8th WWW application Conference 2006 Bloemfontein South Africa

Saturday 9/09/2006

If you read this, please remember this is MY OPINIONS. If I use somebody else’s opinions I will try to be fair in referencing and not quote out of context but it may be my interpretation. I believe that there is no sense in dialogue if everybody always agrees, but there is no sense in dialogue if everything leads to arguments. My name is Alwyn Hugo. My naam is Alwyn Hugo (In Afrikaans) Lebitso la ka ke ntate Setsumi (In Sesotho). My Sesotho name means the one who hunts. My European name means everybody’s friend.

Since it is Saturday I can not write this straight on a block, I DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM HOME! It is just too expensive. In South Africa you have to pay an Internet service provider (ISP) and then pay the telephone bill for the time spent on the NET or you could use your mobile phone as modem and connect through the mobile phone company. Currently I do this only in emergencies but then I need to go through the following:

a) Borough my wife’s Nokia 6111 because my Samsung SHG D500 does not connect to the Net. The Nokia 6111 just zip through to the Net, but it is not a nice phone and it is PINK! Yes, colour has nothing to do with it but ……
b) Swap SIM Cards – mine is a 32k and faster than my wife’s 16k
c) Pay R 2-00 per Megabyte of download ( www.mtn.co.za )

I suppose the term download should read data transfer regardless the direction in which the data goes. To be fair the price structure is not that expensive but it does mean, at least in my case, that one must budget for controlled usage. MNT does have data products that facilitate controlled usage. You pay for an amount of data that you require and when you reached the limit you are disconnected. It seems that data transfer on these products is cheaper as well. ( www.mtn.co.za )

I started to write a diary to commit my thoughts on the 8th World Wide Web Application Conference that was held in Bloemfontein South Africa from the 5th to the 8th of September 2006. How I got distracted to write about the cost of Internet connections in SA is directly related to discussions from this conference.

Stephen Downes was a keynote speaker at the conference and I spent a day in a workshop that he gave on the use of blocks, podcasts and vodcasts in education. He demonstrated the technologies well but the participants in the workshop still need to find a way to use the technologies to change the way students learn/the way we teach in South Africa. It seems a lot of educators in SA and in other parts in the world are faced with constraints regarding certification, accreditation and assessment of skills necessary to demonstrate to the communities that the people who engaged in learning actually acquired the skills necessary to become good pilots, doctors, nurses, economists, educators, guardians of the peace the law and ….. I read the blog of Christopher D. Sessums and see that he is in the same predicament. I find it easy to reconcile with his views.

I do believe that if a person decide on a professional career and decide to learn skills towards such a career that person wants and are entitled to be certified and accredited whether by a Traditional Institution or by a different method. Certification and accreditation is important to institutions, to governments and to students. Certification by an accredited institution is the pillar on which communities place their trust in professions like doctors, nurses, pilots … My framework of reference is Higher Education, but as a father I know that it is equally important in primary and secondary schools al well. Stephen's view on this is to “kick the government out” to “release all control of learning” and to “place all learning content in an open environment”. But all over the world the call is to ensure quality in education. Governments, governing bodies and communities relay on set standards in education to ensure quality. The Health Profession Council of South Africa determines standards of professional education and training, and they accredit training providers and practitioners to ensure that public communities may have a reference regarding the quality of health care practitioners (http://www.hpcsa.co.za/). The South African Government equally plays a part in ensuring quality of education. Is this only happening in SA? I don’t think so.

The operational cost of education and certification is one area where the Internet tools demonstrated by Stephen at the Conference may make a difference. It is not only the tools that he demonstrated but also tools that may replace expensive commercial LMS tools that may have a big impact on operational costs of institutions. The decreased operational costs are probably not proven yet but it challenges the idea that an institution may only have one fixed way to engage students online. This is an important part of Stephen Downes workshop. Currently an educational institution may have different instances of Moodle running on the same server and the only cost will be in terms of space on the harddrive. (www.moodle.org) Institutions like primary and secondary schools that do not have a budget for an LMS but who needs a LMS could run Moodle at no costs towards software. Schools who do need an LMS but who wants a controlled Web environment may use Moodle or any of the other Open Source Software like Elgg (www.elgg.net). I mention these two open source products because I have some limited experiences with both but there are other products as well.

An important challenge to educators is to arrive at the point where students may learn in a social constructivist learning environment. The learning environment should be in place regardless the process of certification, accreditation and quality assurance. The tools demonstrated by Stephen may be useful in realizing a social constructivist environment for learning but it will be up to the education community at institutions and between institutions to debate ways to achieve such communities.

Issues that need to be taken into account in constructing social constructivist environments are:

a) Cost to Institutions – the open source tools have enormous potential.
b) Cost to students – my first paragraph regarding cost of Internet are very applicable to students. At my Institution students have a 30 megabytes/month Internet limit; they pay for any Internet use above this 30 megabyte limit.
c) Language – it does not help to have dialogue if half of the community does not participate. Some Higher Education Institutions have parallel medium language policy regarding instruction, which means that for any social constructivist environment a duplicate environment will be active or a good solution towards the language division needs to be found.
d) Assessment in the social constructivist environment – if certification and accreditation is important in education a way to assess contributions in a social constructivist environment need to be in place.
e) LMS – learning management systems. Is a software program capable of management of a process that takes place in the mind of a person? Different versions of commercial LMS’s confuse educators even more because they believe that product X can do certain stuff only to realize that they have and very earlier version of product X and that upgrading to the current version will be prohibitively expensive.


While learning is a process in the mind of a person and while the learning process can not be managed by persons or software programs, academic programs are constructed to develop and assess skills to demonstrate the level of outcomes of the learning processes in individual students in relation to set standards. Social constructivist environments do have a place in the development of skills in academic programs but to demonstrate benefits to academic programs more thought needs to be given towards the implementation of such environments. To release all content in a chaotic web environment and to forsake all certification will not stimulate more and better learning, but if deeper learning and live long learning skills can be developed through social constructivist learning communities we as educators need to find a way to implement them.

Alwyn Hugo aka Ntate Setsumi