Oh, those Afrikaaners, with their hybrid Dutch-English and what not. I say potato, they say Biblioteek.

Actually, this is where I gave my training presentation in Pretoria. It is the campus of UNISA (University of South Africa), which I believe is the largest university in South Africa. It is also where Nelson Mandela got his law degree from jail via correspondence. They have a very progressive history of offering education to all races from as early as 1920 (for this part of the world, that is borderline revolutionary). Granted, any race besides Caucasians couldn’t do much with that education.

That is not necessarily UNISA‘s fault, though. It was an interesting place.

By Michael Gallagher

My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.