Putting graduate qualities to work
by Vincent Ciccarello
A graduate demonstrates international perspectives as a professional and as a citizen – it’s number seven of UniSA’s Graduate Qualities but also the introduction to this story.
Dr Hannah Slay, who completed her PhD in augmented reality in the
School of Computer and Information Science in 2005, is the first
postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Computer Science
at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
Since July of that year she has been working on a range of research
projects revolving around bringing information and communication
technology (ICT) and e-commerce to rural African communities.
Earlier this year, she was responsible for arranging a donation of 40 computers from UniSA for the community-based Grahamstown Schools and Dwesa Projects in South Africa. The projects broadly support schools and marginalised communities to source ICT equipment, to provide training and technical assistance and to improve computer literacy.
"Typically, schools in the Eastern Cape have very little ICT infrastructure – maybe a Pentium 1 or 2 in the school office at the best," Dr Slay said. "A problem with these old computers is that they can’t cope with the demands of newer operating systems and software. So what we’re doing is using four of the UniSA computers per school to create a distributed server, and connecting the old computers as thin clients. This is a very cost-effective way of creating labs."
Dr Slay said that when she first arrived in South Africa, she was amazed by the difference between "the immaculate private schools and the impoverished township/rural schools.
"Like most marginalised communities, Dwesa suffers from major infrastructure problems including limited availability of electricity, tele-communications infrastructure and under-funded, under-equipped and under-staffed schools. Life in the community itself is equally as hard, as none of the houses have running water or electricity and most people are subsistence farmers.
"Personally I’ve come to the realisation how lucky we are in the developed world - we take so many things for granted that would be a dream for the people here in South Africa.
"From an academic side, I’ve also had a brief glimpse at how we can combine the fields of development and computer science to actually help improve people’s ways of life."
Shipping of the computers was jointly sponsored by the Centres of
Excellence at Rhodes University and University of
Fort Hare.