Afternoon at the aquarium: a change of pace
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829 days ago
This is a little personal glimpse, not my usual blog posts. OK, I confess, I am really doing some usability testing on the blog tools, but its still a change.
My father in law (Sekuru - grandfather in Shona), is visiting from Zimbabwe, so today we took him to the Two Oceans Aquarium and a walk around the waterfront. The Aquarium was fascinating for him as he had never been to one before, and I think the fish were quite something to see.
The waters off the southern tip of the African continent is the mixing place of two oceans, the Indian and the Atlantic. The Two Oceans Aquarium on the V&A Waterfront showcases the incredible diversity of marine life found in these two oceans. The Aquarium is one of the top tourist attractions in Cape Town and over 3000 living sea animals, including sharks, fishes, seals, turtles and penguins can be seen there, and we saw most of them.
The aquarium has a fantastic Kelp forests exhibit, something that you can see in only two aquariums in the world - Monterey Bay Aquarium (USA) and the Two Oceans Aquarium. The Kelp Forest Exhibit houses three species of giant kelp, which provide shelter for an array of local fishes and invertebrates. Strangely enough, there are a couple of species of pink, paint-like coralline algae the live on the stalks of the kelp, and one of them is named after me: Pneophyllum keatsii. It was named by a colleague in the UK to 'acknowledge my contribution to knowledge' of these marine plants. The seaweed version of me is much thinner than the human version.
Info: You can click any of the pictures to see a larger or altered version.
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The Predator Exhibit contains 2 million litres of seawater, and includes large ragged-tooth sharks and an assortment of rays, predatory fishes and a loggerhead turtle. It is the grande finale to a tour of the Aquarium, since when you leave it you are back out at the starting point.
From there we walked down to the main tourist area of the Waterfront. The weather was gorgeous, considering its the middle of winter, so we sat for a while on the steps opposite the Clock Tower.
Situated near the site of the original Bertie's Landing Restaurant, and close to the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island, the Victorian Gothic-style Clock Tower has always been an icon of the old docks. It was the original Port Captain's Office completed in 1882. Since its restoration was completed in 1997, it has become an important focal point in the Waterfront's recent urban design. While it is interesting as a landmark on the outside, inside on the second floor is a decorative mirror room, which enabled the Port Captain to have a view of all activities in the harbour. On the bottom floor is a tide-gouge mechanism used to monitor the ebb and flow of the tide, something of importance to shipping, particularly in the days of sailing ships.
From there we went via the amphitheature, where we passed some performers on the way and found the Brazilian Marine Band playing Samba and the crowd really enjoying themselves. We saw some big warships in the harbour, and discovered that the South African, Brazilian, Argentinian and Uruguayan navies were on exercises in the South Atlantic and were in port. We went on a tour of the Brazilian and Argentinian ships. Coffee in the Waterfront mall, and then came home.
waterfront cape town aquarium navy south africa
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A cool twitter mashup
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830 days ago
Mashups are all the rage these days. They have many uses, including some pretty cool ones in education. There is a mashup which allows you to visualize which of your Twitter friends know each other. Not that useful, but cute none the less, and a good use of the Twitter API.
Go there...
mashup twitter social network
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Challenges for Quality Assurance in an Education 3.0 world
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832 days ago
| Challenges for Quality Assurance in an Education 3.0 world is a paper that I presented at a UNESCO conference in Dar es Salaam last year. It is relevant to an up-coming discussion on "Open Educational Resources" in Africa, and I thought it might be useful to make it available here. | ||
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| The concept of Education 3.0 has been used to categorize a possible future scenario of change in higher education in which we will see breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning. Education in the 20th and early 21st Centuries (Education 1.0) has been based on scarcity. Professors and learning resources are scarce, so they are aggregated into institutions within which most of the key processes are contained. This containment means that the factors that contribute to quality are largely contained within individual institutions, and quality assurance is largely a matter of assuring the quality of institutional processes. An increasing abundance of free and open resources for use in education means that learning resources are no longer scarce, and a proliferation of networking and learning technologies that blur the distinction between play and study, means that sources of learning are no longer as scarce as they once were and that professors are not the only valid means to ensure that learning takes place. In an Education 3.0 world, institutions will be called on to accredit not programs of study or courses, but rather to accredit learning achieved. Learning achievements may happen in a variety of institutions, some contact and some virtual, as well as through self-study and through a resurgence of digital apprenticeships. This paper discusses the challenges of quality assuring learning achieved in the context of Education 3.0 in higher education. | ||
- You may also wish to
- download the written paper
- download a version of the presentation that you can reuse.
education 3.0 quality assurance open educational resources OER FORE
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Good to Great: refocusing ICS
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832 days ago
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a management book by James C. Collins that aims to describe how companies transition from being average companies to great companies and how companies can fail to make the transition.
"Greatness" is defined as financial performance several multiples better than the market average over a sustained period of time. Collins finds the main factor for achieving the transition to be a narrow focusing of the company’s resources on their field of competence. This is the hedgehog concept, which can also be applied to the social sector - as he inticated in his second book - including higher education.
I have been using it to try to focus energies on redesigning my department, Information and Communication Services, to get over a slight backward slip of the past year or so, and reposition us on a path to great for the next 5 years. Below is the presentation I used today with all staff members. There is also a podcast of the talk with will be available shortly via the podcast module on this site.
Text adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_great
Buy the books from Amazon:
good2great good to great organizational design
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Experimenting with Apture
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835 days ago
While ferriting around in the wilds of the Web this weekend, I came across Apture. It takes weblinks and turns them into multimedia experiences. According to the Apture site,
This is my first experiment with it. I added the Apture code to my dkeats.com Chisimba skin, uploaded it to the site, and created this post.
With the speed of the Internet in South Africa, and my DSL performing at the speed of a jam melon falling up a hill, doing interesting things can be quite a pain. Nevertheless, you can check out what it does by clicking on the Chisimba or South Africa link in this page.
I will explore the opportunities to use this capability in some of the other posts. The tool is currently in Beta, and they do not say what their business model is or if it will remain free after the beta. But it is a pretty cool use of distributed computing.
web 2.0 multimedia apture
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Cellphones and the banning of pencils in the classroom
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836 days ago
Last week I gave a seminar in the Law faculty, in which I talked about IPods and other MP3 players as well as cell phones as educational tools. Not long after, I ran into a colleague coming out of the student centre, and after a brief chat, he told me in no uncertain terms that he would never allow is students to use cellphones in the class. His argument was basically that the students might misuse them and this misuse might interfere with their learning. He pointed out that the nature of the technology makes it easy to misuse them. I thought back to my days as a student, and muttered something like
"Perhaps we should ban the use of brains as well, since they might be misused. They are easy to misuse since we do not have to do anything other than think thoughts in order to misuse them. They might be used for daydreaming, or they might be used to imagine the teacher naked. They could be used to construct an elaborate scenario of blowing up the classroom, and escaping on a rocket to Mars."
My colleague looked at me strangely, and ran off to escape my weirdness. How bizarre I thought. Googling around about this I came across an interesting blog post by Doug Johnson that relates nicely to the idea. He says:
I gotta say that this “potential misuse” as a reason for banning technologies drives me nuts. If we applied this rationale for not allowing a technology to an old, familiar technology, we’d certainly have to ban pencils from school because:
1. A student might poke out the eye of another student.
2. A student might write a dirty word with one. Or even write a whole harassing note and pass it to another student.
3. One student might have a mechanical pencil making those with wooden ones feel bad.
4. The pencil might get stolen or lost.
5. Kids might be doodling instead of working on their assignments.
To this list, perhaps we should add that a student might draw a picture of the teacher naked as another good reason to ban pencils.
change classroom cellphones new technologies
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Facebook, Chisimba, and the Personal Learning Environment
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856 days ago
Today on the Chisimba developer mailing list, one of the developers in Kenya asked about creating a Facebook application. Another replied and suggested that the question was off the topic.
This got me thinking about Education 3.0, and the paper i gave in Tokyo last year, where I presented a mockup of a Facebook application as an example of how social networking technologies could be used to make personal learning environments. This presentation is shown below, and I think it is worth Chisimba developers having a look at it.
We already have Brent working on the Personal Learning Desktop in XUL for the IADP project, so the notion of Personal Learning Envirnoment is not outside the scope of our current activities. It is also an area that we are exploring with some of the Sakai people.
There is lots of Chisimba functionality that could become a Facebook application, not just for PLE but for any use to which Chsisimba is put. It would be good to have that capability in the framework, perhaps even a means to generate Facebook applications from an API. In particular, I think that while Facebook is widely used, it can be a connector of people and courses, or people and X where X is any aspect of Chisimba. The wonderful API created by Paul Scott makes this feasible and relatively easy.
So I would say if someone wants to work on Facebook and Chisimba integration, then it would be AWESOME! Step one would be figuring out how to get an application into facebook. Step two would be to make a really cool Facebook app from Chisimba that allows for interesting things to happen in the PLE space. I have thrown this idea out to the Kenyan Facebook developer community, lets see if there are any takers.
But there is more to this idea than just Facebook. Widgets are all the rage nowadays. We could also look at how we can implement the W3C Widget specification, and allow Chisimba to both generate and consume W3C compliant widgets. Not that would be cool! But I will write about that another time.
Given the increasing prevalence of widgets, I have decided to devote a few blog posts to widgets and how they might be used in eLearning to achive some of the goals inherent in the idea of personal learning spaces.
Adapted from a post originally made on http://ics.uwc.ac.za on Fri, 02 May 2008 11:19:22
facebook chisimba education 3.0 widgets elearning
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Stability in an Enterprise 2.0 data centre
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860 days ago
This is a re-post from my ICS blog to get started.
People who work in IT operations and look after data centres have to maintain stable systems because the organization depends on those systems for its day to day operation. In a University, we have systems such as Finance, email, human resources and payroll, student administrations, and others. These systems must be solid, reliable and available when people need to use them. They are typically applications that do not change very much over a 1-2 year timeframe.
Web applications are increasingly coming into the the core of organizations, and often these applications fall into a category that can be thought of as Enterprise 2.0. They are applications that evolve rapidly, and where the underlying infrastructure may also be evolving rapidly. At times, they use external APIs that are themselves changeable.
This creates two scenarios for creating stability in the enterprise data centre, and they approach cannot be the same for both of them.
Stability: Scenario 1
Where you have a stable application and you install it and leave it for a year or two.
In this case, a static system that is not updated with newer libraries and versions of underlying software will be the most stable. Updating libraries and underlying software will be more risky than leaving it static. Here an enterprise grade operating system is important, so distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise or Suse Linux Enterprise Server are suitable for creating a stable infrastructure.
Stability: Scenario 2
Where you have applications that evolve rapidly, consistent with the way modern web-based applications do.
A static system that is not updated with newer libraries and versions of underlying software will be the most unstable. A system that is reasonably up-to-date with libraries and underlying software that have a reasonable chance of being stable will be the most stable. Here enterprise grade operating systems present major risks to stability, so distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise or Suse Linux Enterprise Server are completely unsuitable for creating a stable infrastructure. Instead, what is necessary for stability under this scenario is to have a distribution that is able to evolve with the requirements of the web applications. If enterprises do not recognize these differences, they run the risk of creating instability in the web application space, and being unable to take effective advantage of Enterprise 2.0.
Of course, creating stability under this kind of rapid change means that special competencies are needed. These include knowledge of the underlying technologies and their current status, the ability to perform rapid changes and rollbacks, as well as still retaining a mindset that considers the enterprise.
enterprise 2.0
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Welcome to dkeats.com
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860 days ago
Welcome to dkeats.com. I have changed the default page to be the blog. You can still access the CMS and its content, but I will not be updating it very much, and if I do I will post a link in the blog.
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