Browsing by Author "Chivuno-Kuria, Shilumbe"

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    Determining requirements within an indigenous knowledge system of African rural communities.
    (SAICSIT, 2010) Chivuno-Kuria, Shilumbe; Kapuire, Gereon Koch; Bidwell, Nicola J.; Winschiers-Theophilus, Heike
    Eliciting and analyzing requirements within knowledge systems, which fundamentally differ so far from technology supported systems represent particular challenges. African rural communities’ life is deeply rooted in an African Indigenous knowledge system manifested in their practices such as Traditional Medicine. We describe our endeavors to elicit requirements to design a system to support the accumulation and sharing of traditional local knowledge within two rural Herero communities in Namibia. We show how our method addressed various challenges in eliciting and depicting intangible principles arising because African communities do not dichotomize theoretical and practical know-how or privilege a science of abstraction and generalization. Ethnography provided insights into etiology, or causal interrelationships between social values, spiritual elements and everyday life. Participatory methods, involving youth and elders, revealed nuances in social relations and pedagogy pertinent to the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation. Researcher and participant-recorded audio-visual media revealed that interactions prioritize speech, gesture and bodily interaction, above visual context. Analysis of the performed and narrated structures reveal some of the ways that people tacitly transfer bodily and felt-experiences and temporal patterns in storytelling. Experiments using digital and paperbased media, in situ rurally showed the ways that people in rural settings encounter and learn within their everyday experiences of the land. These analyses also demonstrate that own ontological and representational biases can constrain eliciting local meanings and analyzing transformations in meaning as we introduce media. Reflections on our method are of value to others who need to elicit requirements in communities whose literacy, social and spiritual logic and values profoundly differ from those in the knowledge systems that typify ICT design.
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    Towards appropriate user interface design preserving rural African communication practices.
    (IKTC, 2011) Chivuno-Kuria, Shilumbe
    Poster presentation: The aim of this research project is to determine current communication structures and discourse practices of listeners in a selected rural community.
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    Towards appropriate user interface design preserving rural African communication practices: Listeners' roles in face to face communication.
    (2013) Chivuno-Kuria, Shilumbe
    This mini-thesis examines different socio-cultural norms and communication behaviours of indigenous communities. In spite of existing Information Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructural challenges, the software solutions that have been designed for rural communities have been a major concern. In this thesis, qualitative methodologies were used with deliberate sampling of two village populations to investigate verbal and non verbal behaviour. In order to design appropriate interfaces for Indigenous Knowledge Management systems required to capture, store and retrieve local information, the input from target community members, regardless of their levels of formal literacy education, has to be explored. The fact that in those communities, communication takes place primarily through oral transmission also has to be considered. Oral communication involves both narrators and listeners who engage in an interactive correspondence including verbal and non verbal communication during storytelling. Many researchers focus on narrators but in this thesis, we will concentrate on listeners’ contributions during interpersonal communications in rural communities. Non verbal communication such as gestures are prevalent in traditional oral African communities and these can offer rich information that can be infused in interface designs for human computer interaction. The aim of this mini-thesis is to identify general socio-cultural norms, communication behaviour such as non-verbal communication structures (gestures) including general verbal utterances of the rural Otjiherero speaking people to provide a basis for subsequent use in the design of local systems. The findings in this thesis were that gestures thought to be universal were specific to the rural members. It was also found that there were specific verbal and non verbal gestures that were observed. This Thesis recommends more research be done in the areas of the correlation between gesture and verbal communication.