Pedagogical memory and the space of the postcolonial classroom : reading Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by interrogating a classic text of African women’s writing, Tsitsi Dangaremnga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive application of the novel’s concerns to the contexts in which it is often taught, that of today’s postcolonial classrooms. The article seeks to place Dangarembga’s novel in the context of its present moment, contemporary South Africa – that of the present critic’s site of practice, both pedagogical and scholarly, and that of many of this article’s readers. This present moment, in turn, is made up the many sites, successive and simultaneous, in which the novel’s work of memory is being re-activated in the minds of students as readers and writers. Via a dialogue between the textual past and the pedagogical present, one which is often subject to critical amnesia, the article seeks to inaugurate a debate on the nature of pedagogical memory in the space of the postcolonial university or high school literature classroom.http://www.informaworld.com/RSCRhb2013gv201

Visualizing the Shadows of Information

Three-dimensional visualization facilitates human perception, imagination, and reasoning based on computer-represented knowledge. Since human imagination and reasoning is based on 3D-shapes, the presentation and validation of knowledge is most efficiently performed with the aid of geometric shapes. Thus, we propose the use of visualization methods in knowledge management, supporting qualitative information by quantitative data that is simpler to explore. We support our thesis by a case study modeling the ontology of a human heart. This work connects the areas of human knowledge as philosophical ontology and knowledge management as ontology in artificial intelligence

VES: VIRTUAL ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY SYSTEM

The objective of the VES project is the research and development of innovative techniques and solutions for the achievement of a virtual examination environment in echocardiography. One crucial point is the development of realistic geometric models representing the diseased human heart. For this purpose we decided to use real echocardiography findings as a starting position. The modelling and visualisation of a human heart based on findings requires initially the elaboration of an ontological framework for echocardiography findings and heart-beat descriptions at the medical and at the geometrical level. In this paper we present our work on ontologies and how geometric models can be derived from them. We go on to explain how these techniques can be combined to achieve a virtual examination environment. In this way we show that VES serves as a case study for ontology based visualisation