The Department of Maritime Studies and Survival Centre (DMS and SC) recently threw open the doors to the Granger Bay campus for an informative Open Day session. Continue reading
Author Archives: Guest writer
Getting a taste for research
Delegates at the recent U6 Conference held on District Six Campus got a taste for the work of the African Centre for Herbal Research. Continue reading
Energising engineers
The DST-UNESCO Engineering Conference concluded three days of intensive discussions with a walk-about on the Bellville Campus. Continue reading
Sunshine on the open road
CPUT students and staff members will take part in this year’s Sasol Solar Car Challenge 2018, South Africa for the first time.
Held every second year, the competition sees teams from across the world design and build solar-powered vehicles to drive across South Africa in an eight day event.
Prof Graeme Oliver of the Mechanical Engineering Department has put together a team of 20 staff members and students to compete against the more than 20 local and international teams expected to participate.
Oliver initially signed CPUT up for the competition back in May, but only received confirmation of Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) funding at the end of June, leaving two months to put together the car.
The compressed time schedule meant using a design and manufacturing process that would be achievable in a limited amount of time which Oliver calls a great learning experience for everyone.
“Because this is our first time entering the Challenge there is a lot of extra learning to be done.
“As we are very new to this competition we are also happy to receive advice such as the input from our LiFePO4 battery pack fabricator, who is also sponsoring some small electrical components, on battery management and switching systems to protect our battery performance,” said Oliver.
Since the project is not integrated into a particular course or subject, students from Mechatronics, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering have volunteered to work on the team with the help of the TIA Adaptronics AMTL research unit based at CPUT.
The solar electronic car will be called CPUT Solar Flyer “because it looks a bit like a plane.”
The vehicle design will incorporate in-wheel hub motors and a covered space frame reinforced with composites for safety, with an-offset adjustable roof mounted solar array.
The solar array is assembled from commercially available panels and the hub motors are imported kits supplied by a local Cape Town supplier, with some additional design fabrication needed to mount them in motorcycle wheel rims with the in-wheel hydraulic disk brakes.
The 20 strong team is hard at work in the Adaptronics AMTL building, when teaching and learning schedules allow, but not all will travel to Pretoria for the actual road trip.
The team who do eventually make the journey will drive the car from Pretoria to Stellenbosch between 22 and 29 September, covering a set distance every day.
Written by Theresa Smith
Learning to look at the world through an African lens
The third seminar on decolonisation lived up to its theme as “a complex drama of words”.
Keynote speaker Dr Joel Modiri and respondent Asanda Ngoasheng engaged in a lively conversation around the concept of decolonising the university curriculum.
Modiri is a lecturer in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria and he shared his evolving philosophy of Azanian Jurisprudence.
“We still need in this country an alternative historical perspective,” said Modiri as he expounded on his experiment in theory building.
“Rather than asking what has changed since 1994 we should ask what has remained the same since 1652. What has remained consistent? We are still people upon whom the world acts, not people who act in the world,” he said.
Modiri wondered whether it was possible to ask a Eurocentric, neoliberal university to decolonise itself when this places the responsibility of change on the largely white professoriate who look at the world in a particular way.
“The decolonisation of the university is unthinkable outside of the decolonisation of South Africa itself. We are trying to decolonise at the wrong level and place, the university is a symptom of a problem. The real challenge is to decolonise South Africa,” was Modiri’s argument.
He believes that any attempt at change must deal with the idea of conquest and that reducing decolonisation to only an academic affair is not enough. “Decolonisation is a demand for reparation, it entails an endless fracturing of the world colonisation created,” he said.
While Ngoasheng, a lecturer in CPUT’s Media Department’s Journalism programme, applauded Modiri’s take on a new way of looking at the world predicated on philosophies espoused by African thought-leaders she questioned why he would dismiss the concept of intersectionality.
“Intersectionality is a theory developed by black African women and it I surprises me that the Azanian tradition does not include it when I know from my own life that my experience will differ from that of the black man, when I know that society will engage with me first based on my gender and then on my race,” said Ngoasheng.
For her the big challenge is how to begin the process of removing conditions that keep us unchanged.
“We can start by decolonising the curriculum. This is how we understand the South African curriculum as flawed. South Africa is a flawed subject and you cannot solve what you don’t understand. Academics are in the business of thinking and meaning making. This is what we need in order to decolonise the mind of the African child who has to do the actual decolonisation of society.
“Children who continue to learn in the colonised system will never learn to stand up and say ‘this is who I am and who I am is valued, even if my experience is not reflected in your textbook’,” said Ngoasheng.
*This conversation was the third seminar hosted at CPUT around the issue of decolonising the curriculum in higher education. The Fundani Centre of Higher Education, supported by the Impala Project (the Internationalisation and Modernisation Programme for Academics, Leaders and Administrations which forms part of the Erasmus+ Key Action2: Capacity Building in Higher Education programme, an European Union funded initiative) are spearheading this institutional project.
One of the major focus areas of the decolonisation project is on seeking cognitive justice and decentering Western knowledge through curriculum renewal activities.
Written by Theresa Smith
Powering up the Energy Institute
The recently held Industrial & Commercial Use of Energy Conference (ICUE) marked the changing of the guard at CPUT’s Energy Institute.
Started two decades ago by Prof Ernst Uken the Energy Institute was created as a platform to market research in energy to outside industry, like Eskom. When Prof Nico Beute brought the Domestic Use of Energy Conference (DUE) under the auspices of the Institute more researchers were attracted to the conference platform.
ICUE deals with research into the industrial applications of energy like power systems or mines while DUE concentrates on the smaller scale such as for home use or micro-grids.
Upon his retirement from CPUT Prof Philip Lloyd took over some of Uken’s Energy Institute duties and ran the conferences together with Beute.
Head of CPUT’s Centre for Distributed Power and Electronic Systems (CDPES) Prof Mohamed Tariq Khan pointed out that very recently though the Institute by itself oversaw no university students active in research.
“The three founding members were already retired and mostly serving in an advisory committee,” said Khan. He took over the running of the Institute in July this year, and by default the organising of the conferences.
“The Institute will now be supported by my very astute colleagues from the CDPES research and technical team. The CDPES is a large centre with over 80 graduate students in its Masters and Doctoral programme,” said Khan.
Senior lecturer and CDPES staffer Dr Khaled Aboalez, who sat on this year’s ICUE organising committee, said 34 papers were delivered at the conference and they are already thinking about how to expand international participation for next year.
“With the long history of these two conferences we will be able to invite more people, especially with the new conference management and the merging of the management of the CDPES and the Energy Institute under the leadership of Prof Khan.
“We do similar things but used to be isolated. Now with the new facilities and labs at CDPES we will be able to merge the experiences of the CDPES in application of power electronics and power system analysis with the scope of the Energy Institute for energy policies and energy economics. Both of the objectives will be unified for a more focused overview on different energy aspects, not only the technical but also policies and economic impact,” said Aboalez.
He said they were thinking of introducing a keynote address named after Lloyd in honour of the retired CPUT lecturer who passed away a week before the ICUE conference took place.
Engineer Andrew Kenny paid tribute to ex CPUT professor by delivering a paper written by Lloyd entitled “The Evolution of the UK Power Grid”, preceded by a warm description of a man who had a big impact on academic research into the use of energy in this country.
Using Gridwatch, the live monitoring website of the UK’s power grid, Lloyd had examined how that country had reduced its dependence on coal based power. His research pointed out that South Africa would only be able to do the same if it changed underlying conditions such as increasing the amount of power generated from alternate sources such as solar or wind.
Written by Theresa Smith
Academic scoops eLearning Award
Associate Professor Dr Eunice Ivala recently won an Award for Excellence in eLearning from the Global LearnTech (Congress and Awards).
Held in July at the Taj Lands End Hotel in Mumbai, India, the Congress honoured Ivala, who is CPUT’s Coordinator for Educational Technology: Centre for Innovative Educational Technology, for her research impact in changing individual’s practices and contribution to the field of Education.
In explaining why she was chosen by the Congress said “the position that you occupy in the fraternity is strategic and iconic. As a thinker and doer you are a role model and a believer in change”.
The Award consists of a trophy and a citation and the objective is to benchmark educational and learning practices.
CPUT did not nominate Ivala, the Congress chose her by assigning a global research cell constituted of researchers from different parts of the world to submit their own recommendations.
Ivala initially declined the invitation because it coincided with the 13th International Conference on e-Learning which she was organising as chairperson, but the Congress persisted. Her colleagues persuaded her of the importance of the Award so she left the CPUT conference in the hands of Daniela Gachago and Prof Johannes Cronje to travel to India.
“I went but my head was here, I kept on sending Daniela messages,” she remembered.
Ivala says now she is glad she went because it turned out to be an excellent networking opportunity to interact with educators from all walks of life who deal with digital education.
“It was an eye-opener to see how people go about establishing themselves in their own businesses and consult on strategies on e-Learning,” said Ivala.
This year’s Congress theme was Technology Roadmap for Education and in addition to collecting the award Ivala also delivered a talk on OERs (maybe write it out)at CPUT.
“Lots of people asked me to send them the presentation afterwards. It was interesting to see how many people are impressed by our work.
“It is a great recognition for CPUT on what we do because everything I write about is what we do here. This makes CPUT visible to the world,” said Ivala.
While she couldn’t take up the Congress’ offer to go share her work at an Indian higher education institution during this past visit, Ivala has been invited to sit on their Advisory Board for the 2019 World Education Congress and will attend their next conference.
Written by Theresa Smith
Reading students are winning students
In an effort to encourage students to read more the Faculty of Applied Sciences recently hosted their second Reading Quiz.
Nine teams of students from different departments competed against each other to establish a winning team from District Six Campus and Bellville Campus respectively. Language Coordinator for the Faculty of Applied Sciences Dr Ignatius Ticha served as quiz master on the District Six Campus while language practitioner Dmitri Jegels was quiz master on the Bellville campus for round one and the semi-finals on Bellville.
The two teams – Food Technology from Bellville and Environmental Management from District Six – then competed against each other in a fun-filled quiz in Cape Town.
The all-female blue team from Food Technology eventually won the day over the mixed green team from Environmental Management, who took it in good spirits. The winning team won a voucher worth R10 000 which they split amongst the team members while the runners up split a voucher of R5 000. All participants also received a goody bag and certificate.
Ticha said the quiz was started to encourage a culture of reading amongst their students and boost the use of Institutional resources.
“Really, it is to get them read with understanding.”.
Students were encouraged to use the PressReader digital database on the CPUT website to access particular newspapers over a specific period of time and quiz questions drew from the stories they would have read.
Addressing the students before the quiz started Ticha encouraged them to make better and more use of PressReader to not only arm themselves with knowledge about their own world but also improve their reading skills to improve their learning.
“All these newspapers are available on PressReader and we got the sense that the CPUT community just doesn’t use it. Dr Lynn Kleinveld from the Library assisted us with the quiz questions,” said Ticha.
Ticha hopes to use suggestions made by students to improve next year’s quiz and he challenged other CPUT campuses and departments to start their own quizzes in the hope of one day seeing students compete against each other across faculties.
The students in the winning blue team are: Alleluia Mukeshimana, Nanilethu Ngcukayitobi, Tina Bebe, Sesethu Ntoyabo and Asiphe Zayedwa.
Written by Theresa Smith
Threading together teaching and learning
The Clothing and Textile Department used their recent Open Day to not only reach potential new students, but teach existing students a valuable lesson.
Business and Marketing lecturer Dr Sweta Patnaik set about 150 first year and second year students the marketing project of helping run the Open Day. Not only did the students have to be based at particular work spaces but they had to brush up on their knowledge about their chosen stations. They also had to create videos related to the Open Day, including their own feedback of the event.
Close to 250 leaners from six different local schools as well as a few teenagers accompanied by their parents were shown around the seven work spaces where students learn about pattern making or computer aided design in the Clothing and Textile Department. They were also shown the Technology Station Clothing and Textiles next door.
Students demonstrated techniques and concepts to learners and encouraged them to ask questions.
This is the tenth annual Clothing and Textile Department Open Day and this year they decided to incorporate a station about career options.
The Education, Training and Development Practices Seta was on hand to explain their bursary scheme which is firstly aimed at people who study education but also provides opportunities in other fields.
“The Departmental Open Day is mainly focused on increasing student intake and a qualitative upliftment of incoming students.
“It is also a mode of reaching out to people who probably aren’t aware of the Department. I am really positive about the uptake this year seeing as we had a career fair for the first time. We will also post student videos on social networking sites to increase and enhance our reach,” said Patnaik.
Written by Theresa Smith
Making the case for clean soil
Extended Curriculum Programme coordinator for the Environmental Management programme Dr Elie Itoba Tombo can’t tell what he likes more, teaching or research.
He especially loves the challenge of training previously disadvantaged students to embrace science: “Empowering them through the vocation of science to be scientists or researchers, that is what I am passionate about,” says Tombo.
The lecturer speaks proudly of supervising one of his earliest pupils, from when he started teaching at CPUT in 2007, to complete his Master’s degree earlier his year: “It is quite encouraging to see my passion is paying off.”
His research into cassava plants though fascinates him in equal measure.
Originally from Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo where he graduated with a BSc in Physical Geography before moving to Cape Town in 2000, Tombo grew up with cassava as a staple food. Today it is still a staple food source for much of Western and Central Africa as well as a source of bio-energy research in Asia and South America.
“Why can’t we investigate such a crop and see if we can establish it here in this country,” was the question that started his research line. Today his research is rare – he looks at the effect of the plant on the environment, rather than the possible uses of the plant.
Tombo’s recent PhD thesis “Cyanogen and Mycotoxin reduction for cassava (manihotesculata crantz) in cultivated soil” looked at identifying a novel isolate that could help decompose cassava in a safer way.
Previous studies have shown that decomposing cassava tubers deposits toxic hydrogen cyanide into soil and he investigated an environmentally benign approach to long term remediation of soil. He wanted to know whether introducing a particular microorganism into the soil would mitigate or reduce the presence of the toxic compound (hydrogen cyanide).
He discovered a particular fungi (Cunninghamamella bertholletiae) that did resist and degrade the cyanide as well as produce a mycotoxin.
“Basically we also assessed the pathogenicity of that fungi on the soil biota or micro-organisms.”
Tombo also investigated what green approach could be used to keep the mycotoxin in check, figuring out that the juice of a particular carnivorous plant, nepentheses mirabiles, fulfilled this function.
Next he wants to investigate how to advocate for the implementation or establishment of genetically modified cassava to reduce the amount of hydrogen cyanide in the environment in general.
“The second thing would be to assess the removal of cyanide from a cassava decomposing environment. This is part of a project we have in mind to get to a rehabilitation or reduction method on a big scale to help people in remote areas.
“A third research line would be to investigate possible plants with similar properties such as the carnivorous plant we used in order to be able to use plants in the remediation or control process,” said Tombo.
FOOD SOURCE: The Cassava tuber.
Written by Theresa Smith