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Editorial: Religion and Social Responsibility
Get PDFIn our decolonising, digitalising, and neo- and post-colonial world, the scholarly focus on ‘Religion and Social Responsibility’ is here to stay. As Smit (this issue) cogently points out, it has become common purchase not only within traditional socially-minded religious discursive traditions such as the historical Social Gospel Movement, the Catholic Church’s socially conscious and social justice statements and programmes since at least the eighteenth century, and the large variety of missionary movements of the nineteenth century, but that it has also been embraced by more conservative sectors of global religious society. Following the wide variety of social responsibility programmes developed and implemented – with a variety of measures of success – by the capitalist business sectors of the world since the mid-twentieth century, social responsibility programmes as forms of social intervention, or, for the purposes of social transformation and social and economic develop-ment, have become common cause for many institutions. With this issue of Alternation, we wish to place this item firmly on the scholarly agenda of not only institutions of higher learning, but also religious organisations across the religions. We also affirm the socially conscious engagement of society by the business and corporate world. After all, it is these sectors that not only drive the world economy and world development, but also, as individuals and companies, benefit the most from a continuously developing world political and socio-cultural economy
Assessment and Cognitive Demand in Higher Education Accounting Textbooks
Get PDFDriven by requirements prescribed by professional bodies, the accounting curriculum in many higher education institutions in South Africa and Nigeria demands high cognitive attributes from graduates. Advancing the proposition that assessment drives learning, the authors contend that cognitive demand can be determined by analysing the assessment tasks in students’ textbooks. Using a conceptual framework based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy and levels of difficulty theory, this article analyses the cognitive demand of assessment tasks in selected chapters of level one Financial Accounting textbooks in South Africa and Nigeria. The findings indicate that the bulk of the assessment tasks in the selected texts are pitched within middle and lower cognitive hybrids with limited tasks at higher levels. The article offers new insights into graduate attributes, assessment tasks and cognitive demand. It also suggests an alternative approach to assessing cognitive skills, specifically within the discipline of accounting to ensure a closer fit between training and the demands of the work place
#DecolonialEnlightenment and Education
Get PDFThis article provides a few brief, historicisable perspectives on what we may call the Truth, or Knowledge, of the Decolonial in the history of thought in South Africa. It explores what we may mean when we talk of the Colonial and the Decolonial, their Truth(s) and Knowledge(s), as well as how we could contribute to the continuous developing of the Decolonial through research, and research-led teaching and learning. Referencing Scott’s notion of ‘hidden transcript’, I provide a few pointers as to how to engage such references to the beginnings, and roots of the Decolonial in our context. I also provide a few conceptual perspectives on how to view history in Africa, from the vantage point of this approach, how to focus our research especially on thought-as-resistance, and the imperative to engage the digitally globalizing world. Finally, I provide a few perspectives on my notion of #decolonial-enlightenment, and the significance of the quotation at the beginning of this article. Originally a paper that was invited to the plenary on ‘Conceptualising Decolonisation and Africanisation’ at the Zululand Humanities and Social Sciences Conference, 18 – 20 October 2017, the article intends to open up (further), and contribute to the continuous developing intellectual space for decolonial thought and knowledge production in the Arts and Humanities. These must be positioned within the broader framework of the educational transformation processes South Africa has engaged and gone through, since the first education White Papers and related educational decisions and directives were released and implemented since 1995/ 1996. I shall therefore front my argument with a brief overview focused on this matter
A Web of IOT Sensors to Automate Quality Control in an IVF Embryology Lab
Get PDFIOT (Internet of Things) sensors have been very effective in real-time monitoring of an environment. With currently available low-maintenance sensors able to perform accurately for months on end, there is an opportunity to use this technology for sensitive monitoring of high performance lab environments, such as an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) lab. This paper is an attempt to use a network of well positioned IOT sensors to measure key parameters such as temperature, humidity, door-open count and volatile organic compounds (VOC) content inside an IVF lab non-stop for a stretch of one month and seek new insights from the resulting data in real-time
Telehealth Nursing in Care Settings and Specialties Worldwide
No full textThe ISfTeH Telenursing Working Group was first organised in 2008. Its mission and vision statements validated the roles and responsibilities that had developed and expanded since the first publication about telehealth nursing practice more than three decades earlier. Today, the Working Group has more than 120 members and represents 41 countries. Now, telehealth nursing can be seen worldwide; it is not considered a new nursing specialty. Instead, telehealth nurses employ a complementary toolkit to their particular specialty or setting. The key value of telehealth nursing in responding to people with health care needs is that nurses are able to reach farther and more efficiently and effectively than ever before. This extra reach, in conjunction with nursing’s commitment to holistic care of every person, can improve health care by increasing access, improving quality and decreasing costs worldwide.
Dental Trauma Tracker: A Mobile Phone Application for the Epidemiologic Surveillance of Dental and Maxillofacial Trauma
Get PDFIn the broad field of injury and traumatology, injuries affecting the maxillo-facial region have an important role: dental trauma (DT) makes up 35% of facial injuries, and 31-39% of dental emergencies are consequences of DT. Dental trauma is injury to the soft tissue as well as the teeth. Although in the majority of cases dental trauma is not fatal, it still may cause some long-lasting psychological or physical damage to the victims. Consequently, DT is recognised as a major dental public health problem worldwide. However, lack of data reduces the timeliness and effectiveness of dental trauma research. Thus the ‘Dental Trauma Tracker’ project was established to promote the development of research in dental trauma. The aim of this project was to implement a mobile phone-based application for the epidemiologic surveillance of dental and maxillo-facial trauma. The Dental Trauma Tracker application takes advantage of mobile phone data capture capabilities (text, photo, video, and audio) for epidemiologic surveillance of dental trauma. The initial work to activate larger scale, longer-term studies in the future is described. The goal in the initial stage is to present the development of a working prototype system collecting dental trauma data to provide an overview of the nature and extent of DT, letting researchers view and summarise the collected data, and make greater use of the data for improvements at a local level (e.g., educating on the best first aid, identifying high-risk locations and activities).
What’s the Importance of Portable Tele-Monitoring Devices in Patient Therapeutic Adherence?
Get PDFIn the UK it is estimated the NHS spends almost £100 million every year in unused drugs. In addition, hospital admission costs attributed to patients not taking their prescribed medicine properly was estimated to be between £36m and £197m per year. In the U.S., medication non-adherence is estimated to lead to between 300 billion of avoidable healthcare costs annually, representing 3–10% of total U.S. healthcare costs. Studies show that improving medication adherence may have a greater influence on the health of the population than the discovery of any new therapy. Effective medicines are available for many conditions and yet patients are non-adherent 50% of the time. This can be critical point in certain disease states, such as asymptomatic conditions like hypertension, where the incidence may approach 80% non-compliance. It is proposed to create a therapeutic adherence monitoring device within a smart blister pack that is coupled to a device with the capacity to collect and send data to a common server. This would allow a clinician to know, with high certainty, if the patient is taking their medication as prescribed and on schedule. This paper gathers information to identify current technology to support integrated monitoring and control of therapeutic adherence
Followership and sustainability of school leadership for Science and Mathematics: A distributive perspective
Get PDFIn leadership-followership relationships, roles are exchangeable, portraying followers as co-constructors of school leadership processes. Leadership literature largely focuses on the effectiveness of leaders and neglects the role of followership. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of followership in the construction of leadership processes for secondary school Science and Mathematics. We used a narrative inquiry in the form of a single school case study purposefully selected for being a top performing school in Physical Sciences and Mathematics. Narratives were elicited from seven participants who included positional leaders and teachers. Follower role identities and the leader-follower trade (LFT) were used as conceptual frameworks. An active follower role identity enabled teachers to co-construct and sustain leadership processes for Science and Mathematics. Significant teaching experience, subject expertise and proven records of good results in learner attainments activated the identity. The teachers co-constructed and sustained leadership processes for Science and Mathematics through participative leadership, continuous teacher learning and classroom practice
Social Responsibility and Power I: J.T. van der Kemp’s Interventions For and on Behalf of the Khoikhoi on the Eastern Cape Frontier (1801 – 1806)
Get PDFIn a previous article, I have traced Van der Kemp’s link to the British anti-slavery network, argued that his position on the exploitation of the Khoi paralleled his views on slavery, and that his civil rights activism for and on behalf of the Khoi mirrored his anti-slavery advocacy (cf. Smit 2016b). In this article, I continue my analysis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century archive which Van der Kemp formed part of, and here focus on Van der Kemp’s interventions for and on behalf of the Khoi (1801 – 1806) and power. My hypothesis is that starting with Van der Kemp, the interventions of Christian missions vis-à-vis the governments and the frontier settler farmers, and later beyond the frontier, on behalf of indigenous people, were the manifestations of late eighteenth and nineteenth century ‘social responsibility’. As indicated in my topic, such taking up of ‘social responsibility’ includes the ‘power’ or more particularly, in Foucault’s terminology, the colonising ‘power effects’ of the missions on indigenous people. In this article I consecutively provide some background related to twentieth century, as well as late eighteenth and nineteenth century notions of ‘social responsibility’, Van der Kemp’s change of plans to not continue with mission work among the Xhosa but to switch to the Khoi, and his and his fellow missionary James Read’s interventions for and on behalf of the Khoi asserting their ‘freedom’ and their ‘civilisation’. For these focuses, I mainly draw on Van der Kemp’s correspondence from his extant South African texts. For ‘power’ or ‘power relations’ and ‘power effects’ in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I draw on the theoretical and discursive historical studies by Michel Foucault1
Transcending Solely Print-based Texts through Blogging – A Multimodal Approach
Get PDFStudents are often exposed solely to print-based texts as the primary sources of communication. In South Africa, English Additional Language (EAL) students struggle to engage conceptually with English-medium academic material and, in most cases, they transition to other forms of engagement such as imagery. This study from which this article derives explores the use of various modes of communication such as audio, imagery, and reading text in a scaffolded language that EAL students can better associate with. As literacies change to simultaneously incorporate new ways of communication, this paper examines the impact a blog could have on how EAL students understand text across a variety of different methods of communication. This study employs multimodality (Kress 2010). A case study design approach is used with a small sample of Extended Curriculum Programme first-year mechanics students and their lecturer at a South African university of technology. From the findings, the author reflects on mediating teaching and learning strategies to promote conceptual understanding of course material. Furthermore, the findings contribute to the debate that aims to find viable solutions for suitable teaching and learning practices to promote learner-centeredness in EAL contexts in higher education