Digital Immigrants & Digital Natives
Bloemfontein (South Africa), November 2006 - (by Dr. Herbert Thomas) In South Africa, large numbers of faculty members at higher education institutions are 'digital immigrants', and yet we presume to create learning environments for 'digital natives', who differ radically from us in their understanding of technology. This already complex situation, is further exacerbated in South Africa, where we have eleven official languages and as many different cultural groupings.
How do you design 'staff development' sessions aimed at encouraging the implementation of ICT-assisted learning amongst faculty staff in this context?
The Division eLearning at the University of the Free State (South Africa) decided to redesign its staff development programme so that the programme incorporated some characteristics of complex systems.
Some of these include: formal orientation sessions for lecturers using eLearning for the first time; just-in-time, one-to-one sessions as the need arose; remote access support for individual lecturers in the comfort of their own offices; focused small-group sessions, on request; multiple feedback loops, development of horizontal networks, and an ecological or viral model of skills transmission.
Outcome: A year ago traditional workshops were organised for faculty members and only one or two would arrive. A year ago there were 334 registered courses on the insitutional LMS, of which 79 were active (and most of these, only barely). Today, a year later, we have in excess of 400 registered, active courses on the institutional LMS.
A 'staff development' workshop aimed at encouraging new lecturers to use ICT in their courses features seven current staff members as 'guest presenters'. Three of them are enrolled for Ph.Ds in computer-integrated education and the other four have completed Master's degree modules in computer-integrated education.
Staff development and training sessions relating to the use of ICT in education have to be engineered in such a way that they embody the characteristics of the complex educational systems that they address. If we do not do this, faculty members will want to address complexity in traditional linear and hierarchical ways. This is particularly applicable to institutions in developing countries, where the dimensions of educational complexity are multiple.
Title of ONLINE EDUCA presentation:
Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives and the Training Games Africans Play
Date: Friday 11.45 - 13.15
Session: Staff Development and Training
