Keynote Address The Past, Present and the Future for Computers and e-learning in Education

1. The 1st International Conference on Teaching Practice in Education (ICTPED), Pretoria, South Africa Keynote Address The Past, Present and the Future for Computers and e-learning in Education Alan Rogerson

2. alan@rogerson.pol.pl Personal areas of interest in Innovation Assessment Teaching of statistics and probability Maths and other subjects Teaching methods Curriculum development Teacher education e-learning

3. The Future of Technology – what did the experts predict? The Chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, said in 1948: “I think there is a world market for at most 5 computers”

4. The Future of Technology – what did the experts predict? Bill Gates: “640 kb is more than enough memory for any PC” Popular Mechanics in 1949 wrote: “in future Computers may weigh less than 1.5 tonnes”!

5. A tried and tested model for successful interactive e-learning Plan

6. A completely integrated and inter-connected database All student records All teacher records All class records All course records All enrolments and registrations All mailing lists and all email addresses The public face of the school through its webpage.

7. A completely integrated and inter-connected database The Student Lounge where students enter, chat and participate in the courses and lists. The Staff Room where teachers enter, chat and administer their own classes Student reports All financial matters relating to payment for courses, payment to teachers and authors of course material.

8. Advantages of fully interactive e-learning Safe and secure e-learning environment Open online contact for students and teacher Teachers with experience in virtual learning Self-pacing multi-level course material Webpages constructed using independent learning techniques (CAL) Secure server/database/manager "platform" Flexibility of working for students and teacher Very low capital investment

9. A new paradigm shift in education I would like to recommend some influential life-changing thinkers who have helped us to understand the importance of the creative human spirit in education. Paulo Freire and his work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a work full of courage, wisdom and humanism of a practical kind, which seeks to empower students, not merely to educate them.

10. Predicting The Future of Science, what did the experts say? Ernst Mach, professor of physics at Vienna University (1838-1916): “I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas”

11. Predicting The Future of Science, what did the experts say? Ernest Rutherford after he had split the atom for the first time in 1917 said: The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

12. A new (humanistic) paradigm shift for science and science education Thomas Kuhn transformed the image of science from a dogmatic, fact-collecting and theory-creating exercise to a fallible but human search for better and different conceptual models of physical phenomena Kuhn's concepts of scientific revolutions, paradigm shiftand normal science have illuminated inductive Science as a humanistic, creative struggle, impossible to systematise in the opinion of Feyerabend

13. A new paradigm shift for maths education Godel revealed axiomatic deductive Mathematics to be incomplete, and Lakatos showed the history of mathematics to be fallible, and geared to human creativity,harking back to the heuristic ideas and examples of George Polya. Lakatos wrote: “I respect conscious guessing because it comes from the best human qualities - courage and modesty… Certainty is not a sign of success, but of lack of imagination… The value of a logical proof is not that it compels belief, but that it suggests doubts

14. Implications of this paradigm shift for student learning and hence for teacher education Problem-posing leads to Problem-solving, Modelling, and Real Life Themes. Real Life Themes use relevance, motivation, group learning, self-learning and self-assessment to help in the holistic integration not only of other school subjects but also the everyday life of the students, and the real world around them. We have seen a paradigm shift in education from a subject-centred, to child-centred, to society-centred approach.

15. References Freire, P., 1974, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, Continuum. Kuhn, T.S., 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, I., 1976, Proofs and Refutations, Cambridge, CUP.

16. Darth Vadar in the first Star Wars film : “Do not be too proud of the technological terror you have created. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of The Force”. Our future task in education, I suggest, will be indeed to maintain the power of the force, and by that I mean the force of humanity and of humanism. These sentiments are endorsed in UNISA’s own vision for its future: “Towards the African university… in the service of humanity”.