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The Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS) and the UFS will host an Africa Day Webinar on the topic, Reflections on Africa amidst Covid-19, to be delivered by Prof. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, renowned decolonial scholar. The title of his lecture is Revisiting the African idea of Africa during the moment of Covid-19 pandemic.
The crisis delivered by Coronavirus and Covid-19 invites Africans to rethink and even unthink the long-standing dependency on Europe and North America for help. What has dawned on Africa is the equally long-standing aspiration of self-reliance. What is emerging is a new African idea of Africa which takes responsibility for its own challenges. This new African idea of Africa challenges the Mudimbean idea of Africa embodied in the colonial library.
Thus this presentation reassesses how Africa has relied on its own historical experience, its own knowledge, and own people to confront Covid-19. What is of interest here is the proverbial wisdom of necessity being the source of invention. The presentation brings to the fore the decolonial turn as it gestures beyond crisis into post-Covid-19 world order. It ends with a call for decolonial love founded on new ethics of living together and new economies of care.
Bio of Prof Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatshen
Date: Tuesday, 26 May, 2020
Time: 14:00
Duration: 90 min max (45 min talk, 45 min Q&A)
The webinar can be accessed via one of the following links:
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Laptop in, paper out
2013-07-31
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Prof Pieter Nel gives advice to students.
Photo: Johan Roux
31 July 2013 |
The first major steps to a paperless lecture environment for the School of Medicine were taken in July 2013 with the presentation of laptops to all first-year- medical students.
The aim is to have the entire undergraduate medical programme computer-driven within a few years and to get rid of paper in the classroom.
Prof Pieter Nel, Programme Director: Health Sciences at the school in the Faculty of Health Sciences, said, “As far as we know, this action is the first of its kind in any medical school in South Africa whereby an entire class are supplied with computers for this purpose. We also have no knowledge of anything similar in any programme within any other faculty at any university in South Africa.”
All first-year medical students received laptops. The UFS is facilitating the process to provide students with computer access via their own laptops. “The reason for this is that the undergraduate health-sciences programme will be totally computerised from now on. Students will therefore utilise their laptops in all their contact sessions.”
The entire building where teaching takes place is equipped with Wi-Fi. The students buy the laptops at a much lower cost than the commercial price.
Prof Nel said the printing costs of study material during a student’s undergraduate study years can amount to as much as R5 000.
In future, first-year students will receive laptops, computerising the entire undergraduate health-sciences programme within a few years, Prof Nel said.
During the presentation of the first laptops, Prof Gert van Zyl, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, referred to this action as a big step forward in modernising the undergraduate training of medical students in the faculty.