Reflection #1

Context

The Faculty of Military Science, Stellenbosch University, is situated on a satellite campus in Saldanha Bay at the Military Academy.  All our students are serving personnel in the Department of Defence.  Approximately half of the student body is composed of distance learners who work fulltime and are situated throughout South Africa as well as beyond our borders on active mission deployment.  The FMS itself is a small multi-disciplinary faculty offering Bachelor of Military Science degrees in Commerce, Science and the Social Sciences through to PhD level.

There are many challenges at the Military Academy.  First and foremost is the issue of extremely limited resources and outdated technical infrastructure.  Secondly bureacratic constraints serve to undermine and inhibit progress in this domain.  As a result the FMS is struggling to upgrade its teaching and learning platform, and in particular is bandwidth and connectivity to a level which is in line with other higher education institutions in the region. 

The second challenge is with regard to staff and students readiness for e-learning.  The students arrive with a hugely disparate range of skills and competences.  Most concerning it is often the distance learners who have the greatest shortfall in web related skills.  On the positive side, the Military Academy is integrated on Stellenbosch University’s network and therefore residential students are able to access the full range of intranet and internet services provided to all Matie students.  Aside from the students, FMS faculty members are equally diverse in terms of their readiness, willingness and ability to embrace technology in their teaching.  Some are typical early adopters whilst others continue to embrace their decades long relationship with the overhead projector.  The bulk of staff members fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

Given that it is ultimately the staff members who are required to integrate technology into their teaching it is as important to focus on interventions for staff as interventions for students.  Too a certain extent many staff are comfortable with everyday technologies such as the Office suite, email and even the Moodle LMS.  Many however, lack confidence with regard to using other technologies to further enhance teaching and learning such as blogs, wikkis, podcasting or any of the plethora of Web 2.0 tools.

The Challenge

The Faculty of Military Science is geographically and to some extent intellectually isolated.  Building collaborative intellectual spaces between staff in Saldanha and their peers nationally and internationally is important for a whole host of reasons.  Equally important is the drive to promote open access education and research.  For this reason I decided to focus on an intervention to further improve digital literacy amongst staff members.

Five members of faculty have been approached to take part in the case study.  They were selected based upon demograhic criteria (age, gender etec) and academic profiles in order to provide a diverse group.  The one commonilty which they share is an under developed online presence.  Various tools will be used to assist in creating an e-portfolio as well as to promote their online presence.  I intend to use the following sites/tools to this end:

Twitter

Academic. edu

Google sites

Slideshare

Linkedin

The is a teacher to teacher type of intervention and based somewhat on Anderson and Elloumi's Interaction Model.

Intended Outcomes

The objective is to focus on enhancing staff digital literacy particularly within the Web 2.0 space.  The specific intervention will focus on teaching staff how to improve their digital online presence by sharing the results of their teaching and research.  It is hoped that working with different online tools to this end will assist staff in expanding their competences and enthusiasm for the use of web based tools in both teaching and research.  It is postualted that by improving digital literacy amongst staff members that they will experience the possibilities which technology offers them to create more interactive academic spaces between themselves and their students and between themselves and other academics.  It is further hoped that during the six weeks of the project that the selected faculty will begin to experience the benefits of their online "reach outs" through the increased visibility of their work.