The goals of South Africa’s e-Education White paper are for every school learner to be capable of using information and communications technology (ICT) by 2013 and for teachers to use ICT to enhance teaching and learning.This paper discusses the innovative use of MXit, a locally developed mobile instant messaging platform, as a teaching and learning platform by the CSIR Meraka Institute and others. It suggests a pragmatic framework for integrating cell phones as ICT tools into the education system in South Africa.

Dr Math is a mobile tutoring system which has been running in South Africa for three years. It links primary and secondary school pupils to tutors in mathematics. The pupils use the popular Mxit chat client on their cell phones. The tutors use full size computer work stations connected to the internet. This paper describes the redesign and rewrite of Dr Math to a new framework called C³TO: Chatter Call Centre/Tutoring Online.

Electrospinning is a straightforward and versatile technique for fabrication of nanofibres from a variety of polymer solutions. Nanofibers with high surface area to volume ratio, high porosity and small fibre diameter make them ideal materials for biomedical applications such as wound dressing. CSIR researchers investigate the effects of governing parameters on the formation of chitosan nanofibre membranes                                and subjected the membranes to various cell cultures for antibacterial                                properties.

An algorithm for identifying individual fires from the Modis burned area data product is introduced for southern Africa. This algorithm gives the date of burning, size of fire, and location of the centroid for all fires identified over 8 years in Africa south of the equator. Initial results indicate that humans can have massive impacts on fire size distributions and on the area burned by large fires. This information on fire number and fire size can be used to ask important questions on the effect of increasing human ignitions, and the barriers to fire spread in savanna systems.