Group items tagged

"Is Luciana Fasani too cool for school or better prepared than most teens for a rapidly changing workplace? A qualified make-up artist and hair consultant and now studying the performing arts, the 14-year-old Cape Town teen tells Nelia Vivier about stepping up to today's job market and life in future.. "The educational system today only values one type of intelligence - if you do not fit into that mold, you are made to feel unhappy and stupid" "Schools and schooling ar becoming increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No-one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes, or politicians in civic classes, or poets in English classes - John Gatto"."Our school crisis is a reflection of the greater social crisis (in South Africa) - children and old people are penned up and locked away to a dgree without precendent... a community that has no future, no past, only a continuous present". "We live in networks, not communities and everyone I know is lonely...school is a major actor in this tragedy....We appear to be creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander..."

A non-profit organisation that advocates for open data.

A non-profit organisation that advocates for open data.

About the book: Information Literacy and Cultural Heritage: Developing a model for lifelong learning Kim Baker, Cape Town, South Africa - covers cultural heritage in the museums, archives and... Kim is our fellow co-student from Cape Town. She already created a digital project, her blog. She also has created an analog project: a book, you know, something printed on paper :) Kim is a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) expert. Her book covers anything digital and GLAM or cultural heritage, at least that is what the content section promises. So I'm very glad to have such an expert in her field in the class.

Thank you very much. :) And I am so happy to be here and learn from so many experts around the world!

An interesting opinion/confessional piece on one academic's experience of publishing in the developing world. The author points out cultural pressures and differences that could possible contribute to the expanding knowledge gap.

It is very fascinating articles, thank you for posting this. I myself, most of the times, focus on the publisher issues rather than the author himself. However, after read this I realise how important it is to pay attention to the authors because their contribution can really affect the quality of researches that they involved in. Regardless how successful the authors are, they are still human beings who are also affected by the national cultures.

This is an interesting piece but raises the question - why is the institution placing the pressure? It says, tacitly, a lot about the culture of the academic institutions in the country as a whole - and this culture is often shaped by funding patterns from central government, or major funders. The institution then responds to these funding patterns by pressuring staff to produce what is funded. In South Africa this is very much the pattern, with central government funding articles published in selected journals (see the readings for the module 11). However, there has been a rethink and there is proposed changes in now supporting book publication to a much greater degree. So whereas the pressure was on to produce articles, now the universities are looking at book production to a greater extent. As has been said as a truism; "Follow the money" - and in this case we see how this affects what should be, in effect, academic freedom.