Conference Papers and Presentations

A keynote address by Catherine Ngugi at the Open Learning Conference 2009 in Nottingham, UK, November 2009. The focus of this address was that OER presents an opportunity to overhaul how we think about and practice higher education - and how education as a collaborative endeavour - a cornerstone of the OER movement - is far more likely to result in success than going it alone. The video presentation can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0HyeN130gc.

Higher Education Institutions in Africa increasingly find themselves trapped in an ineluctable impasse: To remain relevant they must satisfy the diverse and often contradictory demands of various stakeholders while doing so with severe limitations to their budgets and other resources.

Presentation by Neil Butcher, OER Africa Strategist, at the 2nd National Health Sciences Education Conference in Cape Town, South Africa on the 3rd July 2009.

The Key Note covers a brief history of higher education in Africa; the impact of funding on the purpose of education; the debates about the purpose of higher education within the global knowledge economy; and the possible role within all of this of OER Africa and of Open Educational Resources.

Presentation on an Institutional Policy Review by OER Africa to the Kenya Methodist University, Meru, Kenya, 27th January 2010.

OER in Africa: A Sea Change? A Keynote Address at the OpenEd 2009: Crossing the Chasm. This is a keynote address made by OER Africa Project Director Catherine Ngugi at the Open Education Conference: Crossing the Chasm held at the Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from the 12 - 14 August 2009. The video presentation can be viewed at http://openedconference.org/archives/1030. This is a 60 minute video, you can skip the first 11 minutes of the conference introduction and welcome address. The keynote focuses on how higher education has evolved on the African continent over the past three or four decades and the relevance of OER Africa and of Open Educational Resources, within this context.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a more comprehensive analysis of the impact of climate variables, technology and crop prices on crop yield and on crop acreage in the US using county-specific, historical data for 1977-2007. Specifically, we estimate the yield responses of corn, soybeans and wheat to output prices and to changes in climate and technology over time. We use instrumental variable regression methods to control for endogeneity of prices and county specific fixed effects to control for unobserved location specific effects on yield. We also examine the price responsiveness of total cropland and the own and cross-price elasticities of crop-specific acreage while controlling for climate and other socio-economic factors. Since our empirical framework includes lagged dependent variables and endogenous variables such as crop price, we use the dynamic panel GMM estimation method. We explore the implication of future climate change as projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2001) for crop yields based on our estimated coefficients on climate variables. The main contributions of this study are to examine the impact of climate variables on crop yield and acreage while controlling for a number of other variables using panel data methods. We also provide updated estimates of various price elasticites and productivity growth trends that are critical to examining the extent to which rising crop yields can mitigate the food vs fuel competition for land and the extensive and intensive margin changes likely as crop prices increase.

Risk classification of livestock farms can help stakeholders design and implement risk management measures according to the possessed risk. Our goal is to examine how differently pig farms may contribute to the societal costs of an animal disease outbreak, how valuable this information is to different stakeholders, and how it can be used to target risk management measures. We show that the costs of an outbreak starting from a certain farm can be quantified for the entire sector using bio-economic models. In further studies, this quantified risk can be differentiated so that farms and slaughterhouses internalise the full cost of risk in production decisions and inhibit animal densities, animal contact structures or other characteristics which pose a threat to the sector. Potential benefits due to risk classification could be received by society and producers, and in the long run also by consumers.

During three-hundred-year history of the market economy, the main sources of wealth creation have changed from the natural resources (mainly land and relatively unskilled labor with the exception of the master craftsman), tangible material assets (buildings, machinery and equipment, funds) to intangible assets (knowledge and information of all types) that may be contained in the people, organizations, or physical resources. In the later period of the twentieth century, science has acquired the features of direct production force. The term direct implies that unlike the relationship which existed between science and production in the IXX century, where scientific advances was incorporated through the physical labor in the tools, which, in turn, created new value through the physical labor, the relationship between science and production has become all direct, immediate, because the scientific advances allowed the funds to be produced with less labor and allowed funds itself to become "smarter" and as such to require less human intervention and human physical labor in the final production process. As a result, the need for physical labor continuously declined with time, and the application of labor is moved from direct production to processes of preparing and organizing production. Also, a large part of today's knowledge that is used in production is not embodied in machinery, and the effects of this are immense

This paper addresses the question: how do mathematics teachers make meaning from curriculum statements in relation to their teaching practices. We report on a teacher development activity in which teachers mapped test items from an international test against the national curriculum statement in mathematics. About 50 mathematics teachers across Grades 3-9 worked in small groups with a graduate student or staff member as a group leader. Drawing on focus group interviews with the teachers and the group leaders we show that the activity focused the teachers on the relationships between the intended curriculum and their teaching, i.e. the enacted curriculum, in four areas: content coverage; cognitive challenge; developing meaning for the assessment standards; and sequence and progression. We argue that the activity illuminates ways in which international tests can provide a medium for teacher growth rather than teacher denigration and alienation.

In this paper, I illuminate the notion of mathematics for teaching (its matter) and argue that it matters (it is important), particularly for mathematics teacher education. Two examples from studies of mathematics classrooms in South Africa are described, and used to illustrate what mathematics teachers use, or need to use, and how they use it in their practice: in other words, the substance of their mathematical work. Similarities and differences across these examples, in turn, illuminate the notion of mathematics for teaching, enabling a return to, and critical reflection on, mathematics teacher education.

Paper submitted and presented as part of the Open Ed 2010 Conference