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One of the challenges facing education systems in general and the South African education system in particular is how to understand ways that teachers change from nonusers of technologies to becoming transformative teachers with technology. Despite numerous initiatives, not limited to training, workshops and so forth, to bring about sustained and wide-spread teacher change, transmission/delivery-based pedagogies and chalk-and-talk methods continue to dominate. While policy directives and professional development programmes aim to effect change in teachers' practice, they tend to fail to create sustainable change in teachers' practice of using emerging technologies (ETs). This paper reports on a study that sought to understand how teachers change their pedagogy of teaching with ETs. Using a Design-Based Research approach, the paper reports on the teachers' pedagogical change framework (Teaching Change Frame-TCF) as a diagnostic tool for locating and mapping how teachers' change. The TCF maps teachers' existing pedagogies and ET uses, and designs a pathway of a change process to effect the desired change. The TCF was tested and refined using data from 325 teachers drawn from rural, resource-constrained schools, urban, well-resourced schools and from preservice teaching students in a decontextualized environment. Following three iterations it was found that teachers' use of ETs in regulated, restrictive ways correlate with transmission pedagogies, unregulated, dispersed ways correlate with transformative pedagogies. The use of TCF not only located teaching pedagogies but also provide different pathways to ensure sustainable change. Findings emphasize the need for teachers to encourage learners to build/create/construct with ETs and for increased interaction in fostering nonregulated dispersed use of ETs.

Although social networking sites (SNS) are increasingly popular among students, their academic application is unfolding on trial basis and best practices for integration into mainstream teaching are yet to be fully realised. More importantly, is the need to understand how these sites shape academic relations and participation of heterogeneous students, particularly in resource-constrained African environments. The speculation about meaningful educational uses of SNS possibly rests on the complexity of grasping the multiple horizontal and vertical interactions that unfold via these sites. This study examines academic relations on Facebook with a view to generating a nuanced account of how power is reinforced or disrupted in interactions mediated by Facebook. The paper analyses the Facebook wall and forum postings of 165 first year Information Systems students and employs Anderson's model of six types of interactions to explore student experiences of the enactments of social power in Facebook engagements. Issues relating to power that emerged from Facebook interactions concerned asymmetrical engagements based on gender, breaching of hierarchical boundaries, compulsive academic use of Facebook, perceptions of vertical surveillance, lecturer and student projection of themselves and impression management. The paper recommends that learning with and from Facebook demands identification of leverage points in various stages of Facebook interaction.

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.

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. (Contains 2 figures and 4 tables.)

Although use of podcasts and vodcasts are increasingly becoming popular in higher education, their use is usually unidirectional and therefore replicates the transmission mode of traditional face-to-face lectures. In this paper, the authors propose a tool, MOBILect, a mobile lecturing tool that enables users to comment on lecture vodcasts using mobile devices, and aggregated comments become an educational resource. The vodcasts are generated through Opencast Matterhorn and YouTube. The tool was evaluated at the University of Cape Town with students' own devices. The paper reports on the architecture of the MOBILect, its framework for student-vodcast interaction, and evaluation results. The paper concludes that the MOBILect has potential for use as a supplement to the traditional face-to-face lectures especially in scenarios of large classes, or where the medium of instruction is not the students' mother tongue.

The paper employs two case studies to develop an approach for using podcasts to enhance student learning. The case studies involve two cohorts of postgraduate students enrolled on a blended course, over two years. In both cases, the institutional learning management system was used as a server to host the podcasts, giving students discretion on how and when to listen to podcasts. The podcasts were integrated in learning design hence tightly coupled in pedagogy in Case One, and optionally used i.e., loosely integrated in Case Two. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were employed to solicit student experiences of using podcasts. Access logs from the podcast server provided insight into frequency of use of podcasts, thereby helping to establish the relation between podcast use and facilitation of learning. The findings suggest that students were confident in using podcasts for academic purposes. This is despite having had to overcome some challenges not limited to institutional policies on limited Internet quota for students. The findings also suggest that use of podcasts within a constructivist learning environment afforded learners control and flexibility, reflection and self-paced learning. The paper concludes that podcasts facilitate learning when tightly coupled to a curriculum and used within constructivist learning environments. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

This paper describes an evaluation of a web-based consultation space (a dynamic frequently asked questions environment--DFAQ) in which learners consult one another using questions, and in which both the flow of interaction and its artefacts become a resource available to a community of learners. The DFAQ is a special form of a Computer-Mediated-Communication tool specifically developed to facilitate question-based interaction. We argue that education is too complex a social structure to be evaluated using deterministic positivist quantitative approaches. Given the volatility of determining what constitutes value, costs, inputs and outputs and the complexity of dynamics of socialization, a non-deterministic qualitative approach, utilisation-focused evaluation approach is used. Our conclusion is that the DFAQ does contribute to students' academic performance and frees the lecturer-learner consultation time. (Contains 3 figures.)

While the practice of using educational technologies in Higher Education is increasingly common among educators, there is a paucity of research on innovative uses of emerging technologies to transform teaching and learning. This paper draws on data collected as part of a larger study aimed at investigating emerging technologies and their use in South African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to improve teaching and learning. The research employed a mixed method research design, using both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods--quantitative data from a survey of 262 respondents from 22 public HEIs in South Africa and qualitative data gathered from 16 experts/practitioners on their self-reflective definition of the term "emerging technologies." The paper concludes that levels of institutional development, access to resources, discipline, group belonging and individual motivation of respondents influenced the way they defined emerging technologies including what constituted an innovative use of technology, foregrounding the contextuality of emerging technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most common problems of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in education is to base choices on technological possibilities rather than educational needs. In developing countries where higher education is fraught with serious challenges at multiple levels, there is increasing pressure to ensure that technological possibilities are viewed in the context of educational needs. This paper argues that a central role of educational technology is to provide additional strategies that can be used to address the serious environmental and educational challenges faced by educators and students in higher education. The educational needs manifest in South African universities include addressing general lack of academic preparedness, multilingual needs in English medium settings, large class sizes and inadequate curriculum design. Using case studies from one higher educational institution, this paper shows how specific and carefully considered interventions using ICTs can be used to address these teaching and learning concerns. These examples serve to demonstrate some ways in which teaching and learning may be enhanced when uses of educational technology are driven by educational needs. The paper concludes that design of educational technology interventions should be driven by educational needs within the context of a broader teaching and learning strategy which requires buy-in of both educators and learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African Universities are tasked with increasing student throughput by offering additional academic support. A second task is to teach students to challenge and question. One way of attempting to achieve these tasks is by using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The focus of this paper is to examine the effect of using an ICT tool to both increase academic support to students, and to teach critical thinking skills. A field study comparing a Project Management course at the University of Cape Town over two successive years was conducted. In the second year an ICT mediated constructivist approach (DFAQ web site) in which students acquired project management skills was used to increase support and teach critical thinking skills. Structuration theory, in particular the notion of practical and discursive consciousness, was used to inform our understanding of the role of questioning on teaching project management. The conclusion is that a constructive approach, mediated by an anonymous web-based consultative environment, the Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions (DFAQ) improved support to students and had an effect on student learning of project management and students acquired some questioning skills as evidenced in the examination performance. The efficacy of the approach was evaluated both through an interpretive study of DFAQ artifacts and the performance in the examination. The paper examines relevant literature, details the research objectives, describes a field survey, and the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses students' use of computers in the University of Cape Town's (UCT) "walk-in" laboratories. In a time of decreasing resources for higher education, South African universities are required to respond to the myriad inequities of the past while simultaneously ensuring participation in an information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled future. As pressure mounted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) to extend student access to computer laboratories, build bigger and better laboratories, wire residences, improve networks and provide faster computers, students were asked what they do with the computers they already have access to, and whether they are using those computers to support their learning. 1,023 students were observed of whom 56% were female and 44% male. Most were undergraduates, only 14% were postgraduates. Given that there are few facilities available only to postgraduates, this suggests they are more likely to have their own computers at home than undergraduates. Given the primary interest of the researchers in using computers to support students' learning, this survey flagged for them important areas of concern, suggested topics for further research, and clarified for them where useful interventions can be made.

Although culturally diverse students have potential to create enriched learning resources, it is difficult to harness students' agency and to aggregate individual contributions into a meaningful learning resource. This is one of the challenges facing higher education institutions in South Africa where institutions are increasingly cosmopolitan and culturally diverse, but production of knowledge has largely remained skewed in favour of those students with unlimited access to learning resources, the Internet and peer networks, anywhere, anytime. Although the appropriation of emerging technologies such as mobile phones has enabled a digital sharing culture, this social practice has not been harnessed for co-creation of learning resources. This article reports on a study that sought to uncover the extent to which the use of WhatsApp-enabled phones facilitated the co-creation of learning resources in a human resource management programme at a university of technology in South Africa. The article employed Amartya Sen's capabilities framework to analyse WhatsApp interactions of 72 participants from underprivileged backgrounds. The article concludes that leveraging students' capabilities, including rich culturally diverse knowledge, is not a mere outcome of access to a tool such as WhatsApp, but requires pedagogical designs that exploit the affordances of the tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]