Roddy's thoughts and pictures at the close of the day
As I sit here working steadily through the end of year marking there is a carrot dangling ahead. I will travel to Nairobi soon to attend the MyCOE/SERVIR Fellowship workshop as mentor for one of our students, Natalie Ellis, to take part in a remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems training initiative. Here's the press... Continue Reading →
Here's the latest video from the Story of Stuff project 'Tis the season to get trampled'. It asks us to buy nothing and do something on Black Friday (which I gather is an American consumer occasion and media event ....). It is only a minute long. I watched, bemused, but not surprised. This is what the mainstream... Continue Reading →
Just in case anyone navigates here looking for my Rhodes University African Futures course here is the link: http://africanfutures.wordpress.com The image below is also clickable. I was intending to set up the African Futures site next year but the move from Rhodes University's Web Based Learning platform became urgent. RUconnected (Rhodes' customisation of Moodle) has become... Continue Reading →
I used to have a website devoted to Grahamstown's urban geography before Apple wrote off Mobile Me and support for iWeb. It described how the city grew, showed the segregation and apartheid areas and had pairs of photographs showing how the city has changed. All of those images are now in the gallery below. The... Continue Reading →
On Friday last week I got round to uploading this material on to slideshare. It is a seminar presentation on Open Access and Open Source that criticises the current publishing and teaching systems' dependence on market based models which lock our work away into silos of inaccessibility. Today I read this opinion piece on Al... Continue Reading →
Now my three week introductory module at Högskolan Väst in Sweden is over it is time to have a brief look at using an open access blog (Roddy's Courses) as the main supporting device for presenting course material. This was the first time I have used a blog that is open to anyone and it... Continue Reading →
There have been a couple of items this last week or so about Internationalisation that have got me writing. Last month's Rhodos was a special edition on the subject and our department got a very nice write up as one of the most 'internationalised' at Rhodes. Rhodos Special Edition: Internationalisation (July 2012) One of the... Continue Reading →
Here's another piece of futures thinking (from the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities) which I came across whilst doing some lecture preparation. The three scenarios are: Gulliver's World Massive socio-technical revolution Triumph of the Triads Presently South African cities seem to be caught somewhere between the first and last scenarios. Perhaps it is... Continue Reading →
I have been using TED talks in my teaching for many years now. Five years ago I showed my first year class one of Hans Rosling's TED talks 'Stats that reshape your world view' and sitting in that class was Tyron Louw. Earlier this year the same Tyron Louw - now a postgraduate student - walked... Continue Reading →
Yesterday was the big day when Rhodes hosted its first TEDx event. It was a privilege to be there presenting with such an exciting group. What a great audience of 'TEDxsters' too. Congratulations to Tyron Louw and all of the team at TEDxRhodesU. Here's my talk ...
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