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This paper is about how people experience places through the visuals that populate the place. I interviewed people who are part of Rhodes University in South Africa. It is the case that people experience places in a highly targeted manner and that from this manner they fashion ideas about the place. Experiencing universities through their visual culture is a phenomenon that is seldom studied. In South Africa, this reality of rare study was highlighted by the occurrence of the 2015 #RhodesMustFall moment when students across the country argued that there are visuals within the university space that remain experientially problematic within a postcolonial society. The South African higher education landscape was taken by surprise as it had not been adequately aware of the power that visuals can gain when considered as part of a culture of representation. Visual culture is in this paper defined as what is seen and allows itself to be placed within a culture of seeing and representation. As South Africa is a postcolonial society, it has been argued that the colonial period showed bias towards certain visual cultures throughout the country's spheres – especially in the country's tertiary education institutions. This is a paper documenting how students at a South African university experience the university through its visual culture. In‐depth mobile interviews, closely related to transect walks, were conducted with 12 "Rhodians" purposefully selected in the hope for maximum sample variation. The study finds that the experience of Rhodes University as a place through its visual culture is highly informed by the isolation of parts of the visual presentation of the built up and decorated environment, the expectation of what the visual culture should be, and the experience of alleged contestation over what is visually presented as the university. Ultimately, the university space is experienced often through its socially‐learned visual representations and the experiential templates that people bring to the place as seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short commentary, I explore some recent shifts in the landscape of South African higher education, from the vantage point of my particular location within Geography at the University of Cape Town. Although those of us working in this context have experienced multiple challenges in recent years, I argue here that we could usefully re‐frame the ongoing state of crisis as a moment of opportunity in which we might both revitalise critical geographical work and engender more just cultures of academic praxis, premised on relationships of care. In particular, Geography could productively engage more directly, in both its theory and its praxis, with Southern and decolonial scholarship as well as postcolonial and feminist thought. Such a move would deepen our understanding of where we are, how we got here, and how we might build more equitable relationships. It would help us to see the world more clearly and imagine alternatives more effectively, from our diverse locations on the African continent. This commentary explores recent shifts in the landscape of South African higher education, from the vantage point of one academic's situated and embodied perspective. The paper argues that we could usefully re‐frame the ongoing state of crisis as a moment of opportunity in which we might both revitalise critical geographical work and engender more just cultures of academic praxis, premised on relationships of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, emerging technologies and transformative practices have diffused into higher education social systems in ways that formal leadership styles are increasingly stretched to both keep abreast of and to manage. While many scholars have argued for the importance of the role of leadership styles in shaping the strategic direction of institutions, there is a paucity of research on the role that informal leaders, and more particularly opinion leaders and change agents, can play in enabling wide-scale adoption of innovations in higher education institutions. This paper focuses on the ways in which leadership in higher education can best extend their influence to accelerate the diffusion of transformational educational practices using emerging technologies by leveraging informal leaders. To illustrate how this could be achieved, we report on a study of 22 public higher education institutions in South Africa involving 259 participants who responded to an online survey. The survey focused on the uses of emerging technologies to transform the teaching and learning practices and the nature of institutional support such initiatives received. The findings reveal that for emerging technologies to be diffused in institutional social systems, more transformative and less transactional leadership is required. The paper proposes a model for accelerating the diffusion of emerging technologies in higher education institutions and concludes that leveraging informal leadership is particularly critical in accelerating the uptake of emerging technologies practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is an increasing use of emerging technologies ( ETs) in higher education internationally and in South Africa in particular, there is little evidence that their use is transforming teaching and learning practice. Anecdotal evidence shows that there is a dichotomy between the technologies supported and used in higher education institutions ( HEIs) on one hand, and technologies owned and predominately in use among students. Thus, the gulf between technologies supported and used for teaching and the technologies used by students for learning has created pressure for educators to 'play catch-up,' resulting in a continuum of pedagogically ineffective to effective uses of ETs. This paper argues that pedagogically sound uses of ETs leverage the broader context of existing practices (cultural-historical context) to design learning activities that transform both the teaching and learning practices. The paper draws data from a national survey on uses of ETs among educators in higher education to propose a pedagogical model of use that has the potential to transform practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this paper we discuss language-in-education practices, along with the ideologies and attitudes that undergird them, in the two countries. The focus is on the ideology of development, the essence of which is captured in the second epigraph: An education through the medium of English brings about employment, literacy, and development, personal success and upward social mobility. We discuss these presumed outcomes in the context of Kenya and South Africa, and argue that the language remains accessible only to a select few, the elite, and so do literacy and socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse of social media adoption in higher education has often been funnelled through utopian and dystopian perspectives, which are polarised but determinist theorisations of human engagement with educational technologies. Consequently, these determinist approaches have obscured a broadened grasp of the situated, socially constructed nature of human interaction with educational technologies and failed to explain ambivalent positions of technology adoption. To contest the innate determinism embodied in the aforementioned technological views, this paper draws on technological ambivalence to unravel the complex, multiple possibilities in pragmatic use of technology-including the double-bound relationship between human agency and educational technology. A phenomenological approach that draws on self-narratives of the use of social media by Computer Science and Informatics educators at a South African university is employed to unravel how their perceptions of social media shaped and informed their pragmatic instructional uses of these technologies. Findings suggest that the sharp contrasting experiences of collaborative engagement, enactment of decentralised power and democratic expression in social media coexist recursively with the disempowering, dependence-ridden and distractive effects of these technologies. This technological divergence is further compounded by ambivalent views that neither celebrate the unrealistic hopes of social media nor grossly protest against the debilitating effects of these technologies. This view foregrounds the social embeddedness of technology and its potentially multiple, contradictory effects. The implications of these findings include the need for educators to consider social conditions of technology use, the alignment of such conditions with innovative social media-enhanced pedagogical models and the use of proven models to demonstrate the educational potential of social media technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of Internet technologies has the ability to provide a new era of easily accessible and personalised learning, facilitated through the flexible deployment of small, reusable pieces of digital learning content over networks. Higher education institutions can share and reuse digital learning resources in order to improve their educational offerings. Descriptive language (known as metadata) is required to facilitate the search and retrieval of learning content. Various research offerings have been proposed to promote interoperable educational metadata. However, current metadata standards cannot accommodate the requirements of every community of users. This paper describes the development of an educational metadata application profile for describing learning resources within a South African higher education context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]