Mobile devices are at the centre of a revolution delivering platforms to achieve knowledge transfer and behaviour change in Africa. With the accelerating growth of mobile devices in Africa the past few years, unique solutions have been developed to address barriers to large-scale adoption of learning platforms. In particular, the specific challenges and unique problems faced in Africa have had a marked impact on the innovation in developing novel channels for providing information in a cost-effective manner.

A key barrier to successful adoption of learning platforms is mobile penetration. It is necessary to achieve at least a minimum percentage penetration amongst a community of users to exploit network effects and viral strategies which facilitate the building of vibrant communities. Africa’s recent rapid rise of mobile phones has seen mobile penetration grow in some markets to over 100% (South Africa) and to close to 500 million connections for the continent as a whole.

When evaluating markets for feasibility the following key measures of the penetration should be considered: absolute mobile phone penetration, mobile internet penetration, desktop internet penetration and Social Networking penetration.

Absolute phone penetration provides us with with a baseline measure of the lowest common denominator technologies that can be used to deliver basic information, such as Voice, SMS, USSD and Please Call MEs. Each of these channels has characteristics that make them usable for very large scale information delivery platforms, particularly the cost of usage. As is to be expected, mobile internet penetration far outstrips desktop internet penetration in African markets and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Social network penetration on mobile and desktop can be a particularly good proxy for pinpointing markets that have vibrant communities with high levels of interconnectedness. Facebook and MXit are currently the largest social networks in Africa, both of which are showing explosive growth on the continent. The launch of Facebook zero, Facebook has developed a particularly compelling offering that allows users to access a low-bandwidth version of the social network at no cost from their mobile phone. The rapid growth of Facebook in markets where it was able to negotiate a zero cost deal with network operators, proves how important cost of access is in developing markets.

Developing effective mobile learning platforms requires a deep understanding of the multiple modalities of interaction presented by mobile phones. Novel channels are viable alternatives to voice for delivering information, building communities and driving behaviour change. As part of our work in the Praekelt Foundation we explore the channels that can lower the cost of access whilst still providing enough information to enable learning experiences.

On of the least expensive, yet effective, means of large scale messaging for the base of the pyramid is Please Call Me Messages – an approach to free messaging developed in South Africa and utilised in Project Masiluleke. Most mobile users in developing countries are on pre-paid mobile packages. Pre-paid users often ran out of airtime, which can prevent them from making a call. Please Call MEs allow them to send a free message requesting a call back. Currently over 40million Please Call MEs are sent per day in South Africa alone. In Project Masiluleke, we have tagged critical information about health services and HIV/AIDS to over 1 billion messages over the last 2 years.

USSD – or unstructured supplementary data – provides a more interactive means to deliver information and learning services to low-end text-only phones. USSD was originally developed for use by mobile operators to communicate directly with subcribers and provide access to operator functionality, such as airtime updates, service status and requests. Most pre-paid subscribers access on USSD multiple times a day to obtain their account balances and to top-up airtime. USSD allows for the creation of decision trees which a user traverses to find relevant information. Typically, interaction over USSD is either free or extremely low in cost, making it possible for 3rd party developers to build rich applications that are highly interactive, yet can function on the most basic of phone. A further benefit is that the most of the interface is already well known to the many mobile network subscribers across developing markets.

Group messaging platforms like MXit and Blackberry Messenger, allow users to chat via text for very low cost or a flat rate per month (in the case of Blackberry messenger). It has enabled the development of number of mLearning innovations like Yoza, developed by Steve Vosloo with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation in 2010. The project was launched for “book-poor, mobile phone-rich” teenagers in South Africa to see if they would read stories on their cell phones. Says Steve Vosloo of the project:

“Yoza stories aim to captivate teens and inspire them to enjoy well-written stories by good authors. The m-novels are written in conventional language, with txtspeak only used when a character is writing or reading SMSes or instant message chats. Also included is prescribed school reading that is in the public domain, for example, Macbeth. There is no charge for the actual stories, but users do pay their mobile network operator for mobile data traffic. Images have been kept to a minimum to keep the mobile data charges low.”

One of the benefits is promoting behaviour change through social networks is the power of having members of a peer group providing help and advice on important topics, such as health or education. Recognising this opportunity, the Praekelt Foundation launched YoungAfricaLive, a groundbreaking mobile platform where young people learn and talk about life issues, including love, sex, relationships and HIV/AIDS.

The portal features daily blogs by young South Africans sharing their journeys through the difficult terrain of love, sex and relationships in the time of HIV. Along with relationship advice, facts on HIV, STDs, Safe Sex and more, these stories have created a safe sex-savvy community that logs on daily to give and receive support and advice. Since it launch in December 2009, the network has signed up over 400,000 users. One of the reasons for its rapid growth and success has been the stickiness of the platform, over a 1,000,000 comments have been posted and an extremely lively community has spontaneously coalesced around the topics that are important to them.

Social platforms allow granular tracking of connections between users and identifying the most influential people in a network. Since all stories can be commented on, and users can “like” each others comments, it is possible to build a very detailed map of the connections between users and thereby identifying which users have the greatest impact on opinion in the network. We can then target influencers in the network with information that we wish to deliver and track the traversal of the message through the network.

Mobile penetration and cost of data and messaging remain the largest obstacles to large scale usage of mobile platforms to improve learning in Africa. Through the use of novel low-cost channels such as SMS, USSD, and Mobile Social Networks it is possible to build compelling platforms that are available to every user of a mobile phone in Africa, and that can have meaningful impact on our users lives.

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Information and communication technologies (ICTs) combined with the open intellectual property arrangements of Open Education Resources (OER) and networked collaboration have the potential to change fundamental business models for the education sector in Africa. In this blog post I explore the contemporary challenges we face and the opportunities for using digital OERs to implement new models of educational provision in Africa.

The concept of open education encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.

Internationally, the education sector is now exploring and implementing the potential of OER to provide free learning opportunities for all students worldwide. Africa has a unique opportunity to leverage the benefits of open education and digital ICTs in providing free learning opportunities for her learners, especially those students currently excluded from the formal sector.

The problem

Today, in Sub-Saharan Africa the majority of children of school going age will not have the privilege of completing the last three years of their schooling and very often do not have access to affordable textbooks. With reference to the higher education sector, Olugbemiro Jegede, Secretary General of the Association of African Universities reminds us that even if Africa were to build one new university per month, still this would not provide a cost-effective solution for the projected 7 million applicants who will be seeking university placements over the next 5 years.

OER offers two significant business enablers for sustainable education futures:

• the marginal cost of replicating digital learning materials is near zero, and
• sharing course design and development costs among institutions is cheaper than doing this alone.

Therefore, it is possible to provide affordable access to high quality learning materials and textbooks, even for learners who may not have reliable or low-cost access to the Internet. Moreover this would not necessarily require new money or investment.

Within the publicly funded education system, the educators’ salaries who produce learning materials are already to some extent sponsored by the taxpayer. Rather than investing new money, all that is needed is a policy shift to re-license selected outputs produced by state-supported educators under open content intellectual property arrangements where the respective institutions provide permissions for others to reuse, adapt and redistribute learning materials at no cost.

• Why should taxpayers have to pay twice for their learning materials?
• Why do publicly funded education institutions restrict access to knowledge through restrictive copyright regimes when we have the digital technologies and legal tools to share freely?

We also have the technologies to produce print-based materials from digital OER repositories for learners who may not have affordable access to the Internet. In WikiEducator, for instance, educators can collate open textbooks for printing or offline editing with the added advantage of using the same digital repository for integrating teaching materials into online delivery systems for those institutions who use learning management systems.

Worldwide, there is a growing inventory of open access learning materials on the Internet. There are literally thousands of courses, research journals and OER available under open access licensing provisions, which could be integrated into selected courses for academic credit in Africa. With permissions to adapt and modify these materials, it is now easier for African educators to share and localise learning resources for the Continent.

Already Africa hosts a number of exemplary OER projects. OER Africa is a continental network supporting and driving the development and use of OER across all education sectors in Africa.

The African Virtual University has launched the OER@AVU portal which will provide 219 high quality modules of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, ICT in Education, and Teacher Education Professional Courses available in three different languages – English, French and Portuguese. Individual institutions like the University of the Western Cape and University of Cape Town in South Africa support open content projects.

The Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) project brings together teachers and teacher educators from across Africa working on OER in four languages to support school based teacher education and training. Siyavula is a ground-breaking project working collaboratively with school teachers to produce open textbooks for high school students.

• Notwithstanding the pioneering work of these projects, taking into account the large number of learners excluded from the formal education sector in Africa, what are the reasons for the slow uptake and mainstream adoption of OER on the continent?
• How can we scale-up and share the successes of these African OER projects for all African institutions?

As the global inventory of OER increases we are presented with new opportunities and challenges. Specifically, learners who access digital OERs on the web and acquire knowledge and skills either formally or informally, cannot readily have their learning assessed and subsequently receive credible credentials in recognition for their efforts. Open assessment and credentialisation services are needed. The Open Education Resource (OER) university concept is a new international initiative which aims to address these challenges.

The OER university concept

Existing delivery models cannot address the growing global demand for post-secondary education. Many countries do not have the resources to build the number of conventional universities that would be required to meet the future demand for tertiary education.
The OER university (OERu) is nurturing the development of a sustainable and scalable OER ecosystem for the formal sector. The OER university concept aims to create a parallel learning universe based solely on OER for learners excluded from the system to augment and add value to the formal education sector. These learners may choose to enrol at formal education institutions in the traditional way or participate in free learning provided through the OERu network. Assessment and credential services will be provided by participating institutions on a cost-recovery basis or may be funded through scholarships or grants from the respective Ministries of Education.

A Scenario

Ibrahim Omowale has worked as a carpenter for twenty years in Nigeria and is now teaching at the local technical college. He wanted to upgrade his qualifications for his new career in vocational education. Due to work and family commitments, he couldn’t pursue full-time study. Ibrahim did not have the financial resources to register in the formal system and there were no scholarships available in his home country.

Ibrahim was undecided about his preferred area for degree study but wanted to combine his work experience and interests with the flexibility to move into new subject areas. Free access to the learning materials for the OER university (OERu) courses provided a “try before you buy” scenario. Ibrahim decided to start with a Diploma of Arts which offered the flexibility to select first-year degree courses across different disciplines. He chose three business related courses combined with a course in international relations and another in communication skills.

Ibrahim did not have affordable Internet connectivity at home but was able to utilise WikiEducator’s features to download offline digital versions of the course study guides. During the week, Ibrahim worked off-line preparing portfolio assignments and noting questions. On Saturday mornings, he visited the local cybercafé, uploaded completed assignments to his online e-portfolio, consulted online discussion forums and posted support questions to the “Academic Volunteers International” website selecting the SMS message feedback option for his learner support questions. Taking the free trial examination, Ibrahim felt he was ready to present himself for assessment. Paying the assessment fee, he submitted his e-portfolio to the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and successfully completed the remote challenge examinations and graduated with the Diploma of Arts — the first step towards a Bachelor of Transdisiplinary Studies.

Ibrahim decided that he wanted to specialise in vocational education and apply for assessment of prior learning. Using the open support materials provided by the OERu website, Ibrahim prepared a portfolio of his prior experience mapped against the graduate profile of a Diploma in Construction Management (second-year degree level). He presented his assessment for prior learning at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand and decided to continue his OERu learning in the area of Tertiary Teaching, incorporating third-year bachelor-level subjects. Ibrahim’s credits for the Diploma of Arts were recognised under the OERu’s approved Transnational Qualifications Framework and he decided to use the assessment services from Otago Polytechnic for his prior learning and tertiary teaching subjects. Ibrahim decided to complete his remaining subjects at the local national university through the conventional system and graduated with a Bachelor of Transdisciplinary Studies (Vocational Education).

Ibrahim Omowale is now Head of Department at his technical college and is leading a strategy aimed at enhancing the professional development of staff throughout the region.

Note: At the time of authoring this blog post there were no participating institutions from Africa. Therefore, I could not use African institutions as examples in the Scenario text. In time we hope to see a number of African institutions sharing in the benefits of this global tertiary education network.

How will the OERu work?

Concept for an OER university initiative (Adapted from Taylor 2007).

OERu students will gain free access to high quality courses that are designed for independent-study using OER. OERu learners will receive student support through a global network of volunteers and peer support using social software technologies. Students can be assessed for a fee by participating institutions and earn a credible credential.

From an investment-decision perspective, participation in the OERu network would not require new money, but rather a reallocation of existing staff time to releasing selected development outputs under open content licenses for the OERu network. The OERu model anticipates that no more than 1% of existing budget time would be required for release under open content licenses. The institutional costs of assessment and credentialisation services are recouped on a cost-recovery basis from student fees and/or other sources.

• Is the OER university network a viable model for widening access to learning opportunities in Africa?

I firmly believe that OER is the means by which education at all levels can be more accessible, more affordable and more efficient. OER is a sustainable and renewable resource. What do you think?

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There is a growing awareness around the impact that a lack of books has on literacy levels in South Africa. Books are scarce and prohibitively expensive for most South Africans. Stats show that 51% of households in South Africa do not own a single leisure book, while an elite 6% of households own 40 books or more. Only 7% of schools have functioning libraries.

What South Africa’s teens do have access to are cellphones, with stats indicating that 90% of urban youth have their own cellphone. Steve Vosloo, founder of Yoza and fellow for 21st century learning at the Shuttleworth Foundation, says:

“For the foreseeable future the cell phone, not the Kindle or iPad, is the eReader of Africa. Yoza aims to capitalize on that to get Africa’s teens reading and writing.”

Yoza: addicting teenagers to literature

In 2009, Steve launched the m4Lit project to capitalize on South Africa’s “book-poor, mobile phone-rich” dynamic and see if teenagers in South Africa would read stories on their cell phones.

m4Lit published a story called Kontax in September last year and added another Kontax story in May 2010, both published in English and isiXhosa. To date, the two stories have been read over 34,000 times, over 4,000 entries have been received in the writing competitions, and over 4,000 comments have been left by readers on individual chapters.

Encouraged by the high uptake of the stories and by these reader requests, the Shuttleworth Foundation decided to launch Yoza, to get young people reading and writing, regardless the medium.

Yoza stories aim to captivate teens and inspire them to enjoy well-written stories by good authors. The m-novels are written in conventional language, with txtspeak only used when a character is writing or reading SMSes or instant message chats. Also included is prescribed school reading that is in the public domain, for example, Macbeth.

There is no charge for the actual stories, but users do pay their mobile network operator for mobile data traffic. Images have been kept to a minimum to keep the mobile data charges low – these data charges on local cellphones range from 5c to 9c per chapter, making Yoza m-novels a very affordable option for great reading material for teens.

Yoza m-novels:

• Kontax, the flagship title about a group of four teenage friends in Cape Town. The Yoza library features all four m-novels in the series written by Sam Wilson and Lauren Beukes of Clockwork Zoo.
• Streetskillz is a brand new soccer series written by talented young writer and soccer fanatic Charlie Human. The first story – Golden Goal – is set in the month of the soccer World Cup. Unforgettable international soccer reality merges with a dramatic fictional street soccer competition in Du Noon township in Cape Town.
• Sisterz is a sassy new series by local chic lit star Fiona Snyckers. Latoya’s Secret launched straight into the depths of dark family secrets, the highs of friendship, school Pop Idols auditions, and the breath-stopping sensations of first love.
• Confessions of a Virgin Loser by talented, thoughtful novelist Edyth Bulbring is the story of a Joburg boy steering his way through the complicated world of peer pressure, teenage sex and HIV/AIDS, while just trying to be a cool kid at school.

Sequels to the above stories will generally launch on the first of each month from October 2010

• A Bicycle Ride through Lesotho by Duncan Guy – of Learn the News fame – tells the entertaining tale of riding through the Mountain Kingdom on a bicycle.
• Yoza Classics is a section of its own, featuring a range of public domain titles. School prescribed work Macbeth is one of the first titles selected for Yoza Classics. The idea is not necessarily that teens will read the whole of Macbeth on their cellphones, but if they have to read Act 1; Scene 1 for homework and they don’t have a textbook, then they can do so on their phones.

Over the next six months the plan for Yoza is to expand this library of cell phone stories of multiple genres that are available to teens not only in South Africa, but ultimately throughout Africa. Kontax has already been published in Kenya through MXit. Competitions with airtime prizes prompt readers to participate in the interactive questions at the end of chapters, keeping readers engaged and coming back for more.

Current story languages include English and isiXhosa, an Afrikaans story is being written, and ideally stories in all of the South African languages will ultimately be published on Yoza. The Shuttleworth Foundation encourages the public to get involved in translating the stories into local languages – if you translate it we’ll gladly publish it.

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Carr points out that networked media, especially those connected to the internet, are inherently non-linear and are given to distraction because of the web of links criss-crossing the content. Further, given their networked nature, the devices are used for talking, chatting, posting, viewing and listening very easily. With these devices the temptation to keep linear, undivided attention on a particular train of thought is very high; the chance of deep learning is thus low.

Carr is much more knowledgeable about the possible effects of the internet on cognition than I am — although I also acknowledge that his arguments are not without contestation. But I do have two key points to respond to his core argument in The Shallows — both from the perspective of someone working in education in a developing country.

1. What happens when there are no books?

In his blog post, Carr references a recent study, published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, that revealed a very strong connection between the number of books in a student’s home and the number of years of education the student completes. “Books Matter. A lot,” reported the Chronicle of Higher Education on the research.

But what happens when there are no books? The low level of literacy amongst South African youth is a recognised problem. While it is a very complex problem, one contributing factor is that books are unaffordable, and therefore unavailable, to many students. The lack of books extends to homes – in 2006, 51% of South African households owned no leisure books (TNS Research Surveys, 2006) – and to schools – only 7% of public schools in South Africa have functional libraries of any kind (Equal Education, 2009).

While South Africa is “book-poor” it is “mobile phone-rich”: there is estimated to be nine million people who access the mobile internet — this is about 20% of the population and about double the number of people who access the internet with computers. In terms of access, cellphones are a pervasive consumer technology. In some urban communities, 100% of teens have access to a cellphone and around 70% of those can access the internet.

The m4Lit project, which I lead, uses this reality as a point of departure. We are using the technology that is in the hands of young people for educational goals. We published two short stories on mobile phones and in seven months these were read over 34,000 times. Thousands of comments and competition entries were received from readers – all via their phones. Yesterday we launched www.yoza.mobi, a new platform to publish a wider selection of m-novels.

Did deep learning happen when the teens read the m-novels entitled Kontax 1 and 2 on their mobile phones? I don’t know. Did they read each story, comprehend it, formulate a response and express that as a comment? Yes. Could they have done this if Kontax was only found in print? The answer is simply: no. So through the Kontax m-novels the readers could engage in certain educational activities, and only because of the medium that is highly accessible to them, which is a non-print medium.

While I don’t know if deep learning occurred through the reading of Kontax, I know that at least it provided an opportunity for deep learning. In developing countries the pixels versus paper debate is often an irrelevant luxury. Limited resources demand that all avenues for information dissemination be exploited.

I totally agree that we desperately need well-trained teachers and libraries, but also concede that we probably won’t see teachers trained, or libraries built and stocked for some time (if ever). Given this harsh reality, we must exploit the existing technologies that are in the hands of people. In answer to the question: Is a mobile phone in the hands of an impoverished student better or worse than no book at all? – my answer is absolutely yes.

2. Distraction has its place.

A key feature – not a bug – of a mobile phone, which a book doesn’t have, is connectivity. With chapter comments left by our readers for all to see, reading moves from a solitary exercise to a more social one. While reading a book on one’s own is a very enjoyable pastime, a more social experience has huge potential for those who need help with texts through annotations (remember how useful it was when you got your hands on a school or university textbook that a previous learner had embellished with notes). This sort of marginalia can now be useful to a much wider audience, not only to one lucky student each year. What’s more, in a publicly visible way there can be questions and answers as one reader leaves a comment wondering what is going on in the story, and another reader comments with the answer.

The very connectedness that can be so distracting when trying to focus on learning, is the same quality than can support learning, that can enable tutoring or advice from others, that can present different ways of thinking, which can be privately discussed between people, or discussed in the public eye, often on fora that are persistent and thus make the conversations accessible to future students grappling with the same issues. Here it is not a case of the computer or mobile phone becoming an instrument of distraction that interrupts study rather than deepen it, but rather of the distraction leading to a more informed and potentially deeper understanding of something.

The great danger of The Shallows is that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Let us use the technology for what it is good for, and be aware of its risks. Let us not take binary views that are either for or against. The notion of what constitutes an “essentially educational tool” is increasingly difficult to define. The lines are blurring. In many cases a mobile phone is more of an educational tool than a book. We should not view networked devices as essentially items of distraction.

As a closing point I’d like to share a quote from a Kontax reader. MXit, the popular mobile IM chat client in South Africa on which we publish m4Lit stories, allows multiple chat tabs to be open at the same time so that multiple conversations happen simultaneously. One of those tabs can be for Kontax. Our readers tell us that they are happy because they can chat and read in between, while waiting for a response from their buddies. A great example of fragmented attention!

But a few readers have told me that they find the chapters so absorbing that they focus on reading them instead of chatting. Sheila said that the following: [Kontax] “is realy interesting nd sync it began iv bin glud 2 ma 4ne ma chat mates a evn c0mplainin c0z a dnt chat wth em lyk a usd 2″ (Kontax is really interesting and since it began I’ve been glued to my phone. My chat friends are even complaining because I don’t chat with them like I used to). Not all temptations to distraction are headed!

Steve Vosloo is the 21st Century Learning Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation.

References

Equal Education. (2009). EE rejects DoE’s statement on school libraries. Available at http://www.equaleducation.org.za/press-a-views/press-releases/item/74-statement17dec2009.

TNS Research Surveys. (2006). National Survey into the Reading and Book Reading Behaviour of Adult South Africans. Available at http://www.saccd.org.za/objects/sabdc_reading.pdf.

Carr argues that there is a good fit between the way ideas develop along a linear path in books, and the way in which human memory works. This match makes possible a certain ‘deep’ style of reading and thinking, Carr claims, while the non-linear designs of the Net and eBooks are not so well suited to human patterns of thinking. New media structures tend to overtax the limitations of human working memory, he argues, in that they offer a surfeit of information, leaving users stranded in the ‘shallows’ of thought.

Carr’s book is a reversal of the usual assumption that up-to-date technology makes its users ‘smarter’ and more sophisticated than people who rely on outdated forms of technology like books or other traditional technologies. But his argument is not free of the deep cultural prejudices that underpin simple oppositions between book culture, orality, and electronic textuality. In particular, by giving book culture the monopoly on ‘deep thinking’ Carr’s work certainly lacks a broader understanding of how communication and thought takes place in ‘continua’ of orality and literacy (Finnegan 1988: 175) as well as through visual communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2008).

m4Lit Example

To illustrate my point, I want to discuss the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project. The findings of this research project showed that South African teens use mobile communication technologies as part of a shifting repertoire of modal interactions characterized by interplay between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ modes of communication, indigenous languages and English, with their mobile phones providing a site for vital cultural creativity.

Like many people around the world, the teens who participated in the study used media technologies in diverse ways to maintain complex social affiliations or interactions, and to develop knowledge of their social network, and to find information through their interpersonal interactions, rather than only through media.

The problems with Carr’s theory of media can be traced back to two venerable scholars, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong; both can be described as technological determinists in that they claim that modes of communication determine the ways of thinking and cultural characteristics of entire societies.

The notion that there is a causal relationship between literacy and particular thinking patterns may be an old one, but it is far from universally accepted. One famous study of the effects of literacy on cognition (Scribner and Cole, 1981) set out to prove that literacy had cognitive consequences, only to find that actual interactions between thinking, literacies, and schooling were far more complex than the researchers expected. Science and technology studies depict the mutual interdepence between society and technology (e.g. MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985).

Studies of oral literature even find it hard to define what might be distinctively ‘oral’ or ‘literate’ given the huge diversity of cultural forms and human societies. Instead of looking for ways to generalize this diversity away, scholars of the African oral tradition have called for closer attention to the specific circumstances under which various modes, media and genres of communcation are accessed and produced, and to the social uses of communication (Finnegan, 1988). African scholars have also questioned Ong’s argument about ‘orality’, criticizing its ethnocentric, extravagant and totalizing claims (e.g. Biakolo, 1999).

Carr’s argument in The Shallows does not engage with these critiques, but extends McLuhan’s and Ong’s notions of cognitive consequences to a radical extreme. Carr claims that media use causes changes to the structure of the brain thanks to its ‘neuroplasticity’, or the brain’s ability to form new neural connections and lose old ones. Thus Carr believes that changes to society result when changes in communications media reshape the human brain (Carr, 2010:49).

Mobile Literacies

In 2009 I worked on the m4Lit (Mobiles for Literacy) research project with Steve Vosloo (Shuttleworth Foundation) and Ana Deumert (University of Cape Town). We investigated teens’ responses to Kontax, a serialized m-novel for South African teens, which was published on a mobile website and on South African mobile instant messaging platform, MXit (see Walton, 2010 for a more detailed report).

Kontax attracted over 64 000 subscribers in the course of a month-long campaign, a substantial audience when considered in relation to the very small markets for South African publishing. The popularity of the story when released on local mobile instant messaging platform, MXit, showed us conclusively that youth audiences were keen to try out reading fiction on mobile phones.

Kontax was less successful at maintaining readers’ interest and engaging them in immersive reading of the entire series: we estimate that only 7 200 (26%) of Kontax subscribers in the 14-17 age-group were sufficiently engaged by the story to read all 21 chapters.

This was a core group of committed readers, and MXit page-view data suggests that most readers who persevered in reading the third chapter finished the whole story. Nonetheless, almost three quarters of subscribers did not read that far. In fact, most readers abandoned Kontax after reading (or just downloading) only one 400-word episode. This trend may have been even more pronounced for the township teens specifically targeted by the project In interviews, only 10.4% of these teens told the fieldworkers that they had read all the episodes. The rest of the group said that they had planned to read the story, but had not had time to do so, given the many distractions available on MXit and their preference for other forms of literate interaction, such as mobile IM with their friends.

The m4Lit campaign thus appears to have been successful in using the accessibility and novelty of mobile phone fiction to spark interest in Kontax, while it only ‘hooked’ a minority of more committed readers. Our data didn’t allow us to establish whether it was the distractions of the mobile platform (as Carr might argue), the thriller genre, or specific features of the Kontax story that were primarily responsible for this pattern of declining interest.

Carr’s faith in only one mode of literate interaction (lengthy, linear, solitary reading) seems unduly narrow given the rich variety of interactions we observed in the course of the m4Lit project. M4Lit showed that large numbers of teens were eager to try out different modes of engaging with the written word, including reading lengthier texts, correcting errors and typos in the story, writing comments on the unfolding plot, and submitting their own ideas for stories. It also showed how important literate interpersonal interactions through texting and messaging are to their growing knowledge of the world around them, and of themselves.

Teens in fact reported difficulties extricating themselves from highly immersive messaging sessions. Our research showed that their texting and messaging practices centred around peer networking activities. Here the teens valued speed, responsiveness and attentiveness in their mobile conversations. In fact, for them, the marks of orthodox ‘literate’ writing such as punctuation and unabbreviated texts signified ‘newcomers’ who had not yet learned to “write well”, using “MXit language” – a teen ‘hetero-graphy’ (Blommaert, 2008) specifically adapted to this technology, genre of interaction, and social context. As teens grow older and move beyond the context of their local friendship networks these skills are likely to stand them in good stead. Studies of other low income communities around the world show that the ability to use available technology to maintain their relationships, leverage and develop strong social networks are a crucial grassroots survival strategy (e.g. Horst & Miller, 2005, Kolko, Rose and Johnson, 2007, Donner, 2007).

The m4Lit project showed that there could be real drawbacks to using a chatty mobile platform for certain kinds of reading, learning and study. Nonetheless the mobile platform allowed us to reach teens in a way that would have been almost impossible otherwise, and, in the South African context is a highly accessible, relatively cheap option for the growing numbers of people who can access mobile internet (current industry estimates puts this at 9 million South Africans, or about double the number who access the Internet with computers).

At the same time, while exploring all available options for making the most of mobile, we also need to keep up the pressure for government to invest in books, computers, libraries and librarians for schools. I say this not because I share Carr’s cultural prejudices against electronic communication, but because I believe in providing equal access to public education. Mobiles are a private resource which means that students and their parents must shoulder handset costs. They also require ongoing investment in airtime – so inequality of access and participation are built into this educational architecture and are likely to remain its biggest drawback.

Marion Walton is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

References

Biakolo, Emevwo. (1999) On the Theoretical Foundations of Orality and Literacy. Research in African Literatures 1999 30:2, 42-65.

Blommaert, Jan. 2008. Grassroots Literacy: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. Routledge: London.

Donner, J. (2007). The rules of beeping: Exchanging messages via intentional “missed calls‟ on mobile phones. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 1. Retrieved Nov 28, 2009, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donner.html

Finnegan, Ruth (1988): Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Horst, H. and Miller, D. (2005) From kinship to link-up. Current Anthropology. 46 (5):755-778.

Kress, G.R. and Van Leeuwen, T. Reading Images. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2006.

Kolko, B. E., Rose, E. J., and Johnson, E. J. 2007. Communication as information-seeking: the case for mobile social software for developing regions. In Proceedings of the 16th international Conference on World Wide Web (Banff, Alberta, Canada, May 08 – 12, 2007). WWW ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 863-872.

Richard Conyngham and Doron Isaacs. 2010. We can’t afford not to: Costing the provision of functional school libraries in South African public schools. Equal Education

Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. 1981.The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Walton, Marion. 2010. Mobile literacies & South African teens: Leisure reading, writing, and MXit chatting for teens in Langa and Gugulethu. Research report prepared for the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project. http://m4lit.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/m4lit_mobile_literacies_mwalton_20101.pdf

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Mr. Carr presents considerable evidence that the networked, interactive nature of digital technologies scatters our attention and limits our ability to think deeply. Even more, he points to emerging evidence that access to computers leads to poor educational attainment. Concerned about the decline of books, he writes,

“We need to be concerned about the digital divide, to be sure. But perhaps we should also be thinking about the Gutenberg divide.”

Nearly all of the debate around Mr. Carr’s provocative and thoughtful book is focused on areas that are traditionally well-saturated with media, both physical and, increasingly, digital. What, though, of the developing world where printed material is traditionally not as widely disseminated and where basic literacy is sometimes lower?  As low-cost digital devices proliferate throughout poor regions, is it a reason to worry or a cause for celebration? Simply put, is a mobile phone in the hands of an impoverished student better or worse than no book at all?

For this month’s Educational Technology Debate, we have four experts on media and education providing their views on this question:

• Nicholas Carr, the author responsible for the newfound attention to the cognitive effects of the Internet and ICTs, will provide the opening piece, summarizing his position that networked technologies are detrimental to educational efforts by inducing distraction and limiting deep thinking.
• Marion Walton, a senior lecturer in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, will broaden the discussion by summarizing her research and views on how new technologies can be promote both formal and informal literacies in resource-constrained environments.
• Inés Dussel, is the Educational Director of Sangari Argentina, and is a researcher at the Latin American School for the Social Sciences (FLACSO/Argentina).
• Finally, Steve Vosloo, of the Shuttleworth Foundation, will provide an explanation of his ongoing project to promote literacy via a novel written for teenagers and available on their mobile phone.

Please join us over the coming month in what promises to be a lively and enlightening debate about one of the more important issues facing educators around the world.

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First I am struck by the degree of consensus. But I am not sure what it means: Maybe we just have a wise bunch here or maybe we’re not hearing from other perspectives that powerfully influence education decisions in the developing world.

Second, with regard to eBooks, in our discussion we have not emphasized sufficiently the importance of reinforcing a sense of “agency” in students. Paper-based books are at the low end of the “agency” scale. Simply replacing them with electronic versions is not a leap forward for learning. We all grew up with paper books and most of us love them.

However a key to learning is the process of creation and problem solving including physical manipulation and reshaping of objects. The digital world enables a level of agency and interactivity with words and numbers that can greatly enhance learning. Thus we should not settle for eBooks as they now are. They are too fixed and passive. At the very least we need to be able to include our own and other unpublished content into them and enable us to share with others our comments and suggestions.

Third, I am intrigued by the suggestion that handwriting is a skill that we should preserve. This is a new thought for me and I am not sure how I feel about it. As a lefty, I have found the keyboard to be more user-friendly that the right-handed desks in my schools. I want to think more about this suggestion. Clearly people need to sign their name, fill out a form and write a thank you card. However my guess is that, once the price is right, most cursive writing will involve keyboards and highly accurate voice-to-text software.

Reframing the Discussion

But maybe we should step back, and take a moment to rethink the frame of our discussion. We have tended to circle around today’s version of a specific technology: eBooks, This is the assignment our teacher (Wayan) gave us.

But what would happen if we changed the frame for a moment and ask a different question:

What kinds of systems are needed in the developing world to facilitate learning – at what different levels of learning, for what different skills and knowledge?

Let’s take a “systems” perspective and see where that takes us to achieve a Quality and Universal Basic Education (QUBE).

A Three-legged Stool:

We see immediately that technology, of all kinds, is only one part of the dynamic that leads to QUBE. In simplest terms, a three-legged stool of content, technology and people is required to achieve our goal. But we must differentiate their functions:

Content.

Content is dependent upon both skill and subject levels. For the early grades learning systems are needed for acquiring basic knowledge skills such as reading, speaking, arithmetic, problem solving, interpersonal relations. Learning to speak and learning to write require quite different systems. These content variables may, but need not, be included in the same technology.

As I have indicated before, the most crucial need in developing countries is for courseware: a lesson plan, textbook, workbook suite that teachers can, with a minimum of change, use in their classrooms with assurance that most of their students will pass their test. The k-12 Siyavula content in English and Afrikaans, developed by Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa, is a good example of such content. Since it is free and open on the Internet it can easily be adapted for use in other countries.

Technology.

I have listed in my opening post the fourteen key device requirements for basic learning. Check them out. I am not aware of any existing technologies that meet all of these requirements. And it is not necessary for one tool to have all. The earliest grades do not necessarily require a keyboard although the later grades do (IMHO). If you have no access to electricity that limits the kinds of technologies you can use. In those cases paper and pencil technology with highly effective content can be excellent. That is what most of us grew up with quite well.

Electricity, but no Internet connection, gives you more options. It seems prudent to assume that for the foreseeable future most students in the developing world will not have dependable Internet connectivity.  So every educational initiative in developing countries that seek to employ technologies to improve their schools should also plan to provide paper and pencil resources for those without access to more advanced technologies.

We also need to give greater attention to technologies that teachers and school administrators can use to increase their effectiveness. We need to explore the substantial benefits that information and communications technologies can bring to education outside the classroom –their use in testing and record keeping and as tools for following students when they move from one place to another.

Here’s one simple example: Lawrence Massachusetts has the largest concentration of Dominicans in the U.S. Their students travel back and forth between the Dominican Republic a lot. Yet schools in neither country have a way to keep track of their students’ progress when they are in the other country. Everyone would benefit form a simple student tracking system both countries could use. The educational return on investment outside the classroom can be great.

People.

The evidence is clear that QUBE cannot be achieved by simply providing cool technology, such as laptops, without parallel and intensive investments in the development of appropriate content and the preparation of the people involved to use that technology well. In contrast to baseball fields, if you build it they will not necessarily come.

However it is not sufficient to simply hire more teachers. They need to become familiar and skilled with using whatever technologies they have. Beyond teachers we need to give attention to school principals, district superintendents and subject matter specialists all need to be comfortable and skilled with whatever technologies are involved in the learning process.

Resources.

Providing a strong three-legged educational stool requires money. Such funding is a major limiting factor for achieving QUBE in the developing world. The education budgets of most developing countries are grossly insufficient to meet the most basic needs for QUBE. Teachers are often paid intermittently if at all. Few if any books are available for students. Despite the flowery rhetoric one hears about its importance, education is consistently given short shrift in the budget. It is relatively easy to create small jewels of quality learning that one can showcase.

However scaling innovations so that every child, indeed, every person, has access to a quality basic education is much more difficult. Too often we resign ourselves to reaching a limited percentage of people. The rest seem too hard to reach. A large part of the reason for under-investment in education the widespread doubt that more money will make a difference – that things cannot change. Thus for QUBE to be achieved in developing countries at least three things must happen

Working closely with government as a catalyst, giving their leaders credit whenever possible, we must:

1. Demonstrate highly effective and scalable learning systems that include free and open content supported by a combination of affordable new and old technologies,
2. Provide clear and convincing evidence of their cost/effectiveness, instead of relying upon faith-based assertions, and
3. Persuade the stakeholders that QUBE can be achieved economically and quickly.

This last step is the most challenging. It in involves changing the expectations of students, teachers, administrators, politicians, businesses and the public at large and persuading them that the long-term return to them personally as to their whole nation that such investments generate are better than just about any other investment they can make.

These kinds of changes can only be accomplished from the inside of each country. It takes a strong, influential and independent board of directors led by a talented 24×7 social entrepreneur who is irrationally committed to QUBE. Such a three-legged campaign implemented with vigorous persistence and courage, can be successful.

1. provides a global network of quality, free and open k-12 courseware,
2. enables teachers everywhere to use innovative approaches to learning and
3. employs suitable and effective information and communications technologies.

These three legs must be balanced and closely linked to achieve a quality and universal basic education.

The growing impact of free and open educational resources

Content is king. Yet today high quality k-12 courseware that is aligned with educational standards, as distinct from interesting bits and pieces of content, is rare. Over the next few years, spurred by the Internet and Creative Commons licensing, high quality, free and open courseware will become increasingly available to schools in the developing world. Such resources are readily adaptable to local conditions and are inexpensive to produce and distribute. The evaluative feedback that authors receive from users enables these resources to be improved continuously.

Intellectual property. We can expect educators increasingly to use the Creative Commons, “for attribution, non-commercial” license for the basic educational resources they develop. Most are not in it for the money. Thus it will be difficult for commercially produced educational materials employing digital rights management systems to compete with open source content. As a result for-profit publishers of basic educational resources will perforce modify their business models.

Global Library Network. To facilitate the availability of free high quality content, the Open Learning Exchange is developing a federated network of national libraries comprising free and open k-12 content, including online interactive, offline interactive and paper-based materials. Emphasis is being given to contextualized and printable courseware packages complete with lesson plan, textbook and work book that teachers can download and use “as is” in their classrooms.

The potential educational roles for eBooks and other ICT devices in the developing world.

Technology is powerful. And it can be seductive. Some have assumed that quality content and well-prepared teachers, to the extent they are needed, will somehow follow the introduction of laptops in classrooms. However learning is not automatically enhanced by the distribution of cool technologies. Although they can have important roles in improving education, it is naive to believe that by themselves technologies will change education.

eBooks have a limited role. eBooks can deliver information. However more interactive tools are far more effective in helping learners develop the skills they need to manage information, physical objects and interpersonal relationships. Tools that support the key learning principles of immediate positive and negative feedback, mental and physical manipulation, standards-based practice, curiosity and creativity provide learners with the crucial experiences of agency and competence. Interactive content can be highly effective not only for developing the basic skills of reading, writing, speaking languages and performing basic arithmetic calculations but also for stimulating a positive framework about learning that lasts a lifetime.

We’re not quite there yet. Today’s eBooks, such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader are essentially one-way delivery systems. Low cost cell phones have many interactive features and they are rapidly becoming ubiquitous throughout the world. But so far they lack effective learning materials. PDA’s, while more expensive, are even better suited for learning basic educational skills. Laptops are dropping in price but are still too expensive. And in those places where laptops have been employed extensively, such as the state of Maine, their results have not lived up to initial hopes.

Content for cell phones and PDA’s. We should focus on developing high quality courseware for cell phones and low-cost PDA’s, especially for the earlier levels of learning. They are widely available and inexpensive compared with other devices. Other tools specifically designed learning skills are continually under development. The TeacherMate, developed by Innovations for Learning is one such example; designed like a handheld game console it meets the basic learning requirements for early elementary levels, including its moderately low cost.

The Total Cost. Even as hardware costs decline, however, the costs for technical support, and maintenance will continue to be significant. All things considered, scaling ICT devices for all students remains outside the current financial capacity of most developing countries. The situation is only compounded by a serious shortfall in both high quality content and well-prepared teachers. While it is tempting to use technology to create a few centers of educational excellence, that does not satisfy the vital need to reach every child.

Paper-based content. It follows that, for now, strategies for achieving universal Quality Basic Education must not focus primarily upon ICT’s in the classroom, as attractive as that approach may be. It will be years before ICTs in the hands of every teacher, let alone every child will be affordable. Technologies can, however, be used now to provide teachers and students high quality paper-based lesson plans, textbooks and workbooks at low cost. The Siyavula Project of the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa has created an impressive such system for the development, localization and distribution of its printable free and open k-12 courseware. Such an approach is scalable.

An Important Demonstration

Notwithstanding the obvious problems involved we have much to learn about how best to employ ICT’s in schools. The Open Learning Exchange of Nepal (OLE Nepal) provides an excellent model for exploring the introduction of ICT’s in a developing country. The OLE Nepal team is now in its second stage of a carefully designed program involving student-owned laptops. Four thousand students in six widely dispersed rural districts of Nepal are using student-owned XO laptops with interactive content developed in Nepal.

OLE Nepal is documenting their process of creating interactive content, done in collaboration with the Nepal’s national Curriculum Development Center, and their extensive preparation of teachers and villagers. Both formative and summative assessments are providing evidence of the strengths and weaknesses of their approach. Initial indications are that students, teachers and villagers, including those in neighboring villages, are enthusiastic about the laptops and are asking for more content. We have yet to see how this approach can be scaled to the millions of students in Nepal.

Summary

I envision a world where virtually everyone has access to a quality basic education that is aligned with their capabilities and interests. That was a distant dream a decade ago. Today high quality, free and open digital and paper-based learning resources are spreading rapidly throughout the world. A plethora of ICT innovations for learning is becoming available and affordable. Teachers, principals and education leaders are improving their skills.

Our biggest challenge is to align and balance the three key components of change – content, technology and people. When that is done, the UN’s Second Millennium Development Goal and Quality Basic Education for all will become much more than a dream. While achieving that goal will still be an enormous and complex challenge, we will then be on a path that will make it possible.