Handing over ownership of schools to learners

Education is not only about the interaction that happens in class between the learner and the teacher, but also about producing a holistic citizen. This can be achieved none other than through a constructivist approach to learning. Constructivism is a theory that says that people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences. In the classroom constructivism usually means encouraging students to use active techniques such as experiments and real world problem-solving to create more knowledge. This research is about taking a business approach to the management of schools through adopting technology and a constructivist approach. Learners are encouraged to participate in the management of their schools. They participate in the management of the state of the infrastructure, availability of resources, discipline, maintenance of school grounds, etc. They report on these management issues to a central database which can be accessed by school inspectors in the Department of Basic Education (DBE) for decisionmaking. This gives them a sense of ownership, grooms responsible citizens and gives them a sense of loyalty to their schools. This technology is based on integrating the Mobicents platform, Ushahidi platform and cell phone technology. The learners take photos of management-related events that require improvement in their schools, such as the poor state of infrastructure, lack of resources, unhygienic state of facilities, incidences of indiscipline, poor maintenance of grounds, etc. using their cell phones. These photos are forwarded to the Ushahidi server for access by school inspectors in the DBE. The Ushahidi is a crowd sourcing platform that uses social media and mobile communications to collect information which is then placed on Google Maps to give a visual picture of the state of affairs. This research develops the client software that enables communication with the Ushahidi server for the information to be made available to DBE inspectors. For anonymity and removal of cell phone numbers, a CSIR server acts as a proxy for the content to and from the learner