Laura Czerniewicz

Laura Czerniewicz’s career in education has ranged from high school teaching in a Cape Flats' school in the 1980s, to teacher training and educational publishing in South Africa and Zimbabwe, before moving, in 2000, to UCT as Director of the Multimedia Education Group. Appointed as the first director of the Centre for Education Technology (CET) in 2005, Laura was behind UCT’s first educational technology policy and at the forefront of bringing technology more firmly into the classroom in a traditional university. In 2010, she was seconded to run OpenUCT, spearheading the open scholarship agenda, (including the UCT Open Access policy and repository ) and then mainstreaming the work into the university library. As the first director of the newly formed CILT, Laura took up her position in August 2014, relishing the fresh, space for engaging with issues of teaching and learning as the heart and focus of the enterprise . An NRF-rated researcher, Associate Professor Laura Czerniewicz has published widely, both formally and informally. Her research has focused on the technologically-mediated practices of students and staff and the changing higher education environment. She believes that research and practice are closer inter-linked and that there is “nothing as practical as a good theory”. While Laura maintains that her work in this field is made possible by a “high tolerance for ambiguity”, it is equally possible that her work is fuelled by an inability to be bored and a passion for interesting work. Underpinning this is a keen awareness of the extent to which the higher education environment is characterised by digitally-mediated learning, and a commitment to surfacing the expressions of inequality in emergent contexts. Laura’s work extends beyond the bounds of UCT. She is involved in policy work regionally and internationally, and is a regularly invited keynote and panellist presenter in South Africa and internationally as well as serving on the advisory boards of a variety of international educational and technology publications. - See more at: http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/about/laura-czerniewicz#sthash.QzcFOTMu.dpuf