12 Preparations for EAMUN

12
Preparations for EAMUN

Now it is time to move on to the prepataions for EAMUN...

(End of OET assignment!)

/Richard

11 HIV AIDS in Africa

11
HIV/AIDS in Africa

Before this week’s lesson have a look at the Wikipedia and UNAIDS pages on the HIV/AIDS disease and epidemic, as well as some fact sheets from UNAIDS with 2008 data: Global and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). You should also have a look at this presentation.

When you have done the reading have a look at this video: Voices from a world with AIDS.
Also have a look at this TED video by Emily Oster.

We will discuss this in our next lesson.

/Richard.

10 Investing in Africa

10
Investing in Africa

Below is a list of which TED videos I would like you to watch this week. During the next lesson (or 2, depending on how long it takes), I want you to present a summary of the video as well as your thoughts, reflections, reactions to the topic and content. We will use Elluminate for the next couple of lessons, so if you will be able to share presentations (e.g. PowerPoint) with the group or use the ”whiteboard”.

Cheetahs vs. Hippos (students’ names)
Doing business in Africa (students’ names)
Aid vs. Trade (students’ names)
Investing in Africa (students’ names)
Investing in Africa's own solutions (students’ names)
Patient Capital (students’ names)

/Richard

9 Civil Society and Democaracy in Africa

9

Civil Society and Democaracy in Africa

Here are some my notes from a lecture this week by Prof Jerry Gana on Civil Society and Democracy in Africa. Read through them and then put any questions you have in the comments for this blog entry. We will then continue the discussion in the next lesson.

/Richard

8 Understanding and Explaining Africa

8
Understanding and Explaining Africa

Here are some notes I took from the lectures that Christina Nyström gave this week. Read through them and then continue the discussion in the comments section of this blog entry. We will then continue the discussion in the next lesson.

(You can also check out Sara’s summary of the lecture on our blog.)

/Richard

7 UN Millenium Development Goals

7

UN Millenium Development Goals

This week we are going to be looking at the UN Millenium Development Goals (MDG). There are 8 MDGs and you will be split into groups to research and discuss the goals.

For some general information on the UN have a look at this presentation, this part of the UN website, as well as this part.

For information on the MDGs look here and here, you will also need to search for more information.

As a group I would like you to research your MDG and then present you info by using a bubbl.us mindmap. You will need to sign up for membership (free) and then add each other (and me!) as friends so that you can share the mindmaps with the whole class group. Be aware that you cannot work on the same mindmap at the same time from different users/computers.

When you have completed the mindmap add a link to it in a comment to this blog post. Make sure you look at each others before this week’s lesson.

MDG 1: student names

MDG 2: student names

MDG 3: student names

MDG 4: student names

MDG 5: student names

MDG 6: student names

MDG 7: student names

MDG 8: student names

/Richard.

6 History

6
History

We are going to use this BBC site to have a look at the history of colonisalism, decolonialism and post colonialism. You will each have a specific area to look at (listed below with the links) and I would like you to add a comment to this blog entry with a summary of your area, as well as your thoughts/analysis and some discussion questions. We will take up these discussion questions in the next lesson, but you can of course respond in the blog before and after the lesson!

After Independence (name)

Gold Coast to Ghana (name)

Towards independence (name)

French and British colonial styles (name)

The Nation State (name)

Programme Part 21 - Challenges to Colonialism (name)

Programme Part 22 - Indenpendence (name)

Programme Part 23 - Apartheid (name)

Programme Part 24 - The Nation State (name)

Case studies Guinea and Algeria (name)

Case studies Kenya and Congo (name)

Education (name)

After Independence (name)

/Richard

5 Amazing stats!

5
Amazing stats!

Check out this presentation by Hans Rosling – please add your comments. Here is the Gapminder site that he helped developed which provides access to some of the statistics and tools that he used.

Here is the presentation on the TED site, with comments, Hans Rosling’s bio on TED, as well as another presentation of his.

/Richard

4 This year's TED prize winner

4

This year’s TED prize winner

View the speech by this year’s TED prize winner, physicist Neil Turok, and his dream for Africa, this is another voicethread so please add your comments! (The original on the TED site.)

Here is the worldmapper site Turok refers to in his speech, as well as an interesting view of the world that they have put together.

This will form the basis of this week’s lesson.

/Richard

3 What is Africa

3

What is Africa?

Please watch the video below that I have assigned to you – you may of course watch the other videos if you want. When you have watched the video please add a comment to this blog entry, as well as commenting on others’ comments. This will form the basis of this week’s lesson.

Ingenious Africa:

An Introduction (student names);

Analysing Africa (student names);

Animal Allies (student names);

Innovation in Africa (student names);

Playful Africa (student names);

Reaching Out (student names);

Watching over Africa (student names);

Visionary Africa (student names).

/Richard

2 Bono

2

What is Africa?

I would like everyone to watch this voicethread of Bono’s acceptance speech of his ”TED wish”. It is a voicethread which allows viewers to comment with text, audio or video – we are going to
be using these again in the course so you will need to sign up as a user (free) and leave a comment.

TED is an organisation with an amazing bredth of resources which we will be taking advantage of in this course. It is worth having a look around. For Bono’s speech it is worth having a look at the comments made on the TED site as well as his bio on TED.

This will form the basis of this week’s lesson.

/Richard

1 Hello and welcome

Hello and welcome!

Welcome to the start of this course. This lesson will provide a basic introduction to the course as well as outlining some of the content we will be covering. The preliminary course structure is flexible and I am certainly open to suggestions. We will start with a broad overview of the areas that this course can include which will give you a chance to think about what you would like to focus on both in the course as well as your final project (see course structure for outline of this task). If there are any specific people, groups, exhibitions, et cetera, that you would like to include in the course please let me know and I will see what I can do.

The grading criteria and course goals are very broad which allows you a lot of choice in your final project, within the scope of Africa. It is also important that in your choice of topic you are able to adress the goals and criteria clearly.

We, as a group, are going to maintain a public blog which will chart the progress of the course and our preparations for East Africa Model United Nations – particularly for potential sponsors. I will organise a schedule where each student will be responsible for the blog for a week, I expect at least one entry per week.

Moving on to Africa – here is a slightly out of date map of Africa. You need to be able to place the countries on this map as it is vital that we have an understanding of the continent we are studying. You could use this map or this one to learn the countries. Vanity Fair magazine had an African special a while ago which you might find interesting.

Please add you ideas, requests, questions to the comments section of this entry. A specific question I would like to ask is what areas you are particularly interested in studying.

We will be having weekly skype chats, so if you haven’t already installed the program you will
need to (free). When you have signed up could you please add me as a contact, my skype name is ”first.name”. We will also try to move on to using Second Life for the chats as I think there is a benefit of being able to see avatars and move around. As well, we will try to use elluminate
(a virtual classroom) when it is necessary to have a ”blackboard” function for sharing of information.

Welcome once again,

Richard.

OET Assignment 2 plan

Presenting a collaborative/interactive online course with free, hopefully easy to use, web/IT tools

The goal is to show how to easily create an online, interactive and collaborative course with freely available web tools. In this respect the audience is teachers that either have or are thinking about running an online course. The course that I am going to try to ”translate” into an online environment is a secondary school social studies subject.

The purpose is to hopefully demostrate that it is possible to use a number of free web tools to relativly easily recreate a collaborative course online without the need for an expensive and/or complicated LMS or other software licences. These tools should allow the teacher to follow the activites of the class as well as allowing the class to feel as though they are part of a group working together towards common
goals.

Online technologies to be used:

• Blog (Google) inform students what is happening in the course each lesson/day/week.

• Google documents to provide an easy place to collect all the ”intellectual property” that makes up the course: lesson plans and instructions, exercises, feedback, assessment, etc. These can be easily published to the blog at the appropriate time, and then preserved if the course is to be run again.

• Jing (together with screencast) can be used to record and ”mini-lectures” as well as images.

• Slideshare can be used to share presentations (PowerPoint files)

• Voicethreads can be used to share images and videos and has a very good system for asynchonous discussion and comment.

• Bubbl.us and/or Thinkature for online brainstorming colaboration.

• Skype can be used for synchronous activites.

• Elluminate at Learningtimes could possibly be used for virtual lessons.
  

Learning Theory

Social Constructivism is a theory of learning associated with Vygotsky (1978, cited in Corrie, 1995) that emphasises the influence of cultural and social contexts in learning. There is an underlying belief that education is to develop the students’ personality and creativity. Knowledge is constructed through active learning and collaboration with teachers and other learners in authentic and meaningful situations (McInerney & McInerney, 1998). Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is central to social constructivism in the classroom. The ZPD describes the area of skills or tasks that cannot be performed by the student alone, but can be accomplished with the help of others (University of Houston – College of Education, 2002). Willis, Stephens and Matthew (1996, cited in Rice & Wilson, 1999) discussed four principles of a social constructivist classroom:

1. learning and development are social collaborative activities,

2. the zone of proximal development can serve as a guide for curricular and lesson planning,

3. learning should occur in meaningful contexts, and

4. learning should be related to a child’s own experiences. (p.29)

   
   

There is a large amount of literature that discusses the use of computers and other related technologies with specific regard to the social constructivist theory of learning. There appears to be three main themes within this literature. First, those who believe that computers can and will improve learning through its inherent compatibility and promotion of social constructivism. Second, there are authors who can see the benefit computers do provide to a constructivist method but argue that this should not be to the exclusion of other methods of teaching and learning. Third, the view that the link between computers and constructivism has not been sufficiently researched nor proved, and is possibly not even there. Much of this research has focused on the use of computers in a physical classroom so it may well be unwise to extrapolate all the findings to a virtual, online environment, however I believe that, despite the inherent challenges of students not necessarily meeting each other physically, it is still possible to create an environment there social contructivist learning is possible.

Matusevich (1995) quotes Collins (1991, p.33) stating that ‘Using computers entails active learning and this change in practice will eventually foster a shift in society’s beliefs toward a more constructivist view of education.’ This trend will continue as computers force a constructivist method into play ‘because it is impossible for a teacher to use didactic¹ methodology in a technology rich classroom’ (Matusevich, 1995). In agreement with this view is Nicaise (1998), who believes that the transformation in software design and associated technology will lead teachers to consider radically different ways of structuring teaching and learning. In an earlier work Nicaise and Barnes (1996, cited in Tillman, 1998) had stated their belief that technology can facilitate constructivist methods; leading to the later opinion that when advances in technology are combined with research and theory on learning ‘the learning communities of tomorrow will make astonishing improvements’ (Nicaise, 1998, p.115). El-Hindi (1998) notes that the more recent proliferation of material on, and access to, the Internet changes the idea of who the teacher is, and what the teacher does. Learning on the Internet is very compatible with social constructivism as the assumption of learners as active and curious is actively and powerfully supported by the medium. Students can form their own questions and then seek the answers – constructing knowledge in new ways. ‘[T]he old days are gone and… we must move ahead to discover the dynamic of learning on the Internet’ (El-Hindi, 1998, p.699). It would appear that social constructivism is becoming a more widely accepted theory of learning, especially with regard to the expectation of preparing students for the twenty-first century and the ability to use computer and technology that is implicit in this expectation.

Working prototype

My goal is to recreate the first section of the course that I teach in an online environment and through that discover if my goal is attainable.

Evaluation

The goal is to recreate an interactive classroom course in an online environment. Therefore it would be highly beneficial to evaluate both the students learning as well as their perceived perception of the
interactive/collaborative nature of the course. Student learning can be assessed through some form of assessment. I would prefer to use some form of open-ended, free choice project/paper in one of the
areas the course covers as the course I have in mind places much of the responsibility of learning on the student. An anonymous survey followed by a discussion forum based on the results would be my prefered approach for evaluating students’ perception of their learning and the course.

Sources

Matusevich, M. (1995) School Reform: What Role can Technology Play in a Constructivist Setting? [WWW document]. URL http://pixel.cs.vt.edu/edu/fis/techcons.html , viewed on 11 October 2008

Nicaise, M. (1998) Cognitive Research, Learning Theory, & Software Design: The Virtual Library. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 18 (2), 105-121.

Tillman, M. (1998) The Internet, Internet Curriculum Materials, and Constructivist Learning Theory. ERIC Database, Accession Number ED425706.

El-Hindi, A. (1998) Beyond Classroom Boundaries: Constructivist Teaching with the Internet. The Reading Teacher, 51 (8), 694-700.

1
‘A plan of instruction that emphasises precept, principle, doctrine or rule.’ (Good, 1973, p.158)