E-Literacy training in deep rural areas: The Siyakhula Living Lab experience
- Authors: Gumbo, Sibukelo , Ntšekhe, Mathe , Terzoli, Alfredo
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/431411 , vital:72772 , http://proceedings.e-skillsconference.org/2014/e-skills141-154Gumbo824.pdf
- Description: Within the discourse of broadband deployment in poor areas (particular-ly rural), very little attention is generally put on the critical enabler repre-sented by e-literacy training that empowers people to use ICT systems, especially in the form of full-fledged machines such as fixed, tower and laptop computers (These machines are still more preferable for growing a generation of ‘producers’ as opposed to ‘consumers’ in the ICT space.) This paper reports on the experience in running e-literacy in a deep rural area, as part of the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL), whose end goal is to diffuse production oriented ICTs in poor areas of South Africa and Africa. In particular it will expand on the feedback given by the par-ticipants to the last edition of the e-literacy course, run in the first se-mester of 2014. The lessons learned from this experience include: the need for linguistic localization of the learning material or at least part of its presentation; the importance of teaching and learning that facilitates (easy) transfer of knowledge gained to other ICT settings (such as mo-biles; or uses to support business); and the importance of face-to-face courses to allow real interaction with the people living in the targeted areas, partly as a strategic means to forging relations towards the reali-zation of the Living Lab vision (co-creation of solutions with empowered users). Altogether, e-literacy courses have proved to be critical to the broad aim of SLL of ‘activating’the segment of society living in poor ar-eas towards self-determination. A small but telling indicator is the trans-formation in the view people have of themselves once certified as e-literate.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Towards building an indigenous knowledge platform to enable culturally-sensitive education underpinned by technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK)
- Authors: Ntšekhe, Mathe , Terzoli, Alfredo , Thinyane, Mamello
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/431424 , vital:72773 , http://proceedings.e-skillsconference.org/2014/e-skills275-284Ntsekhe821.pdf
- Description: The everyday use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is ingrained to the fabric of today’s society. A question open for debate is whether this use is or can be optimized to engender authentic solutions, which are aligned to the natural environment of the people? In this paper, we examine at the question from the vantage point of ed-ucating the rural African child. We engage with the sub-question: can ICTs facilitate education grounded in people's own realities, especially those of the marginalized rural poor? We believe this is possible under specific conditions, which include making Indigenous Knowledge (IK) readily available. We propose building an ICT platform that allows injec-tion of IK into the education process: develop a solution that valorizes IK, but also supports efforts to use ICTs in education driven by Tech-nology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. The main goal of this framework is to facilitate effective teaching with tech-nology. TPACK partially embeds IK within pedagogical knowledge and ‘contexts’ of learning; we argue for explicit inclusion of IK within the framework to complement the other knowledges.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014