Dr Rosemary Quilling is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems & Technology (IS&T), within the College of Law & Management Studies’ School of Management, IT & Governance at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), Westville, South Africa. In her discipline, she lectures in Systems Analysis and Design and is keenly interested in use of social and emerging technologies. Her application of knowledge focus is in teaching and learning in Higher Education where she has over 25 years’ experience. Her PhD focused on the use of social computing by HE teachers in their teaching. This research focused on a systemic perspective of teacher agency in elearning innovation that represented a departure from the largely student-/ learning-focused research in HE at the time. She is a recipient of the UKZN Distinguished Teacher award and the South African CHE/HELTASA National Excellence in Teaching & Learning award.
Rose enjoys working in the “in-between spaces”; joining like-minded individuals in interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. She challenges herself and her students to question the assumptions they bring to learning. This has included boundary-crossing initiatives such as placing her Honours students in a collaborative classroom with Kenyan Computer Science Honours students and in another instance; with American MBA students, by using virtual worlds, social networks, cloud-based storage and YouTube.
She believes in the ability of education and technology to lead societal change. In 2022 she served as the Southern African Co-chair for the ACM-W Celebration of Women in Computing (CWIC) inaugural event in Africa (Nigeria-Hybrid event, May 2022) and as a regional KZN judge for the South African GirlCode Hackathon (Durban, August 2022).
