world. We are now defined by our place in or out of information-based economic nodes, both within and across countries. Today, South Africa faces immense challenges, many of which resonate powerfully in higher education. Our own historically advantaged institution, the University of Cape Town (UCT), has had to confront and respond to new and widening forms of inequality characterised in the global environment (Castells, 2001a) as well as to the many inequalities specific to South Africa and its past. UCT, traditionally an elite, Englishspeaking, white university, has had to respond to both external and internal imperatives for change. One of these has been the articulation of new technologies with teaching and learning within the institution. The Multimedia Education Group (MEG) was formed in 1997, in this atmosphere, as an interdisciplinary development and research group, to support educational transformation with and through educational technology. MEG’s primary aim is to explore the possibilities of new technology to support students’ learning at UCT, given an increasingly diverse student body. MEG is involved in building up knowledge, experience and insights at the micro-level while simultaneously responding to interrelated macro-challenges, of which three in particular frame its work: (1) increasing access to new technologies and overcoming the digital divide, (2) dealing with a new communication order, and (3) transforming higher education in South Africa. In the first part of this article, I examine the nature of these three national and institutional challenges and identify macro- and meso-level responses to them. MEG’s work exists as a response to these challenges. In the second part of the article, I discuss the work of the Group, drawing primarily on examples from this issue of BJET. Part 1: national and institutional challenges Increasing access to new technologies Access to new technologies is now essential if students are to have appropriate educational opportunities and be able to participate fully in the social, economic, political and cultural realms of life (Burbules and Callister, 2000a; Castells, 2001b). Within MEG our understanding of the term ‘access’ characterises it as ‘thick’ and multidimensional (Burbules and Callister, 2000b), covering both the quantity and quality of access. Inequalities of access are to be found in the global environment as well as the local context of our work, as described below. South Africa’s economic place within the world order is subordinate, to judge from rates of exchange with hard currency areas and other factors. Our country’s economic standing directly influences our access to affordable technologies and bandwidth. While we are extremely well placed technologically relative to the rest of Africa, South Africa compares relatively poorly with the rest of the world. In 2003 South Africa was ranked © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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forty-sixth in the world in terms of the number of Internet hosts (according to NationMaster, http://www.nationmaster.com), while the next African country, Mauritius, was ranked fiftieth. The UK, on the other hand, ranked twentieth. Local statistics about computers and the Internet are often unreliable or hard to compare. According to recent reports (Goldstuck, 2002; Bridges.org, 2003; Department of Education, 2003) a significant number of South Africa’s estimated three million Internet users are in Cape Town, which is prosperous and has a relatively good infrastructure. However, most computer users in the city are men from the highest income group, living in middle-class areas and with post-secondary education. About one-sixth of South African users are in the academic sector, but only 57% of students and staff in higher education were Internet users in 2002, with less than 1% of all schools being connected. Western Cape Province schools are far ahead of the rest of the country, with over 50% of them having access to email or the Internet and just under half having some PCs for teaching purposes. While these figures are remarkably high, financial constraints and teachers’ low ICT literacy limit schools’ use of their equipment; anecdotal evidence suggests that many underuse it. Of Cape Town’s 105 public libraries in 2003, only six had any computers—five each, respectively—available for public access. For educators working with ICT, lack of access to hardware and software remains a huge stumbling block. UCT’s 20,300 students can use 2,000 networked computers during normal working hours and those in university residences have access to another 800 machines. The ratio of students to machines varies from faculty to faculty—the ratio in Humanities, for example, is 15 : 1. Unlike universities in many other countries, we cannot assume that students (or even staff) have computers at home. Our network is old, requiring extremely expensive investment to upgrade it, and our bandwidth narrow: most middle-class US homes have more bandwidth than the entire UCT campus! With large undergraduate classes and a limited range of software licensed and supported, using ICTs in certain disciplines can be particularly challenging for staff. The South African government holds strong views, evident in a range of policies and initiatives, about the need to overcome the digital divide and for all sectors of society to participate in the new informational economy. However, in South Africa educational technology has received far less attention at the macro-level than in countries such as Britain or Australia. The process of bringing ICTs into teaching and learning in South African higher education institutions has not been steered from the top. The most recent document in this area, A strategy for information and communication technology in education, published jointly by the Departments of Education and Communication in 2001, focuses only on schools and cannot be taken to constitute a policy directive. This lack of action in higher education is unlikely to be due to lack of interest in educational technology per se, but is rather a reflection of conflicting priorities in a decade of permanent educational crisis. Also, while post-1994 intentions and plans were characterised by energy and initiative, the resources they required were stretched far beyond © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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the possible. Consequently, the Centre for Educational Technology and Distance Education in the National Office of Education was downscaled. While the Strategy document supports the many existing educational technology initiatives and encourages a range of responses, it acknowledges that ‘the strategy is being made on the ground’ (Department of Education and Department of Communication, 2001, 6). The strategy contains little reference to ICTs in education outside of a discussion about distance learning. However, the National Plan for Education (Department of Education, 2001, Section 2.3.2) emphasises the importance of wide-reaching curriculum change and states that it welcomes the innovative use of technology provided that it does not leave traditional curricular structures unchanged. The lack of national directives with respect to the role of educational technology is probably due to caution about online learning, which in South Africa, as in other countries, is often conflated with distance learning (Burbules and Callister, 2000a). For example, the Council of Higher Education, a statutory body that advises the Minister of Education, has raised important questions about technology for distance learning and ‘distance education methods’. In South Africa, distance education has a poor reputation, damaged by campus-based institutions hastily developing distance learning courses, reputedly to increase their registrations of black students. The National Plan (ibid., Section 4.4) expresses concern about poorly written and designed email courses developed to save costs, and relying on a single medium of delivery which is often inappropriate for the student. In 2000 these problems prompted the Minister to place a moratorium on the development of new distance education courses by campusbased institutions. Such institutions may now only develop such courses with ministerial approval provided that they meet specific conditions with respect to quality and appropriateness. In this context any conflation of educational technology with distance education is particularly problematic. At the national level, educational technology and access to it are referred to only obliquely. The National Plan (ibid., Section 1.1) argues for improved quality and the appropriate use of new media to support transformed curricula, and for ICTs to support South Africa’s reconstruction and development agenda. Section 1.7 of the Plan emphasises the need for universities to produce graduates with the appropriate skills and competencies to meet the human resource needs of the country. This, in turn, according to Section 2.7 of the Plan, will mean ensuring that graduates acquire appropriate skills for the twenty-first century. Dealing with the new communication order What appropriate skills do graduates actually need to equip them for the twenty-first century? Clearly having access to the technology is a necessary but insufficient condition for social inclusion or equal participation in social and economic life. Likewise access to digital environments does not guarantee access to the new communication order that has emerged from the general integration of ICTs into society (Snyder, 2001a). © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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Access involves developing techno-literate practices, which Lankshear et al (2000) describe as having three dimensions: (1) an operational dimension (use and operate technology and its associate language systems); (2) a cultural dimension (use the technology appropriate in real world contexts); and (3) a critical dimension (evaluate, assess and critique the technology and all it provides). Students and staff alike need to be able to deconstruct and exploit the multimodal systems (sound, images, animations and text) available via the Web, given that digital systems require understanding of how different modalities are combined to create meaning. These multimodal communicative practices and resources amount to a new communication order (Street, 1998; Snyder, 2001a and b). This new order requires communicative competencies that involve knowing when and how to use resources from different channels, which may affect students’ abilities to operate in new domains (Street, 1998). In universities the challenge is to understand the nature of the new communication order in relation to teaching and learning, and to utilise and support the acquisition of appropriate competencies in specific disciplines and content areas. Because the digital domain has become so dominant and is changing how the world works, it is creating new realms of exclusion for students without access to computers and lecturers who are grounded in the pre-digital print culture. In a context of accelerating inequalities, it adds another layer of complexity to the challenge of social inclusion. For students without physical access to computers, the problem is not simply that they are unable to operate computers, but also involves the lack of a set of sophisticated competencies required to participate effectively in a new work order (Street, 1998) and to navigate the broader information society. Writers such as Lankshear et al (2002) suggest that the new generation is challenging standard epistemologies, which perceive knowledge as something that is carried linguistically. The challengers point to the radical convergences that exist in digital media forms and propose theories of distributed cognition that enable new non-disciplinary ways of making knowledge. These understandings suggest that students who have ‘grown up digital’ (Tapscott, 1998) actually think and learn differently (Seely Brown, 2002). If so, this is a significant challenge for lecturers and tutors. Not only do they have to respond appropriately to additional aspects of student diversity, but they also have to come to grips with the features and implications of the new communication order. Having grown up in a print world, they need to understand what new possibilities educational technologies can offer their own specific disciplines, and they need to learn how to use them to support their curriculum objectives. Currently, academic staff engagement with educational technologies in South Africa is not steered by either national or institutional polices. The National Plan (ibid., Section © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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3.4.1.2) says little in relation to staff development other than encouraging institutions to ensure that their teaching processes are sensitive to the needs of different learners. It does, however, encourage the use of different modes of teaching, learning and assessment in order to meet its transformation goals (ibid., Section 4.2). At UCT formal staff development and educational technology policies have only recently been finalised. However, lack of a formal policy does not mean lack of action. Innovative, if fragmented and uncoordinated, activities occur in pockets throughout the university. ICTs are, of course, already part of the terrain for administration and research, and some academics are starting to use them to support teaching and learning simply because they are there. For example, of the 2,548 courses offered by UCT in 2002, 55% had some kind of a web presence, usually a course outline and related information, while some included readings, URLS, downloads for software or course notes. Even using web sites for solely administrative purposes can free academics from repetitive tasks and enable them to focus on teaching. Indeed, the provision of readings and URLs online can be regarded as basic educational scaffolding. Though small beginnings, such ventures can give technophobic (and in the South African context, change-weary) staff the confidence to experiment as online possibilities become more apparent. Transforming higher education in South Africa Access to technology does not in itself ensure access to equal educational opportunity. In South Africa access issues are intimately linked to the overall challenges facing higher education. Transformation in higher education is at three interrelated levels, and enabling the integration of educational technology into higher education means working at all three levels. At the macro-level institutions are being merged and restructured and new funding formulae for students are being put in place. At the meso-level, issues addressed include changing the demographics of both student and staff bodies in and across institutions. As educational technologists interested in teaching and learning in classrooms, our primary engagement is on the micro-level. We are concerned with the curriculum and with matters closely linked to the curriculum: access, equity, participation and throughput. However, in reflecting on micro-level work we try to make micro-macro linkages and to inform policy and practice at higher levels. In terms of equity, real progress has been made, with the student population becoming dramatically more black. By 2000 there was a majority (60%) of black students in South African universities, up from 32% in 1990 (Bunting, 2002). Despite these changes, access for black students to high status and high skills areas such as science and engineering, and to postgraduate programmes, had not improved significantly over the same period (Cloete et al, 2002). In addition, retention rates have been of particular concern to those involved with the curriculum, with the system reportedly still retaining high numbers of failing students. This situation has only improved marginally since 1993 (Cloete et al, 2002): one campus-based student in every six drops out every year. © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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The National Plan acknowledges the importance of academic development as an essential area of work. Closely aligned to the field of work known elsewhere as educational development, academic development is primarily concerned with enhancing the accessibility, quality and appropriateness of higher education. Given the history of structural inequalities in South Africa, academic development calls for equity and for ensuring that the benefits of higher education are accessible to all sectors of the population. The government is committed to funding academic development, partly through additional provision for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. New student funding formulae, not yet finalised at the time of writing, will reflect more of this provision. Such formulae will act as drivers to ensure that academic development is taken seriously and inserted properly into mainstream curricula. These policy changes are essential given that almost 10 years after Scott (1995) wrote these words, it remains true that If transformation is to be meaningful, it must result in real improvements in the appropriateness and effectiveness of mainstream educational processes for talented students from a wider range of educational and socio-economic backgrounds, so that widening the accessibility of higher education will mean providing opportunities for success rather than just entry. (Scott, 1995, 2)

There are now additional imperatives to ensure that educational processes are relevant to a new communication order, ensuring access for all students to the global information society.

Part 2: the Multimedia Education Group Setting up MEG-like units in universities is part of a worldwide response to technology in education. UCT is unusual in explicitly linking MEG to development in academia, the workplace and higher education. Unlike units elsewhere that focus on a single element (usually staff development), MEG, with its project-based approach, often includes elements of student development, staff development, courseware development, research and even policy formulation. The pedagogical element and student learning are paramount, as expressed in MEG’s mission statement: ...to research and harness the potential of interactive computer based technologies and approaches to support effective learning and teaching. Our work focuses on meeting the needs of South African students from diverse backgrounds, particularly those at UCT.

MEG has also been unusual because it was not set up as the institution’s educational technology unit, but as a development and research group with a single, substantial grant that was strongly influenced by the initiative of one individual, a professor of archaeology. His interests and the post-1994 needs of the institution, as well as the interests of the grant giver, the Andrew B Mellon Foundation, set the parameters of the work. As reported in this issue, two key agreed foci have been to develop and under© British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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stand educationally appropriate, low-cost interventions, and to focus primarily on academically disadvantaged students. Developing educationally appropriate low-cost interventions While the sub-heading seems to suggest mutually contradictory imperatives, our experiences suggest otherwise. All our interventions are driven by specific course, programme or tutorial objectives, yet we have been forced by circumstance to find low-cost ways of contributing to the achievement of those objectives. We have assumed that a range of solutions is possible and necessary, since objectives need to be matched with the features and functionality of specific software options. In addition, all solutions have to be designed for a university in transition and curriculum flux, requiring short cycles, flexibility, changing content and ongoing responsiveness to changing student needs. For instance, in their article for this issue, Andrew Deacon, David Horwitz and Jacob Jaftha describe and discuss a low-cost environment they have designed, called MOVES (MEG Office-Based Virtual Study), which employs the approach known as ESSCOTS (Educational Support System Commercial Off The Shelf). ESSCOTS produces learning environments from ‘worldware’ (standard software applications used widely outside education). At UCT we use Microsoft Office because our licence is heavily discounted: it is available on all our machines. Increasingly, our students upon admission will be familiar with it because Microsoft has offered it free to South African schools, in perpetuity, and it is also widely used in the world of work. For our purposes Office is a powerful tool. The MOVES environment is for courses that require interactivity, real-world data, and automated feedback and assessment. It generates some feedback and offers tutors a record of what students do. It is designed to incorporate both guided, structured tasks and open-ended inquiry-based tasks. Given our campus-based context, the assumption is that there will be tutors available to students while they are working through the online tutorials, whereas the automated assessment is intended to lighten tutors’ loads. The online elements reduce paper-based administrative tasks, giving staff more time to support students’ learning. The MOVES environment has been used to develop interactive tutorials for about 15 courses reaching 1,500 students in 2003 and an expected 3,000 in 2004. It has proved useful in courses that require students to develop core literacy skills (numeracy, economic literacies, writing skills, academic literacies) and has been used in maths, economics, psychology, engineering, sociology and information systems courses. David Horwitz and Andrea Eden in their article describe connect, an open source online learning environment, developed in response to the need for face-to-face students in classes to interact with each other in an alternative learning space. Ongoing dialogue with staff and extensive research into the field of online collaboration shaped this solution, which aims to encourage users to collaborate online and to share and build knowledge in a community of practice. © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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By late 2003, connect had been integrated into nine different courses across several disciplines, at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels. Class sizes ranged from 12 to 490 students: in 2003, 1,206 students and 83 lecturers and tutors collaborated actively in the connect environment. These two environments are not the only low-cost interventions developed in MEG. Our choices are pragmatic and balance cost with the ability of the software to meet educational objectives. The software for authoring in the courses described in Emma van der Vliet and Andrew Deacon’s article was Macromedia Authorware, chosen as a cheaper alternative to extremely expensive off-the-shelf film and media industry-standard software. It was used to simulate real world environments and associated activities, and worked well in the classroom, thus supporting the acquisition of key literacies. Using technology to support academic development of disadvantaged students Using technology to support learning of key literacies vital to students’ academic development, particularly those needed by educationally disadvantaged students, is central to MEG’s commitment to equity and transformation. Our approach has been an embedded one, with support for learning of key literacies tightly integrated with specific curricula, as illustrated by two further articles. Dick Ng’ambi and Joanna Hardman describe an online knowledge-sharing environment where campus-based students could anonymously ask questions of or about academic texts and share answers. This environment supports students’ ability to interrogate texts, a particular problem for under-prepared students who regard texts as the authority rather than as sources that open up enquiry. So far, the indications are that this environment broadens the range of answers available and shared among students. The anonymity provided by the environment gave students freedom to ask what might perhaps be considered foolish or naive questions in a face-to-face tutorial. Marion Walton and Arlene Archer argue in their article that the successful development of students’ web literacy skills cannot be separated from the development of their academic literacy. Through their research with first-year engineering students they found that these students needed more modelling of appropriate practices, that guided web searches had to be created to model and scaffold successful strategies, and that many more opportunities for practising and developing critical literacy skills were required. They concluded that it was not possible to teach web literacy skills in isolation, especially as web searching challenges traditional academic values such as the authority of the text. They came to realise through their research how important domain knowledge is in learning appropriate web literacy skills. Using online interventions in relation to face-to-face teaching In the early days of MEG, about five years ago, our discussions about online interventions placed online learning and face-to-face teaching at polar extremes. The main question being asked then was which was better, or even more often, which was cheaper. Posing the question in this way often led to research designs aimed at controlling confounding variables, but we found that, as Salomon (quoted in Collis and © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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Moonen, 2001) put it, ‘there is a whole cloud of correlated variables in technology— activity, goal setting, teacher roles, culture—exerting their combined effect’. In our resource-scarce context such designs also seem unethical, given that we only invest in online interventions where we believe they will add value for students and staff. In the early days it seemed that online conversations were not relevant to our work in a campus-based institution, but we have become interested in the possibilities of online communication (either synchronous or asynchronous) to complement face-to-face methods. Can online communication extend student access to disciplinary discourses and if so how? Does it support diversity by proving useful to a specific student grouping? Tony Carr, Glenda Cox, Andrea Eden and Monique Hanslo report on the use of online text chats in a campus-based third-year economics course during which the class used role-playing online to simulate inter-country trade bargaining. They wanted to know whether there were different dominance patterns on- and offline and whether specific groups of students participated differently. Gender and home language were two areas of investigation. The researchers report that online text chat offered more possibilities for student participation, but that lecturers dominated face-to-face sessions. Their findings support findings elsewhere that, compared with men, women play different, more accommodating, roles in discussions, both on- and offline. In addition, our projects using the connect online learning environment have indicated that students who may never meet each other in large undergraduate classes do take advantage of the opportunity to talk often to one another online. New flexible ways of working The stories told in this issue of BJET show clearly that responding to macro-challenges and doing this kind of emergent work is difficult. Indeed, the nature of the work, the mode of working and the challenges thrown up in the process, form part of the fabric of transformation in the university itself. MEG’s interventions are not neat, clinically tidy events, with clearly defined outcomes and products. Rather they are exploratory, self-reflective and sometimes messy collaborations, often with unexpected outcomes. For example, the article written by Dick Ng’ambi and myself reveals how students were actually using the machines in five of UCT’s computer laboratories, although we cannot say with certainty that all the students were successfully learning. MEG has to cope with tensions between effective internal ways of working and the university’s requirements and reward system. MEG’s work is organised around task-based projects designed to be flexible and dynamic; its structure is organic and participative, which is typical of a transformed curriculum in a post-industrial society, says Mackintosh (1998). We find this form more responsive to rapidly changing curricula and able to produce more effective outcomes; it encourages innovation and is personally more enriching than traditional divisions of labour. (There are of course different functions within the blurred roles served by MEG staff.) Yet this flexibility is not supported by traditional university structures, which treat academics and technical ‘support’ staff quite differently. Different incentives, acknowl© British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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edgements, rewards and funding opportunities are open to individual members of teams. At UCT academics are under pressure to produce traditional peer-reviewed articles (usually in print), with their development or digital work greatly receiving little acknowledgement. Those of our staff not on academic conditions of service participate fully in action research projects and write articles, as is evident from articles in this issue, yet their contributions are not formally recognised by the university system. This lack of recognition is demoralising and causes frustration, especially when academic colleagues receive funds for research or attending international conferences. Even if an attempt were made to create more narrowly defined roles within existing frameworks, such inflexible roles would probably be counterproductive and undermine the quality of work. As in other countries (Moran and Myringer, 1999), a pool of such specialists simply does not exist in South Africa. MEG’s epistemological position While educational technology is a recognised field of work, it is not yet a discipline. It has a ‘community of enquiry’ (Fish, as quoted in Menand, 2001), but without agreement about its boundaries or the kinds of discourse in which communications between specialists take place (Ruthven, 2000). Despite shared pedagogical interests among its staff, MEG is an interdisciplinary unit with staff drawn from disciplines as widely apart as literary theory, archaeology and maths as well as computer science, information systems and education. Its staff must find ways of conducting interdisciplinary conversations within MEG that increase our understanding of mutually interesting questions. We have to work hard to ensure mutual respect for different theories, paradigms and research methods. MEG staff draw on a range of theories of learning. Most fall under a socio-constructivist umbrella, but practice on the ground and redefined research questions have led us to interpret this in different ways, drawing on constructionism, activity theory and new literacies theory where appropriate. This pragmatic approach includes matching technological interventions closely and appropriately with course (or even tutorial) objectives, thus adding value to the students’ learning experience. MEG staff also draw on more than one research paradigm. Some of the difficulties of using the experimental paradigm are documented in the article by Vera Frith, Jacob Jaftha and Robert Prince. They noted concern about students’ command of English as a confounding variable, even in a numeracy course, part of an extended curriculum designed to provide educationally disadvantaged students with extra academic support. Students in this course were offered both lecture room classes and online tutorials in a computer laboratory, therefore the research design could be aimed at investigating differences between learning in each context, as well as the possible effect of the order in which students had the two experiences. While noting the limitations of their quantitative methods, the authors write that their research revealed differences between how students learned in the lecture room and in the computer laboratory. They suggest that their evidence supports a view that computer technology is shifting the emphasis away from mechanical calculations to a real mathematical understanding by students. © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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Many of MEG’s interventions have been effective just as much because of the approach used as because of appropriate use of technology. A growing number of studies elsewhere (Parks et al, 2003, refer to several) support our experience that constructivist/ socio-constructivist approaches to learning are particularly valuable in using computer technologies. At UCT integration of educational technology into the curriculum can only succeed, of course, if MEG’s work is linked to, and promotes, an institutional culture that prioritises student learning and values good teaching by rewarding academics who innovate successfully. The future The Andrew B Mellon grant supporting MEG’s work ends in 2004. However, following discussions and policy development across the university during 2002–03, UCT is setting up an institutionally supported Centre for Educational Technology (CET) located in the Centre for Higher Education Development. The new Centre will be in the fortunate position of being able to build on the work produced by MEG over five years, while also consolidating fragmented innovative activities taking place throughout the institution. Varying levels of engagement seem likely. Hard choices must be made, grounded in institutional priorities: (1) the extent to which technological interventions are likely to support academic development objectives, (2) where such interventions are likely to attain particular objectives in specific courses, and (3) where broadly constructivist approaches underpin courses. In certain areas more centralised approaches will be needed, especially as the CET will be implementing institution-wide policies on both educational technology and staff development. Staff workshops are likely to be customised to specific groups of lecturers and tutors, with disciplinary interest, levels of expertise and particular kinds of interventions narrowing the parameters. At the same time, scaling up the use of MEG-developed software will entail creating more accessible, stand-alone versions that will allow ease of use by lecturers with limited technical understanding. While changes are inevitable, the new Centre will maintain a commitment to ongoing research, teaching and reflective practice, all essential pillars of excellence in this rapidly growing field of work. Conclusion Technological change, although rapid, is both powerfully enabling and constraining, and is only one strand of the complex transformation process in South Africa. Thus, while we at UCT certainly need to understand the nature and unique possibilities for learning and teaching offered by new media, we also have to understand how they interface with other transformative processes happening simultaneously. Working with educational technology at UCT means working with change, grappling with transfor© British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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mation and confronting issues of access at every turn. This is particularly demanding given the lack of a national coordinating framework, leaving individual institutions to act in isolation: educational transformation is fragmentary. While ICTs are nationally recognised as essential to national human resources development, the sole implementing agency for higher education, the Higher Education branch of the National Department, is massively overstretched by the implementation of a daunting array of new policies. Given that educational technology is primarily about education, tensions and debates within curriculum transformation impact directly on our work at UCT. Innovative technological interventions exist to strengthen and ensure curricula objectives, but when these are unclear or contested our role becomes even more demanding. We must also find ways of locating ourselves intellectually in an educational and societal landscape being transformed by ICTs. While being at the cutting edge of new possibilities and rapidly changing practices is enormously exciting, we work hard to refine and redefine our conceptual compass so that we can best explore and understand what we encounter. Located in a university near the Cape of Storms, MEG is navigating turbulent seas, but given the encouraging results of our research and development to date, we choose the alternative name—the Cape of Good Hope—to signify our optimism about a safe passage to calmer waters. References Bridges.org (2003) Digital divide assessment of the city of Cape Town, 2002: overview of ICT status and real access in Cape Town [WWW document]. URL http://www.bridges.org/capetown/index.html Bunting I (2002) The higher education landscape under apartheid in Cloete N, Fehnel R, Maassen P, Moja T, Perold H and Gibbon T (eds) New South African realities in transformation in higher education: global pressures and local realities in South Africa Juta and Centre for Higher Education Transformation, Cape Town, 58–86. Burbules N and Callister C (2000a) Universities in transition: the promise and the challenge of new technologies Teachers College Record 102, 2, 271–293. Retrieved online 25/07/03 at: http://www.tcrecord.org/PDF/10362.pdf —— (2000b) Watch IT: the risks and promises of information technologies for education Westview Press, Boulder, Colo. Carnoy M (2001) The role of the state in the new global economy in Muller J, Cloete N and Badat S (eds) Challenges of globalisation, South African debates with Manuel Castells Centre for Higher Education Transformation and Maskew Miller Longman, Cape Town, 22–34. Castells M (1996) The rise of the network society, the Information Age Economy, society and culture (Vol I) Blackwell, Oxford. —— (2001a) Think local, act global in Muller J, Cloete N and Badat S (eds) Challenges of globalisation, South African debates with Manuel Castells Centre for Higher Education Transformation and Maskew Miller Longman, Cape Town. —— (2001b) Information technology and global development in Muller J, Cloete N and Badat, S (eds) Challenges of globalisation, South African debates with Manuel Castells Centre for Higher Education Transformation and Maskew Miller Longman, Cape Town. © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.

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Cloete N, Fehnel R, Maasen P, Moja T, Perold H and Gibbon T (2002) New South African realities in transformation in higher education: global pressures and local realities in South Africa Juta and Centre for Higher Education Transformation, Cape Town. Collis B and Moonen J (2001) Flexible learning in a digital world Kogan Page, London. Department of Education and Department of Communication (2001) A strategy for information and communication technology in education [WWW document]. URL http://www.gov.za/documents/combsube.htm Department of Education (2001) National plan for education Government of South Africa, Pretoria. —— (2003) Education statistics at a glance Government of South Africa, Pretoria. Goldstuck A (2002) Internet access in South Africa, 2002. An annual report of the ISP market in South Africa World Wide Worx, Cape Town. Lankshear C, Peters M and Knobel M (2002) Information, knowledge and learning: some issues facing epistemology in a digital age in Lea M and Nicoll K (eds) Distributed learning: social and cultural approaches to learning RoutledgeFalmer and Open University, London, 16–37. Lankshear C, Snyder I and Green G (2000) Teachers and technoliteracy: managing literacy, technology and learning in school Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Mackintosh W (1998) Report on re-engineering UNISA’s learning materials process UNISA, Pretoria. Menand L (2001) Undisciplined—the making of the public mind Wilson Quarterly 25, 4, 51. Moran L and Myringer B (1999) Flexible learning and university change in Harry, K (ed) Higher education through open and distance learning Routledge, New York, 57–71. Parks S, Hamers D and Huot-Lemonnier D (2003) Crossing boundaries: multimedia technology and pedagogical innovation in a high school class Language Learning & Technology 7, 1, 28–45. Ruthven K (2000) The future of disciplines: a report on ignorance in Knowing ourselves—the humanities in Australia in the 21st century Australian Academy of the Humanities. [WWW document]. URL http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/aah/research/review/c6_ruthven.html Scott I (1995) Facilitating academic development as a key element of transformation in higher education, South African Association for Academic Development (Submission to the National Commission on Higher Education). Seely Brown J (2000) Growing up digital: how the Web changes work, education, and the ways people learn Change March/April 2000, 11–20. Snyder I (2001a) A new communication order: researching literacy practices in the network society Language and Education: An International Journal 15, 2–3, 117–131. —— (2001b) The new communication order in Beavis C and Durrant C (eds) P(ICT)ures of ICTs in english: teachers, learners and technology Wakefield Press, South Australia. Retrieved online 30/03/03 at: http://www.cdesign.com.au/aate/aate_papers/093_snyder Street B (1998) New literacies in theory and practice, inaugural professorial lecture [WWW document]. URL http://web.uct.ac.za/educate/mednotes/imaugura.htm Tapscott, D (1998) Growing up digital: the rise of the Net generation McGrawHill, New York.

© British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.