Last week I attended the ICT in Higher Education Africa conference in Jo’burg. Some interesting points were raised. We were also shown how some of the tools out there can be used in a classroom environment and even for remote learning.

So I have been assigned the role of Senior System Engineer: Blended Learning at NMMU ICT Services. Wow, what a massive field it is! Luckily I wasn’t thrown into the deep end alone. Koshala Terblanche (System Engineer: Blended Learning) will be helping out in taming the beast from a technology/ICT point of view. Please keep in mind that this blog will look at Blended Learning from a technology point of view.

I am sure you all know how difficult it is to keep track of all the information you find on your specific topic out there. We all have different ways of storing the links to our favourite bits of information. One could add them to one's Favourites but if your machine had to crash, boom, all gone. Maybe even more importantly; how can I group my information and share it in a nice looking format with my colleagues or students?  

You probably already know that we already have a pretty amazing collaboration tool at the NMMU. Blogs, forums, wikis, shared documents, online calendars to name some of the functionality. SharePoint 2010 is indeed very powerful. Both our student and staff portals as well as their mobile versions run on custom developed SharePoint 2010 sites.