Day Report 8th of june 2001: The Third Day

It’s 07:00 a.m again when we get our wake-up call for today. The official parts of this friday are a visit to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in the morning and a visit to th University of Pretoria in the afternoon. Between the two official visits, we would spend some time at the shopping centre at Hatfield, but the busdriver felt the urge to bring us to Brooklyn Mall instead.

CSIR

The CSIR is basically the South African counterpart of the Dutch research institute TNO. They conduct research in collaboration with the government and industry, but CSIR also does research on their own. The council was founded in 1948 by the South African government to stimulate innovation and development in South Africa.

We were welcomed by Jerry and Ella at the CSIR building. At the moment the building was under construction, so we had to be careful not to get paint on our suits. After a nice cup of instant coffee Jerry welcomed us by introducing the CSIR and it’s activities to us in a presentation. We introduced ourselves as well in a short presentation, which was followed by a lecture on a model of the development process used by the CSIR to place their research in a social context and determine what should be worked on in the future. This was followed by a presentation of the proceedings of a conference about E-law, which was mainly focused on legislation involved with electronic commerce. After a short break we learned statistical facts about the development of the South African people in internet connectivity and forms of electronic commerce.

The visit of the CSIR was part of this study tour mainly because of these presentation of their research on e-commerce and application of IT in South African businesses, but also because the CSIR could contribute to our analysis of the higher education sector. The CSIR conducts research, just like universities, so they might be facing the same challenges we found for universities in their research activities. We learned it is indeed very hard to recruit researchers and that the CSIR has solved this problem by forming a strategic alliance with the University of Pretoria.

The people of the CSIR were kind enough to offer us some sandwiches for lunch. Thanks to this kindness we didn’t have to starve ourselves to death like we did yesterday.

Early Afternoon

We spent the fist part of the afternoon at the Brooklyn Mall, mainly because the busdriver drove us there. We had planned to go to the shopping centre at Hatfield, but apparently that was not ment to be. Maybe we pissed the driver off a little when we remodeled the back of the bus into a huge walk-in closet.

The shops of Brooklyn Mall were similar to any shopping centre you would find in a large European city; lots of gift shops with much too expensive gifts, trendy fashion shops, a closed down Internet Cafe and of course a miniature golf course. Our time there was quite agreeable, and some of us got the chance to shop for some snacks and supplies, just in case we run out of lunchtime again in the near future.

University of Pretoria

The University of Pretoria is a very large university when compared to the University of Twente. About 26.000 on-campus students are enrolled at the UP, and there is an equally large number of off-campus students. We visited the Telematics Education faculty.

Once we arrived at the University of Pretoria Walter guided us around the campus to the specific building in which we had an appointment for the afternoon. We were showed how the faculty of Telematic Learning were active in distance learning and how they were providing education for people in rural areas. We learned that the University of Pretoria has developed their ‘Flexible Learning’ system even further than we had imagined when writing our preliminary report. We were quite astonished to hear that the University of Pretoria currently has about 70 learning centres in rural areas to provide education to the people who can’t or won’t leave their rural enviroment to recieve higher education. The flexible learning system is their way of dealing with the challenge of the large number of people unable to attend a college because of geographical and social limitations.

We also saw a few presentations on software products currently available or under development by the people of the faculty of Telematic learning.

Evening

After our visit of the University of Pretoria we drove to Menlyn Shopping Centre. It is apparently one of the biggest shopping centres in the area, but, according to Walter, all we had to do was remember our entrance number and we would be allright. We split up to explore the mall. In some unexplainable way most of us ended up in the same internet-cafe, though. We had dinner at Mug & Beans, a coffee shop which provides for a good restaurant in the evening. The food was quite nice, just as the people there. For some reason a guy sitting near us with his wife and daughter (presumably) offered us all a nice shooter. Apparently he wanted to welcome us in the country by showing us this form of hospitality. After our meal we tried to have some fun while waiting for the start of our planned IMAX movie. Marinus used this time to buy a football and kick it off of the large outside balkony of the shopping-centre, a very enjoyable sight.

The IMAX movie was about the Serengeti desert and the creatures that lived there. Seeing the animals on the big screen was impressive, but not as impressive as seeing them in real life like we did the past couple of days.

After the movie some of us went for a drink and others were occupied trying to win a new football in the arcade hall. Armed with our new football we head home to prepare for a few days in Pilanesberg.

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