Research Partnerships
Strategic research partnerships offer the possibility of both enhanced research opportunities and improved quality of research output, increasing the capacity of research entities to assist decision makers and managers to make the right choices on the basis of the best local, regional and international knowledge and experience available. Partnerships can build confidence and capability especially for research communities working in tough conditions with poor access to resources.
On the 21st April GeSCI hosted a North/South Research Partnerships Workshop gathering more than 50 ICT-in-education representatives from research partnerships, networks, associations and funding agencies that are linked to GeSCI’s donor and partner countries. The strategic objective of the workshop was to examine existing experiences of partnerships in the area of ICT in Education research in general and the potential opportunities for developing / enhancing research efforts that are relevant to the issues and challenges of GeSCI’s partner countries in the developing world.
See some of the workshop presentations below, the workshop programme and a comprehensive report on the workshop.
Jyrki Pulkkinen, CEO, GeSCI, spoke on the theme of Connecting Research to Policy Making and Development.
Patti Swarts, Manager Africa Regional Programme, GeSCI, spoke on GeSCI’s thematic focus areas and meta-review of ICT in Education Research.
Alain Senteni, Professor, School of e-EducationH, amdan Bin Mohammed e-University, Dubai UAE, Co-chair of the Education Commission, World Information Technology Forum (WITFOR), presented a systems overview of the tensions between traditional and activity based learning; as in top-down formally accredited knowledge transmission systems versus bottom-up informally networked knowledge generation systems fuelled by a new generation of web 2.0 social technologies.
Ritva Engestrom, Senior Researcher, Partnership Network of the Universities of Helsinki and Botswana, gave a presentation on Expansive School Transformation in the SADC Region.
Bengt Nykvist, Senior Researcher Mid-Sweden University, and Jabiri Bakari, Senior Researcher, Open University of Tanzania (OUT) gave a joint presentation on ICT Based In-service for Secondary School Teachers.
Angela Rickard, and Nigel Metcalfe, Senior Researchers, Dissolving Boundaries through ICT Project of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland.
Conor Galvin gave a short scene setting exercise in which he explored elephants in rooms as in the extraordinary ICT-Education disconnects that we don’t feel comfortable with – disconnects between policy making and research, and the particular challenge in education settings with the emergence of ubiquitous computing and web 2.0 modalities of learning.
Read the comprehensive Workshop Report.
