One of the lighter moments as the audience reacted to Prof Helene Gelderblom
Just imagine young kids having access to an on-line teenage tutor to help them with their homework problems? The purpose of one of Prof Helene Gelderblom’s research projects is to do a pilot to set up exactly that for grade 2 and 3 children and grade 9 and 10 teenagers. Prof Gelderblom says that the “The aim of this project is to investigate social networking as a platform for a cross-age tutoring system and then to implement and test such a tutoring system in a restricted environment before preparing it for more general deployment. In the envisaged system, teenage tutors will provide after school learning support to lower grade learners who do not have access to such support. Support will be focused on early mathematics and reading skills.”Currently the levels of proficiency in mathematics and reading skills of the average child in South Africa are desperately low. It is well known that sorting out of mathematics and literacy problems during early years of education will reduce the problem of high levels of failure and dropout in later grades. There also is very little access to support for these young children.
Prof Marietha Nieman
South Africa experiences huge shortage in good teachers especially those who can teach in their African mother tongue. Moreover, older experienced teachers are shy of using technology and the last thing this country needs is for them to also leave the profession because they have become frustrated with technology. Teenagers tend to spend large amounts of their time socialising by means of tools such as BBM, Facebook and YouTube.Young children are naturally drawn to technology and would be keen to communicate by means of technology with older children about their school work. The tools to provide solutions for this need should be developed urgently, despite general lack of access to broadband which will only be available to most South Africans in 2020.
A cooperative design approach will be followed in Prof Geldenblom’s research project. Just how the system will be implementedand with which tools, will to a large extent be determined by the children who participate. To avoid wrong learning taking place, the tutors will be chosen and monitored very carefully. The following three principles will guide the project: use what is regarded as a problem to create a solution, turn a big problem into a problem that is small enough to find a solution and when designing tools for children, do it in collaboration with children.
Dr Chobela Semuli
Prof Gelderblom has various M&D research ideas which she would like to develop and thus she invited the Colleagues in the College of Education to please join her in exploring the options. Some of the research topics for Master’s and PhD research which she proposes are:
- A survey of available technologies that could potentially be used to build a cross-age tutoring platform.
- Safety and security issues in an educational social network system aimed at young children.
- Development of a social network tool for use in a cross-age tutoring system for primary school children (design and development).
- Online social networks as a platform for school level cross-age tutoring (literature study).
- Effect of cross-age tutoring via social networks on teenagers’ identity development.
- Developmental gains through cooperative design of social networking tools.
- Life relevant learning for teenagers through online cross-age tutoring.
- Using social networking technology in lower grade mathematics and literacy education (a case study).
- Cooperative inquiry (a South African case study).
- The effect of cross-age tutoring via social networks on lower grade children’s performance in mathematics.
- The effect of cross-age tutoring via social networks on lower grade children’s literacy.
- Collaborative use of mobile devices by lower grade learners in a cross- age tutoring situation.
She also mentioned opportunities in the ABET environment with doing eye tracking research as well.
 Mr Jan Mentz from the School of Computing reacts to the presentation |
 Prof Marietha Nieman responds to the very interesting presentation with many opportunities for M&D reseach for our students |
 Prof Helene Gelderblom was thanked by Prof Marietha Nieman for her inspiring and interesting presentation |
 Mark van Heerden was asking for more information about the eyetracking techniques as reseach tool |
