Videos Bridging Asia and Africa: Overcoming Cultural and Institutional Barriers in Technology-Mediated Rural Learning

Abstract

Will African farmers watch and learn from videos featuring farmers in Bangladesh? Learning videos on rice seed management were made with rural women in Bangladesh. By using a new approach, called zooming-in, zooming-out, the videos were of regional relevance and locally appropriate. When the Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice) introduced them to Africa in 2005, many scientists and civil servants thought that the videos would be culturally inappropriate and hence irrelevant to African smallholder farmers. However, African farmers who watched the videos did not experience cultural barriers. In fact, they enjoyed seeing another part of the world where farmers faced similar problems as theirs, and were able to solve these problems by themselves. To promote wider uptake of the videos a key challenge was to overcome the institutional barriers. Public sector agencies especially had to be convinced that African smallholders appreciated Asian videos. By watching the videos with farmers and listening to their feedback, the skeptical scientists and service providers changed their minds. By 2009, the Bangladeshi rice seed videos had been translated into 20 African languages and so became national products. Videos made according to the zooming-in zooming-out approach can bring farmer-to-farmer extension to a higher level of social aggregation.     

Using technology for enhancing teaching and learning in Bangladesh: challenges and consequences

The increasing use of media and technologies for enhancing teaching and learning is an important current trend to overcome the challenges of schooling and teacher training in the changing world. Many countries in the Global South are trying to adopt technologies in their school and teacher training systems to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals. Though some recent research shows impacts of using technologies for enhancing teaching and learning in technology-poor contexts, no research actually addresses the challenges and difficulties associated with using the technologies in those specific contexts. This article presents interview data derived from secondary schools teachers in Bangladesh, in a context beset with many difficulties associated with technology use. In a pilot project, Apple iPods were introduced in 2009 to explore the challenges and consequences of using technology in schools. The data reveal the implications for the teachers’ professional development when they used the iPod as a multimedia player to access educational resources made available to support teaching and learning. This article has also thrown some light on current debates about using technologies for enhancing teaching and learning in technology-poor contexts.     

A Review of Innovation Systems Framework as a Tool for Gendering Agricultural Innovations: Exploring Gender Learning and System Empowerment

Abstract

Purpose:

To reflect on the opportunities that a systems understanding of innovation provides for addressing gender issues relevant to women, and to provide some insight on how these might be tackled.     

Learning and collaboration in pre-service teacher education: Narrative analysis in a service learning experience at Andalusian public schools

In this article we take up the task of presenting and analyzing a Service Learning experience developed in a class of the major in Primary Education Teaching at the University of Malaga, in Andalusia, Spain. It consists of a narrative analysis of autobiographical texts –final reports and online interviews – produced by pre-service teachers. We aimed to understand how participants learned about the teaching profession throughout their trajectory in the project. The results indicate pre-service teachers (1) learn by feeling, (2) learn by belonging, (3) learn by placing action in a social perspective, and (4) learn by sharing experiences with others.     

Learning about sustainability and gender through Farmer Field Schools in the Taita Hills,Kenya

This research uses transformative learning theory to explore how Farmers Field Schools (FFS) of the Taita Hills, Kenya have contributed to environmental sustainability, with a particular focus on gendered learning. Both genders experienced transformations in their meaning schemes related to farming (e.g., men and women switched their traditional roles in tillage and planting). A significant change in meaning perspective occurred among men who overcame personal biases and a cultural practice of land inheritance for males to now include their daughters. More research is needed to explore how all participants (farmers, extension agents, scientists) could enhance sustainability efforts and gender equality through agricultural participatory education projects such as FFS.     

Learning through action: Parallel learning processes in children and adults

Experiential learning has become an essential part of many educational settings from infancy through adulthood. While the effectiveness of active learning has been evaluated in youth and adult settings, few known studies have compared the learning processes of children and adults within the same project. This article contrasts the active learning processes of children and adults by chronicling a service learning project in the United States in which 19 university students implemented an anti-bias curriculum with 112 young children. Findings are interpreted in relation to David Kolb's model of experiential learning. Implications for classroom practice and theory are discussed.     

美国高校服务学习课程评估及启示

随着世界范围的高等教育知识生产模式转型,美国社会对优质的服务学习课程的诉求日益强烈,高等教育进入关注课程评估的质量保障时代。基于服务学习课程的主体多元性、内涵丰富性、情境的动态性等特点,本文从评估目的、评估主客体及内容、评估方法及工具和评估运用等方面探析美国高校服务学习课程的评估方案,指出其评估理念、评估过程、评估方法和工具能为我国提供重要的借鉴意义。     

Structural Conditions for Collaboration and Learning in Innovation Networks: Using an Innovation System Performance Lens to Analyse Agricultural Knowledge Systems

ABSTRACT

Purpose: We investigate how the structural conditions of eight different European agricultural innovation systems can facilitate or hinder collaboration and social learning in multidisciplinary innovation networks.

Methodology: We have adapted the Innovation System Failure Matrix to investigate the main barriers and enablers eight countries (England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands and Switzerland).

Findings: Results show some of the recent trends the AKS actors in these countries have experienced and how these have affected their potential to act as collaborators in multidisciplinary innovation networks. Lack of funds, combined with horizontal and vertical fragmentation and the lack of proper evaluation criteria for collaborative innovation networks are among the most important threats we found.

Practical Implications: This study shows that each national AIS has some unique features. This means that the implementation of policies promoting collaboration and social learning (e.g. the European Innovation Partnerships and Operational Groups) should depend on a critical reflection of the existing structural elements of the AIS in each country and whether there is a need for inclusion of new actors, or whether certain innovations for collective goods should be promoted.

Originality: The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion in the scientific literature on the advantages and disadvantages of privatization of extension and advisory services and the shift from thinking in terms of the traditional Agricultural Knowledge System towards a broader Agricultural Innovation System.     

Qualitative Differences Between Learning Environments Using Videos in Small Groups and Whole Class Discussions: A Preliminary Study in Physics

Interactivity, group learning and student engagement are accepted as key features of social constructivist learning theories. The challenge is to understand the interplay between such features in different learning environments. This study focused on the qualitative differences between two interventions—small-groups and whole-class discussions. In both interventions, three short video slices on the abstract topic ‘the physics of superconductivity’ were interspersed with the different discussion styles. The video slices are based on the Bruner stages. Twenty-nine first year university physics students completed a pre-test, underwent the intervention and completed a post-test. The remainder of the data were collected from student drawings, video recordings, observer notes and facilitator feedback. Results indicate that the use of the video slices in both interventions were successful in changing students’ understandings of superconductivity. However, the small groups treatment tended to facilitate questioning, meaning-making and subsequent changes of ideas more so than the whole class discussions. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

“服务学习”视域中的开放大学与社会责任

"服务学习"在美国经历的几十年发展历程,充分证实了其在促进高校学生专业知识学习、提升社会实践技能、提高公民素质与社会责任意识等方面所具有的潜在积极意义。积极借鉴"服务学习"的既有文献成果与实践经验,探索开放大学人才培养模式,主动承担历史赋予的社会责任,对开放大学建设和发展具有重要的战略意义。增强社会责任意识是构建和谐社会的基本要求,也是开放大学应用型人才建设的重要内涵,应该把培养学生的职业素养和社会责任意识,纳入开放大学人才培养目标体系。     

Innovation,research and professional development in higher education: Learning from our own experience

This paper describes and analyses an innovative experience carried out by a group of lecturers from the Psychopedagogy Faculty of the University of Alcala, involved in an action research process with the purpose of reflecting about our own practice and constructing alternative teaching strategies to facilitate students’ reflective, autonomous and critic learning. The experience consists of a didactical proposal through which we intend to establish connections and interdisciplinary relationships among courses, in order to break down the isolation that usually characterizes the work of university teachers, and move towards a more global and complex formula for curriculum development. We also propose the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as tools to support the learning process and expand opportunities for reflection, dialogue and collaboration beyond the classroom activities. The results of this experience show a dialectic interaction amongst innovation, research and professional development processes.