We're still spinning from the great feedback that this year's GeekRetreat received, so it was wonderful that Tim Shier from Quirk set up a BrandsEye account to monitor the conversation. Check out his great presentation here.
News
2nd ‘GeekRetreat’ centres on improving education with innovation
Press release.
For the second year in a row, 50 of South Africa’s geekiest entrepreneurs, developers, marketers and journalists came together for a weekend filled with brainstorming, planning and general discussion centred on solving some of the most pressing issues facing the South African Internet.
A broader band when it's local
Jason Adriaan is the founder of Local List - the first and only South African Internet directory that indexes locally hosted content. An ISLabs-supported project, Local List provides South African Internet users with list of websites and services they can access with local-only Internet accounts.
Getting SA teens reading and writing on the mobile web
Steve Vosloo is a Shuttleworth Foundation fellow who is excited about the potential of mobile phones for literacy in South Africa. His project, m4Lit (Mobiles for literacy) is about 'exploiting mobile phones to improve literacy amongst teens -- to get them reading and writing longer texts on their phones.'
Community-driven m-learning
Marlon Parker is a Cape Town PhD student and lecturer who started a drug counseling service using Mxit. He says that it's the world's first mobile counseling system and that it is being managed and driven by community members. After chatting online, Marlon and his team invite addicts to the centre for one-on-one counselling sessions.
The coalface of education in the Western Cape
Sam Christie is excited about the GeekRetreat and it's interesting to know why. 'I am based in Philippi on the Cape Flats and this is often difficult to reconcile with the "hip San Fransisco dinner party" side of education debate,' he says.
Bridging the "cognitive divide"
Cognician is the brainchild of brothers Barry and Patrick Kayton. According to Barry, 'Users interact with content not in a superficial click and pop-up fashion, but by means of responding to engaging questions which set the agenda for what to think about next.
The search for metadata in open education
Michael Paskevicius is interested in metadata for online education. Metadata (information about information) is a fascinating area of research in Web 2.0 technologies. Says Michael, 'We believe that it is vital for vocabularies of OER metadata to be standardized and therefore shared more easily and interchangeably using the web.'
Peer to peer education
P2P University (the ‘peer-to-peer university’) is being heralded as one of the most exciting projects to come out of the open education space in recent years. And best of all is that they’re located in the Mother City.
