7 Students were told, at the beginning of a lecture, that the tool was being used to help them develop their understanding of a particular mathematical concept and to give them an opportunity to practice that concept. In this way, students were made aware of the potential role ICT could play in their learning. Production access refers to the degree to which a user can create products related to their needs. While the ICT tools used in this study gave students the freedom to experiment by using their own examples as inputs, this freedom was limited to a particular class problem; for example, the ICT tools used could only solve a system of three linear equations in three unknowns. A student curious about other systems of linear equations would have to engage with alternate resources, such as the internet, library, peers, and the lecturer. While this is acknowledged as a limitation of the ICT tools used, production access did not emerge as a theme in the data. This may be related to the ICT competence of the participants and suggests a line of enquiry for future research. Institutional access refers to the availability of ICT vendors within a potential user’s geographic and social radius. It is the location, both geographically and socially, of these vendors that give shape and structure to how physical access to ICT is controlled, regulated and policed. Physical access in Wilson’s (2004) understanding is either blocked or facilitated depending on a potential user’s geographic and social proximity to an ICT vendor. For example, ICT located at a university local area network (LAN) (vendor) may only be accessible to members of the university community. Even though the institution’s geographic distance may be accessible to the general public, for those who are not members of the University, it is outside their social radius. Further, depending on structures within the University, membership does not necessarily translate into ICT use. In this study, by virtue of their status as students of UKZN, students could be assumed to have institutional access. However, it was this assumption that the gathered data challenged. Political access is concerned with a potential ICT user’s participation in the process of determining how best to tailor ICT to the user’s needs. Political access is about involving the potential user in all aspects surrounding the use and governance of ICT. While the students were not involved in the choice of ICT tools, the nature of this study aimed to hear their voice which, to a degree, underlies the spirit of political access.
METHODOLOGY During 2008, Pietermaritzburg students in the Foundation programme were exposed to a number of ICT augmented classes. These included: PowerPoint slideshows, which used animation and graphics to introduce students to concepts associated with types of sets and types of real numbers; Venn diagram software which allows visual representation of union, intersection and complement, etc; and a Gauss Tutor, developed on Excel, on which students check their calculations by providing feedback after each row in the Gauss Reduction Table is populated, and which provides clues for executing the algorithm. These technology infused classes and tasks were augmented by personal email correspondence from the lecturer. While many of these interventions may seem simple, the nature of disadvantage experienced by many of the students meant that most were unfamiliar with computer use. Students were trained during lectures, in groups of four to six, to use the software. Through the Foundation programme’s computer literacy sessions, students were taught to operate an email system. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were carried out with students who had volunteered to participate in the larger study from which this paper arises. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and imported into Nvivo
The Journal of Independent Teaching and Learning - Volume 5 / 2010