John Connell: The Blog

There are strate­gies that teach­ers and schools can employ to ensure that tech­nol­ogy becomes pur­pose­ful and sys­tem­atic. There can be lit­tle doubt that its poten­tial is very great, as it pro­vides the oppor­tu­nity for effec­tive teach­ing of skills, of find­ing and using infor­ma­tion within a con­text of high stu­dent inter­est. This unique com­bi­na­tion is too great a value to be wasted.

Celes­tine Kemu­nto Nya­mari lives in Kenya, where she attends St. Theresa’s Girls’ Sec­ondary School in Kithimu, a cou­ple of hours drive North-East of Nairobi. Celes­tine took part in the first student-led Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate (in Novem­ber last year) as a guest debater and is set to join EFF6: From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers on Jan­u­ary 28, 2013.

This has been cross-posted from my new blog at iamlearner.net, which I have estab­lished to sup­port and com­ple­ment my busi­ness web­site at consult.iamlearner.net.

On my trav­els around the world I have often found myself work­ing with some truly inspir­ing organ­i­sa­tions. One of these is SAIDE, the South African Insti­tute for Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion, who I met with more than one occa­sion in Johan­nes­burg. This is an orga­ni­za­tion that is truly com­mit­ted to trans­form­ing edu­ca­tion and train­ing through a focus on the adop­tion of open learn­ing prin­ci­ples and dis­tance edu­ca­tion methods.

SAIDE do not think small! One of their key aims is to:

Sup­port pro­grammes in sound and inno­v­a­tive course design, mate­ri­als devel­op­ment, learner sup­port, man­age­ment, and the use of tech­nol­ogy, par­tic­u­larly for large scale pro­vi­sion.

They given pow­er­ful sub­stance to their prin­ci­ples with the launch of a site ded­i­cated to the pro­vi­sion of OER resources for edu­ca­tion across the con­ti­nent of Africa — OER Africa. With spe­cial areas of focus — teacher edu­ca­tion, health, agri­cul­ture and skills devel­op­ment — this is a great resource built on the assump­tions of openness.

A quick search for ‘pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment’ threw up some 237 ref­er­ences, and I could see a rich har­vest of ideas and mate­ri­als even in the first two of three pages of results.

Def­i­nitely worth a look!