e-Learning Professor

Innovative Pedagogy

by on Leave a Comment

COIL Posters Bridging Cultures

South African Student Posters - TUT-SUNY Rockland Project
South African Student Posters – TUT-SUNY Rockland Project

The essence of good collaborative online international learning is a seamless continuum between course content and intercultural dialogue. So said Henry Shepherd of the Stephens Initiative in his keynote at the recent COIL Conference in New York. He was referring to an exciting initiative between Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in South Africa and SUNY Rockland where graphic design students had shared similarities and explored misunderstandings between their cultures while creating posters around themes like xenophobia, rising university fees, cyber-bullying and gun control. Hendali Steynberg and her SUNY Rockland colleague, Eileen MacAvery Kane, encouraged their students to produce “video icebreakers” to give each other a sense of the different environments. Says Hendali: “A project with soul where there is so much to learn from each other!” The project points towards future successful joint online classes using graphics as a meeting point.

Posters by South African students (starting top left): Nsovo Manganyi, Nombuyiselo Gogwane, Mafemo Phillimon and Mashie (TUT students, 2015). See more at http://rcc.macavery.com/south-african-students/

Eileen MacAvery Kane (SUNY Rockland) and Hendali Steynberg (TUT) at the 2016 COIL Conference
Eileen MacAvery Kane (SUNY Rockland) and Hendali Steynberg (TUT) at the 2016 COIL Conference

by on Leave a Comment

E-Textbooks – Reading on a screen

hipster_02_transpIt’s getting on for a quarter of a century since the New York Times Book Review announced “The End of Books”. Computer screens had started to allure readers with a new nonlinear or nonsequential space that offered not only the words on a page, but the promise of information rich hyperlinked pathways into new knowledge. Today, although printed books haven’t yet disappeared, the widespread use of e-books, and especially e-textbooks in higher education is overwhelming. It is undeniable that the adoption of the e-textbook brings with it all the advantages of interactivity, animations, simulations and instant online quizzes to test your progress. But it is also true that e-textbooks are popular because they are cheap, not necessarily for the individual student, but certainly for the distributors.

Back in the nineteen nineties, Sven Birkerts challenged the notion of e-books and even questioned the possibility of maintaining coherent thought while reading on a screen (I recommend the chapter entitled “Hypertext: Of Mouse and Man” in Birkerts’ 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies). Kolb presents a similar argument in “Socrates in the Labyrinth” (1994). Birkerts’ reservations have particular resonance now in an increasingly digital learning environment. We need to be critical of the e-textbooks we prescribe to our students, and even more so if we venture into authoring them ourselves. Are we sufficiently aware of the requirements of on-screen reading? Does the design of the learning material we recommend provide a sufficiently logical framework to our users? Are we providing an abundance of information but very little clarity?

I hope that the readings provided below provoke a debate that will ultimately benefit our students. At the very least we should be in a position to scrutinise our burgeoning e-textbook collections with a more discerning eye.

Birkerts, S. 1994. The Gutenberg elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age. Faber and Faber.

Birkerts, S. 2012. Why Read? School Library Journal, 58 (3): 26.

Kolb, D. 1994. Socrates in the Labyrinth. In: Landow, G. P. ed. Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 323-344.

Kolb, D. 2008. The revenge of the page. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 1379112: ACM, 89-96. Available: http://www.dkolb.org/fp002.kolb.pdf (Accessed 12 November 2015).

Rainie, L., et.al. 2012. The Rise of E-Reading. Pew Internet & American Life Project:  Available: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/04/04/the-rise-of-e-reading/  (Accessed 15 August 2015).

Stoop, J., Kreutzer, P. and Kircz, J. 2013. Reading and learning from screens versus print: a study in changing habits: Part 1 – reading long information rich texts. New Library World, 114 (7/8): 284-300.

by on Leave a Comment

African Storybook Delight

African_Storybook_transpLorato Trok certainly won over her audience at Durban University of Technology last year when she called for new participants in the African Storybook Project. The DUT Writing Centre have now added a new category for children’s stories in their annual writing competition. Budding authors are invited to write their own stories, or stories from the rich African oral tradition, or stories about experiences, hopes and fears of today’s African children. Anyone can try their hand, though. Go to http://www.africanstorybook.org/