Browsing by Subject "transparency"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Open Access
    A Blockchain-enabled System to enhance Food Traceability in Local Food Supply Chains (FSCs) suitable for Small Co-operatives in South Africa
    (2021) Kanjere, Julian; Georg, Co-Pierre
    Food is vital to human life. Therefore, ensuring its safety as it moves from producer to consumer in food supply chains (FSCs) is essential. This can be achieved through the use of food traceability technology which enables track and trace of produce within a FSC. Recently, blockchain technology (BCT) has shown great potential to enhance traceability in FSCs, owing to its ability to securely store data in a decentralised and tamper-evident manner. However, it appears that research on blockchain-enabled food traceability exists primarily within the context of large FSCs, whilst scarce for local FSCs in which traceability is often an inefficient and manual process. Given this background, this exploratory research is carried out, to investigate whether a blockchain-enabled system can be used to improve traceability in local FSCs. To do this, we (i) collaborate with Oranjezicht City Farm Market (OZCFM) - a farmers market in Cape Town, the smallholder farmers that supply OZCFM with fresh local produce and the OZCFM patrons that purchase the produce; (ii) map out the local FSC by conducting observations and running surveys with the aforementioned actors; (iii) design, develop and pilot FoodPrint - a web based and blockchain-enabled food traceability application. During the pilot within the OZCFM-related local FSC, FoodPrint is used to capture data on the harvest, transportation and storage of produce; and reveal produce provenance at destination by scanning of supplier-produce specific quick response (QR) codes. We find that FoodPrint provides tamper-evident traceability and authentic transparency of produce related data to the local FSC actors. Further, we note that scanning a FoodPrint QR code for produce provenance does not enhance the consumers trust of the local FSC, as it pre-exists. This implies that local FSCs with existing and functional trust mechanisms do not benefit from trust-enhancing mechanisms such as blockchain-enabled traceability. Future work may consider data privacy in FSCs and automating FSC data entry to reduce the risk of fraud.
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    Open Access
    TEDI 2 Week 4 - Cultivating Positive Change
    (2019-06-01) Swift, Odette; Kuhn, Tara
    In this video, Odette Swift and Tara Kuhn, happily share three levels of positive change that educators should focus on – personal, professional and systemic. They call on teachers to reflect on their own areas of strengths and weaknesses. They counsel teachers to constantly reflect on their attitudes towards deaf learners and their abilities and provide them with the best learning opportunities because it is their right to receive quality education. Reflecting on these and keeping abreast with what is happening in the area of deaf education internationally, they say, will help teachers think of how they can change or maximise these for the better. This is video lecture 8/8 of week 4 of the course: Educating Deaf Children: Becoming an Empowered Teacher.
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    Open Access
    Weathering wikis: net-based learning meets political science in a South African university
    (Elsevier Ltd., 2007) Tony Carr; Morrison, Andrew; Cox, Glenda; Deacon, Andrew
    Wikis represent flexible tools functioning as open-ended environments for collaboration while also offering process and group writing support. Here we focus on a project to innovate the use of wikis for collaborative writing within student groups in a final-year undergraduate political science course. The primary questions guiding our research were in what ways could wikis assist collaborative learning in an undergraduate course in political science and how we could support educators' in the effective use of wikis? Curiously, wikis may serve as a mediating artifact for collaborative writing even among students who are reluctant to post online drafts. The paper raises questions concerning the nature and limits of lecturer and tutor power to deliver transformative educational innovations in relation to the capacity of students to embrace, comply with, or resist such innovation. In analysing the negotiation of the use of wikis in the course by and among the lecturer, tutors, and students, we draw on two principles in activity theory, which Yrjo Engestrom argued are central to his model of expansive learning: multi-voicedness and contradictions [Engestrom, Yrjo. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit; Engestrom, Yrjo. (2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work 14(1), 133–156.]. We add a third principle, transparency, to more fully capture what we observed.