Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items

Global Citizen and the role of Digital Futures

17 September 2021 | Story Nitha Ramnath

Prof Francis Petersen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Free State, South Africa, invites us to rethink our relationship with the world in a series of ‘Courageous Conversations’ on the theme of ‘The Global Citizen’. Prof Petersen argues that COVID-19 has been a powerful ‘disruptor’ – it was a stark reminder of the need to rethink our identity, of where we belong, our ‘normative’ view of citizenship – if we want to secure long-term survival of our civilisation and the environments that support it.

Global Citizen and the role of Digital Futures – Monday, 27 September - 13:30 SAST / 12:30 BST

How we turn information into intelligence is the subject of SACC’s next ‘Courageous Conversation’ with University of the Free State Vice-Chancellor, Prof Francis Petersen, in his series debating ‘The Global Citizen’. “I believe the world needs multi-disciplinary solutions to its global problems. For this reason, I established the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures at the University of the Free State as part of my vision to infuse the natural and social sciences and the humanities with everything that digital brings to a multi-disciplinary approach in order to solve real-world problems through the power of big-data analysis,” says Prof Petersen.

Prof Philippe Burger, the UFS Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Poverty, Inequality, and Economic Development, together with Prof Katinka de Wet and Herkulaas Combrink, the interim co-directors of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures, will join Prof Petersen to discuss the value that such an approach can bring to finding solutions to real-world problems. They will also share information on some of the exciting projects of international relevance that they are working on. Agriculture and food security, medicine, and attitudes to issues such as, for example, vaccination, education, governance, and ethics are key foci of the centre.

Join us to find out how big-data analysis and a multi-disciplinary approach can transform understanding and deliver solutions to some of the challenges we face as citizens of the world.

To RSVP click here

The Global Citizen Courageous Conversations series

In partnership with the South African Chamber of Commerce based in the United Kingdom, the Global Citizen Courageous Conversations series that was launched on 26 May 2021, brings together powerful voices from public life, intellectuals, public interest and business leaders, academics, naturalists, religious leaders, astrophysicists, economists, ecologists, and others.

If you missed our previous Global Citizen Courageous Conversations, you can watch the replay on YouTube, or visit the South African Chamber of Commerce website for the recordings.

News Archive

Latest information technology employed to make learning in Disaster Management easy

2014-10-20

Prof Dusan Sakulski
Photo: Leonie Bolleurs

Live, colourful, interactive, real-time-calculated. This is how Prof Dusan Sakulski, researcher and lecturer from the UFS’s Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa (DiMTEC), describes his e-learning platform implemented in this department.

Rather than producing research that gathers dust somewhere in a cabinet, Prof Sakulski believes that research should be used to make life easier, not only for society, but also for his students.

This educational civil engineer, who is responsible for information technology implementation in disaster risk management, developed through his research several programs to optimise the three contact sessions DiMTEC students have to attend each year.

One of the initiatives implemented by Prof Sakulski and his daughter Teodora, was the recording, editing and compiling of theoretical lessons and making it available to students online. “Students then don’t have the excuse of missing a class. Furthermore, it allows them to rather focus on group work during contact sessions and to discuss problems they encountered with the work,” he says.

Students also have access to an early-warning system portal for the prediction of hazards, including droughts, floods, rain and temperature. In the disaster-risk environment, this program is very useful, not only for students, but also for practitioners working with this kind of data on a daily basis. The operational and educational application works in real time – with the click of a mouse students and practitioners have access to information on current weather conditions. Indicators for possible natural disasters are also built into this program. Truly a useful application when you are working in the field of disaster risk management.

Difficult and technical data are presented live, with information that is colourful, interactive, real-time-calculated and audible, thanks to embedded mathematical language. In this way, students can learn, memorise and understand their work better.

Back

Economic and Management Sciences

Education

Health Sciences

The Humanities

Law

Natural and Agricultural Sciences

Theology and Religion

Open Distance Learning

Business School

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept