In the last 20 years, the South African higher education has changed significantly, influenced by global trends national development goals and pressure from local educational imperatives, in the context of a digitally networked world. Shifts in technology enhanced pedagogical practices and in discourses around information and communication technologies (ICTs) have had varying degrees of influence in higher education. This paper takes a rearview of a 20‐year journey of technology enhanced learning in South African higher education. An analysis of literature view is presented chronologically in four phases: phase 1 (1996–2000), phase 2 (2001–05), phase 3 (2006–10) and phase 4 (2011–16). In phase 1 technology was used predominantly for drill and practice, computer‐aided instruction, with growing consciousness of the digital divide. In phase 2 institutions primarily focused on building ICT infrastructure, democratizing information, policy development and research; they sought to compare the effectiveness of teaching with or without technology. During phase 3 institutions began to include ICTs in their strategic directions, digital divide debates focused on epistemological access, and they also began to conduct research with a pedagogical agenda. In phase 4 mobile learning and social media came to the fore. The research agenda shifted from whether students would use technology to how to exploit what students already use to transform teaching and learning practices. The paper concludes that South Africa's higher education institutions have moved from being solely responsible for both their own relatively poor ICT infrastructure and education provision to cloud‐based ICT infrastructure with “unlimited” educational resources that are freely, openly and easily available within and beyond the institution. Although mobile and social media are more evident now than ever before, teaching and learning practice in South African higher education remains largely unchanged.

Although there is an increasing use of emerging technologies (ETs) in higher education internationally and in South Africa in particular, there is little evidence that their use is transforming teaching and learning practice. Anecdotal evidence shows that there is a dichotomy between the technologies supported and used in higher education institutions (HEIs) on one hand, and technologies owned and predominately in use among students. Thus, the gulf between technologies supported and used for teaching and the technologies used by students for learning has created pressure for educators to "play catch-up," resulting in a continuum of pedagogically ineffective to effective uses of ETs. This paper argues that pedagogically sound uses of ETs leverage the broader context of existing practices (cultural-historical context) to design learning activities that transform both the teaching and learning practices. The paper draws data from a national survey on uses of ETs among educators in higher education to propose a pedagogical model of use that has the potential to transform practice.

One of the challenges facing education systems in general and the South African education system in particular is how to understand ways that teachers change from nonusers of technologies to becoming transformative teachers with technology. Despite numerous initiatives, not limited to training, workshops and so forth, to bring about sustained and wide-spread teacher change, transmission/delivery-based pedagogies and chalk-and-talk methods continue to dominate. While policy directives and professional development programmes aim to effect change in teachers' practice, they tend to fail to create sustainable change in teachers' practice of using emerging technologies (ETs). This paper reports on a study that sought to understand how teachers change their pedagogy of teaching with ETs. Using a Design-Based Research approach, the paper reports on the teachers' pedagogical change framework (Teaching Change Frame -TCF) as a diagnostic tool for locating and mapping how teachers' change. The TCF maps teachers' existing pedagogies and ET uses, and designs a pathway of a change process to effect the desired change. The TCF was tested and refined using data from 325 teachers drawn from rural, resource-constrained schools, urban, well-resourced schools and from preservice teaching students in a decontextualized environment. Following three iterations it was found that teachers' use of ETs in regulated, restrictive ways correlate with transmission pedagogies, unregulated, dispersed ways correlate with transformative pedagogies. The use of TCF not only located teaching pedagogies but also provide different pathways to ensure sustainable change. Findings emphasize the need for teachers to encourage learners to build/create/construct with ETs and for increased interaction in fostering nonregulated dispersed use of ETs.Since the fall of apartheid in 1994 South African education has changed significantly to transform what was a fundamentally unequal system. One of the most irrepressible challenges to

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In the last decade, emerging technologies and transformative practices have diffused into higher education social systems in ways that formal leadership styles are increasingly stretched to both keep abreast of and to manage. While many scholars have argued for the importance of the role of leadership styles in shaping the strategic direction of institutions, there is a paucity of research on the role that informal leaders, and more particularly opinion leaders and change agents, can play in enabling wide-scale adoption of innovations in higher education institutions. This paper focuses on the ways in which leadership in higher education can best extend their influence to accelerate the diffusion of transformational educational practices using emerging technologies by leveraging informal leaders. To illustrate how this could be achieved, we report on a study of 22 public higher education institutions in South Africa involving 259 participants who responded to an online survey. The survey focused on the uses of emerging technologies to transform the teaching and learning practices and the nature of institutional support such initiatives received. The findings reveal that for emerging technologies to be diffused in institutional social systems, more transformative and less transactional leadership is required. The paper proposes a model for accelerating the diffusion of emerging technologies in higher education institutions and concludes that leveraging informal leadership is particularly critical in accelerating the uptake of emerging technologies practices.