Vodafone | receiver

Small objects travel further, faster

Jan Chipchase — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:58:38 +0000

Jan Chipchase conducts exploratory human behavioural field research for Nokia. Living and working from Tokyo, his home since 2000, he splits his time between exploring and bringing real world experiences into the company – using them to inform and inspire the design of new applications, services, products and systems. After six years as Principal Researcher at the Nokia Research Center, Tokyo, he joined Nokia Design. On his travels to places we call remote he pays close attention to how people make use and sense of their mobile. Here's some of what he found.

http://www.janchipchase.com

http://research.nokia.com/people/jan_chipchase/

Javascript required to view this content

All artworks in this receiver issue are part of a student project by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

...........................................................................................................................................................................

It's Ulan Bataar in the middle of the winter and the two disciples in red flowing robes kicking a football around a stony courtyard look up to see an approaching stranger. Social interaction is easy when you're obviously 'not from around here' and in broken English they extend an invitation out of the bitter cold and into the monasterial calm. When the conversation drifts to my employer disciple #1 extends a hand into his sleeve and slides out his mobile phone comparing it to the newer, bulkier, 3G model that I've borrowed for this trip. Without breaking the steady flow of our conversation he holds a phone in each hand, deftly pairs both devices, and data-mines mine for photos, wallpapers and ring tones – transferring the ones that take his fancy to his own device. I'm not quite sure what higher calling they teach here but his multi-tasking skills are finessed well beyond the skills of this mere mortal.

A fortnight later and I'm huddled under the awning of a cycle rickshaw parked on the fringes of Lhasa's Barkhor Square. The driver of the rickshaw is patiently explaining how Tibet has changed during his lifetime with a cheery demeanor that belies both his scant winter trade and his likely disposable income. It's close to midnight and the traders selling incense, herbal remedies and prayer wheels to the devotional have left hours ago leaving the square deserted save for a light dusting of snow and a descending mist. A muffled ring tone can be heard under layers of clothes and he pulls off a glove, reaches into his coat, draws out a RAZR – his wife wants to know when he can be expected home. He drops me at the delightfully named Yak Hotel and cycles into the night.

Almost a year later and I'm with a colleague conducting ad hoc interviews in the back streets around Cairo's Ramses Railway Station – on the lookout for interesting characters doing things in (hopefully) interesting ways. The owner of a small café beckons us over and after explaining who we are and the purpose of our research we make a start on the questions. Fortunately the midday heat has dissipated to the point where I no longer drip sweat on the interview participants and towards the end of our conversation the owner gives permission to snap a few photos of himself and the artifacts that make this place what it is. Before I can take the lens cap off, a waiter pulls out a 6600 and documents us documenting him.

Stories echoed from Nairobi to New York to New Delhi, and yes, you probably have a few of your own.

But have you ever stopped to wonder why? Why, regardless of culture, age, gender and increasingly context you're likely to find a mobile phone in the hand, pocket or bag of the person next to you? Put simply – the ability to communicate over distances in a personal convenient manner is universally understood and appreciated, and it's easy enough to get the basics without going to night school or taking a PhD. It certainly helps that, as a functional tool that can be used discreetly or with a flourish, the mobile phone makes an ideal vehicle for projecting one's status and personal preferences – from the choice of brand, model, ring tone or wallpaper, or simply that (because you're connected) you've arrived.

Today over 3 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people have cellular connectivity and it is expected that another billion will be connected by 2010. But what is often overlooked is the disproportionate impact of mobile phones on different societies, which is one of the reasons why, as researchers, we increasingly prefer to spend time in places like Cairo and Kampala: there is simply more to learn. These are places where for many, it's the first time they have the ability to communicate personally and conveniently over distances – without having to worry whether someone can overhear the topic of their conversation – communicate with whom they want, when they want. It makes new businesses viable and creates markets where there was none. For many it's the first time they can provide a stable fixed point of reference to the outside world – a phone number, which in turn creates a new form of identity that in turn enables everything from rudimentary banking to commerce. And not least – each new feature on or accessible through the mobile phone brings new modes of use – unencumbered by my, and probably your entrenched (and increasingly outdated) notions of entertainment, the 'right' way to capture and share experiences, the internet. If you work or study in the mobile space and you're expected to innovate, these are places that bring fresh thinking and new perspectives.

Much of our research started out as an attempt to understand the similarities and differences to what we already knew in order to create products and services that are more in tune with local markets. But increasingly we've had our eyes opened to the sheer ingenuity of people who figure out ways of doing a lot with very little – highly relevant for a planet having to make stark choices about sparse resources. For example the practices around sharing have helped shape our notions of ownership and access – that we've applied to the thinking and design of future infrastructures. Our research into illiteracy highlighted the practice of delegating tasks that require an understanding of words and numbers to other people – and that in fact delegation is a solution for many system design problems – what do we expect the user to do, what can be delegated to technology, and especially relevant to the close-knit communities in emerging markets – what can be delegated to other people? The extent and sophistication of the street repair cultures have changed the way we think about how our products are made, distributed, disposed of and recycled. And occasionally we come across something so elegant and in tune with the local conditions that it could never be designed for – like Sente, the informal practice of sending and converting airtime into cash, effectively allowing anyone with a mobile phone to function as a rudimentary ATM machine. Not least if you want to create a service that people value, you'd be hard pressed to find a more critical group of consumers than people with limited and infrequent levels of disposable income.

This is not to say that you can't find examples like this in Tokyo, London or New York, but rather that they are harder to spot. And this is not to say that there is only one story in 'emerging markets' – India's middle class is approaching the size of, oh, the combined populations of Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom and yes now is a good time to get your kids signed up to that Mandarin class.

But back to Ulan Bataar, Lhasa and Cairo and the big trends that will affect the next wave of innovation. As objects become smaller, their ability to travel further and travel faster grows – technologies that are considered cutting edge in London today will rapidly disseminate to Lagos and yes, to the rickshaw driver in Lhasa. The dissemination is helped by: a shared appreciation of the value of the mobile phone and what it enables – creating demand pull; the sheer volumes of an infrastructure that supports a billion+ products a year industry; the replacement cycle of feature-rich mobile phones in developed markets and formal and informal ways of getting these products into local markets; and the fact that these markets are resourceful in keeping these products alive, long after they would have entered landfill elsewhere.

A few months ago and I'm standing in a very dusty Nima market, situated close to the heart of Accra, having tagged along with colleagues from our LA design studio who are here to iterate a number of new design ideas. Right now I'm just getting in the way so it's an opportunity to wander off, meet and greet. One gentleman extends his hand in the local version of the hand-shake, a LiveStrong bracelet dangles from his wrist, or more to the point a local variation of the LiveStrong bracelet. Yet another small object that has sufficient value to be locally appreciated, but is still not quite understood in the way that its designer intended.

Small objects travel further and travel faster – their meaning adapting to the ever-changing context. Every step an opportunity.

This article was written for receiver

Full list of Jan Chipchase's presentations here.

Contact: Jan Chipchase

------------------------------------------------------------

Share this page

Mobile banking – the next phase in Africa’s mobile revolution

Toby Shapshak — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:10:19 +0000

Toby Shapshak

Toby Shapshak is an award-winning technology journalist based in Johannesburg, where he edits the South African edition of Stuff magazine and writes a column on technology trends for The Times newspaper. He has been an editor at the Mail & Guardian, GQ and ThisDay. He also runs Maven Media, an internet and publishing consultancy, whose clients have included Nokia, Microsoft, HP, and several of the country's largest banks. In "Mobile banking – the next phase in Africa's mobile revolution" he portrays the impact of cellphone banking and mobile commerce on unbanked regions and migrant economies in Africa.

http://www.mavenmedia.co.za

Javascript required to view this content

Artwork by Long Wen

All artworks in this receiver issue are part of a student project by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

...........................................................................................................................................................................

Johannes is a farm labourer in South Africa's Mpumulanga province, far away from a major town and further still from the country's world-class banking infrastructure. Working for cash, Johannes had never opened a bank account before banking consultant Beyers Coetzee flew a two-seater plane to the farm he worked on and opened his first account.

The remarkable thing is not the admittedly rare fly-in service, but that Johannes' bank account is entirely opened and operated through his cellphone. The bank is Wizzit, a division of The South African Bank of Athens Limited, which is turning banking on its head using the ever-present mobile phone. Cellphone banking is growing markedly in a country where far more people own cellphones than they do computers.

Wizzit is a remarkable success story of innovative thinking, clever and appropriate solutions and satisfied customers. Most of its users have never owned bank accounts, but they have cellphones. Linking the bank accounts to the cellular subscriptions not only gives them an account, but use-anywhere, anytime mobile banking. After the spread of the mobile propelled the continent into the global communications village almost a decade ago, this is the next phase in Africa's mobile revolution.

Wizzit is starting in the farming heartland of South Africa and in under-serviced urban areas, while Kenyan network Safaricom's M-Pesa service has revolutionized mobile payments in that east African country, and 40%-owner Vodafone is sure to roll it out in the other countries it operates in. Already its 50% subsidiary Vodacom, which is the largest operator in South Africa, has launched it in Tanzania.

By early this year, M-Pesa's payment mechanism was threatening to change the nature of payment in Kenya. By December 2007, it had 1 million customers who had made $7 million in transactions, and by January 2008 it had 1.6 million customers, according to Balancing Act, an African telecoms research house. Balancing Act's Russell Southwood is right on the money when he says, "This looks as though it will be the breakthrough moment for mobile-enabled cash transaction services in Africa."

The principle difference between Wizzit and M-Pesa is that the latter works without a bank account. This payment model only allows payments to another cellphone user, without all the value-added benefits of banking services, but it allows person-to-person transfers, which is sorely needed in Africa with its massive migrant workforces.

Mobile payments present a lifeline to Africa's so-called unbanked, those who earn too little or are out of the catchment area of banking infrastructure.

Wizzit

M-Pesa

Good signs

The portents for mobile banking are very good. At the end of 2005, Africa had 135 million mobile subscribers. By the end of 2010, it will have 400 million subscribers according to some projections. Such growth is impressive, given how far Africa's telecoms has come, with cellphone users growing from 2 million in 1997 to 30 million in 2000, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations telecommunications regulatory body.

With an estimated $93bn in remittances sent home to and in Africa each year, according to figures quoted by the BBC, there is massive potential for the money transfer industry. The World Bank says remittances sent from nearly 200 million migrant workers to developing countries totalled £102bn last year.

"The GSM Association, which represents more than 700 mobile operators worldwide, believes this could quadruple by 2012 if transfers by SMS become the norm. Vodafone has entered a partnership with Citigroup that would soon allow Kenyans in the UK to send money home via text message. The charge for sending £50 is expected to be about £3, less than a third of what some traditional services charge," the Guardian reported.

Meanwhile, in South Africa, "Mobile banking should overtake our internet client base in the next two years," says Christo Vrey, the managing executive of digital channels at Absa, South Africa's largest bank and a Barclays subsidiary. According to Vrey, South Africa currently has 2 million online bankers and about 1.3 million mobile bankers.

Cellphone banking in South Africa more than doubled in one year, according to the Mobility 2007 research study by researchers World Wide Worx, as another large SA bank, FNB Cellphone Banking, last year reached the significant one million transactions per month mark. The survey found that mobile commerce – purchases and payments via a cellphone – also increased significantly. "However, most of these purchases are for prepaid airtime top-ups – simple to do on a cellphone – as opposed to product or service payments," says World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck.

Migrant workforce

An estimated 60% of Africa's one billion inhabitants are under 30 years old, meaning they are 'born free' into an age where mobile use is widespread and acceptable. Such technological adoption can help with the continent's perennial curses: lack of infrastructure, poverty and acute underemployment.

Millions of Africans work as migrant labourers in their own country, or in neighbouring ones; while many make the perilous journey, often as illegal immigrants, all the way down to South Africa. This migrant economy needs to send money home to wives and children, elderly parents and younger siblings. Zimbabweans in South Africa, for instance, can keep extended families of up to 20 alive with both money and food shipments, as societal breakdown, hyperinflation and shortages in foreign currency mean not even basic foodstuffs are available.

To send money back to a small village often requires physical cash to be sent via a chain of bus and long-distance minivan drivers, all of whom take a cut along the way. This transport fee can be as much as 20%, sometimes more if police roadblocks are encountered. By comparison, M-Pesa costs about $1 to send or receive money, and is an almost instantaneous transaction, unencumbered by the delays associated with money transfers and postal money orders.

No wonder M-Pesa was an instant success. "Within two weeks of the launch over 10,000 account holders were registered and more than $100,000 had been transferred," Michael Joseph, Safaricom's chief executive, told the BBC. M-Pesa grew out of a trial for a money transfer service in the micro-finance industry three years ago, demonstrating how much of a need there is for such transfer, and perhaps even micro-lending, services.

Overcoming challenges

But there are pitfalls and challenges that are endemic to Africa. Infrastructure remains the biggest obstacle to uptake, as banks or payment services require identification and verification on sign-up. South Africa, for instance, has adopted stringent money laundering requirements, in line with global anti-terrorism legislation, which include proof of residence before a bank account can be opened.

Wizzit solves this problem by using what it calls Wizzkids, who help new subscribers sign up and show them through the system. In cases such as Johannes', a pilot like Coetzee flies in to do the paperwork. Coetzee was invited to Elandslaagte Farm by its co-owner Marisa van der Heever. She not only wanted to give her employees access to banking, but also to reduce the hard cash in circulation, which is often a target for rural criminals. It also allows workers to save their money more easily, she says. What's more, Coetzee was able to open accounts for her 54 workers in less than an hour.

Once a Wizzit account is open, deposits can be made electronically and transferred to other Wizzit users or to pay accounts, including such things as utilities accounts. Wizzit has a range of retailers and stores who accept payment from it, as well as Maestro debit cards and access to internet banking and ATM-based banking.

M-Pesa uses Safaricom's network of retail stores to 'deposit' money, and subscribers are given electronic vouchers with a security PIN code, which is how Kenyans transfer money to distant relatives. Safaricom's agents, who already sell pre-paid airtime and other services for the cellular network, function as 'branches' for the physical cash to be withdrawn, using the banking infrastructure effectively provided by M-Pesa.

Another concern is that handsets may well be shared and people other than the primary owner have access to the phone. The services offered by Wizzit and M-Pesa require a user to input a PIN code, much like an ATM card. However, like early ATM use, there is the potential for scamming and hustling of first-time users, the elderly or those who don't understand the technology, or simply cannot read.

A lot of Africa's poorer population, especially in rural areas, suffer from illiteracy. However they are functionally numerate. SMS services in Senegal, for instance, include small pictures of fruit and vegetables in an astounding operation which lets farmers find out, via text message, what prices they can expect to fetch at various markets. Farmers then decide which market will yield the higher rate before they transport their goods.

In spite of all the challenges that still lay ahead, analysts and observers are bullish about mobile payments' prospects. As the London-based Digital Money Forum concluded, "M-Pesa is a valuable case study of digital money in action. It involves replacing cash with electronic money, it is for the mass market, it radically reduces transaction costs (for the least well-off), it provides new functionality including remote payments and, most of all, it provides an infrastructure that delivers capability and efficiency to the microfinance world, allowing them to stimulate new growth, new business and new opportunities."

It's the next phase in the mobile revolution in Africa and might even be more significant than the first which opened up communications to all.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Toby Shapshak

------------------------------------------------------------

Share this page

StoryBank – using mobiles to share stories in an Indian village

David Frohlich, Matt Jones — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:04:16 +0000

David Frohlich and Matt Jones

David Frohlich is the Director of the Digital World Research Centre and Professor of Interaction Design at the University of Surrey, where he works on future photography, literacy and communication technologies. Before joining Digital World, Frohlich, who has a PhD in psychology, spent 14 years as Senior Research Scientist at Hewlett Packard Labs, a time devoted to tangible interfaces, new media design, and the digital divide. Matt Jones returned from New Zealand to Wales to help set up the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University. As a Reader in the FIT Lab he explores the human-computer interaction aspects of mobile and ubiquitous computing as well as socially-inclusive and impacting design. He recently co-authored Mobile Interaction Design (Wiley 2006). For the last two years, Frohlich and Jones have worked together on StoryBank, a project enabling textual and computer illiterate people to build a repository of audio-visual content via camera phones. Here's their report from Budikote, a village in rural India.

http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/storybank/index.php

Javascript required to view this content

Artwork by Zhu Yue Yao

All artworks in this receiver issue are part of a student project by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

...........................................................................................................................................................................

Have you just updated your Facebook status? Watched a video on YouTube? Uploaded your latest holiday photos to Flickr, perhaps? If not, you're quite unusual. Hundreds of millions of us have caught the user-generated content habit over the last couple of years and many now regularly slide or flip open their mobile to participate in this revolution.

Of course, people have always wanted to express themselves by capturing and sharing the moment – before Last.fm playlists, teenagers would swap home-mixes of their favourite records, and we've all inflicted photo album flicking sessions on friends and loved ones. Recently though, there's been a proliferation of cheap, convenient ways to capture and store content, especially via mobile phones. Then, along came innovative services, dubbed Web 2.0, that so elegantly weave technological and social networks together. So, within a few years, we've moved from a world of 'personal' content to one where a user called guitar90 can make a simple video of his musical skill, upload it to YouTube, and attract 37 million (and counting) of us to view it.

The guitar90 phenomenon

And yet, what we are beginning to take for granted would strike billions of people as extraordinary. The majority of the world's population – in places like rural India and China, many countries in Africa, remote islands in the Pacific – live on a different technological planet, without access to computers or networks; they are on the wrong side of what's been called the 'global digital divide'. In all the talk about computing becoming just like a utility as common and pervasive as electricity it is good to be reminded of facts like these: Africa accounts for just 3.5% of the total users of the web; North America, with a third of the population, 18%; Ethiopia, with a population around that of the UK, has just 10,000 users.

Things are changing though, with many countries seeing dramatic improvements in access to communications and IT. Mobile phones are having a particular impact, and the StoryBank project, based in a rural Indian region, has been looking at ways of using them to enable technology-poor villagers to participate in and benefit from content creation and sharing activities. Skipping the text-based internet paradigm altogether, the project is exploring how camera phones and a library of digital stories (the story-bank) can be used to extend existing initiatives in community radio.

The project is funded by the one of the UK's research funding agencies, the Engineering Physical Science Research Council, and is a collaboration between several universities and local organisations. It is based in Budikote, a bumpy two hour drive from Bangalore. Unlike hectic, bustling Bangalore, with its burgeoning IT industry, Budikote is a small community of some 3,000 people, supported by agriculture. Goats and cows wander the dusty main road; monkeys chatter in the trees; people gather under the shade of trees to eat food bought from the roadside stalls and chat. Most people in the village have low levels of literacy and their exposure to computers is very limited. However, at the start of 2007 one of the mobile phone operators in India installed a base-station, and within 9 months around 90% of the households had access to a mobile phone.

While village textual literacy rates are low, visual and oral expression thrive. From daybreak to dusk, colour and imagery are all around – each morning, women chalk up intricate rangoli patterns outside the entrances of their homes, to greet the day. There's a long tradition of storytelling in the region, too, and during one of the fieldtrips we witnessed an interesting method of communal storytelling that demonstrated a striking mixture of audio and visual expression: the storyteller slowly unfurled a scroll to reveal images to complement his patter. Throughout the tale, a band played accompanying music in the background. This kind of creativity is also used in the production of a daily community radio broadcast called Namma Dhwani or 'our voices': a village committee decides what kind of programmes to make and volunteers from the village, mainly women, undertake to research and record news items on health, education, farming and other topics that are broadcast alongside devotional music and public service announcements.

The starting point for the StoryBank project then, was a sense that the villagers had valuable stories and information to share, which might be extended with new technology. In particular, the way they currently told stories with pictures and music might be used to enliven radio content, or could be captured and shared in new ways. This observation led us to examine the way community radio programmes are made and enjoyed, and identify some real benefits that might be achieved with digital technology. These included widening participation through making stories on a mobile phone, using photographs as illustrations, and providing 'listen again' facilities in a convenient location.

So the system we've built has at its heart a large touch screen display in the village's community resource centre. This is a place where self-help groups gather, school children hang out and other villagers often pass through for information or to bump into their friends. Then, there are the mobile phones, Nokia N80s, donated by Nokia, a partner in the project. Villagers make short stories of up to six images and a two-minute audio track on the phones. They can then go to the community centre and donate their content to the StoryBank. Alternatively, they might want to share their story with others – the phone has a special-purpose media player and stories can be transferred to other phones over Bluetooth. All of the stories are available for browsing on the StoryBank screen – groups can watch them together and they can be downloaded to the phones for later viewing.

Click the picture to watch the movie

Remember, though, the special context of the village – very few people can read and write and computer skills are low. The design of the system takes these aspects into account. No text is used in any of the user interfaces and traditional menus with their options, sub-options, and sub-sub-options have been replaced by more direct forms of interaction.

Take the StoryBank display, as an example. We've used a dynamic visual collage to display the stories – media squares, each containing a villager's story, continuously emerge, float and shrink within the display. Tapping on any of the squares brings up the story in full screen mode. Quicker access to particular types of content is possible too – pressing icons filters the collage so that only stories of the selected types, say health or education, bubble to the surface.

Touch screen display with stories being collaged dynamically

After refining the design and operation of the system with the locals, we worked with two non-governmental organisations in the village to put it to the test. MYRADA, who run the resource centre, recruited three community representatives to give out the phones, while VOICES, who set up the community radio station, trained up the representatives in using the phones and display, and acted as our eyes and ears to see how they would be used. Ten phones were deployed for about 5 weeks at the end of last year and could be used to record audio-photo stories about anything the villagers thought other people might like to know about. These stories were regularly transferred to the touch screen display, where a collection of digitized radio broadcasts were also stored. As the number of stories grew, regular visitors to the resource centre were invited to view them on the shared display, and individual visitors increased as news of particular stories spread by word of mouth.

During the trial period, hundreds of villagers took part both in creating stories and viewing them on the StoryBank. The system gave a public voice to many more people in the village than ever before. People of all ages, castes and occupations were involved – school children and young people were particularly enthusiastic, but other groups also participated – including farmers, labourers, health workers, auto drivers, teachers, cleaners, shopkeepers, carpenters and housewives. This wide participation of people in the trial reflected the usability of our phone and display interfaces, and shows that it is possible to create and share digital content without any textual input and output, or prior knowledge of multimedia editing tools and computers.

To understand what villagers were using the StoryBank system for, we looked at the process and content of story creation, and asked them which stories they found useful and why. Although we wanted the phones to be loaned to individual authors for short periods of time, we discovered a great reticence by community representatives to give them out overnight. So story creation was usually done in their presence, and was initially stimulated by a community meeting where over 250 story ideas were deliberately brainstormed across a range of topic categories. While this was not how we intended the phones to be used, this behaviour dramatically demonstrates the community nature of technology use in this context, and immediately highlights the need for better ways of tracking and sharing mobile phones originally designed for personal use. It also shows that the creation of StoryBank stories was approached by the community in the same way as the creation of community radio programmes – planned by a committee for practical community benefit. However, not everything about this process went to plan.

Only about a fifth of planned stories were actually made. These comprised about a third (46) of the total number of recorded stories (137), with two-thirds added more spontaneously by villager authors themselves (91). This resulted in the spread of story topics. Often the planned stories were of serious development content such as how to grow rice, local crops, sheep rearing or the medicinal uses of plants, while the unplanned stories were more frivolous in nature such as beauty tips, mythical stories, songs or, in one case, pictures and descriptions of a student's best paintings. Sometimes the unplanned content was simply a very current news item, such as a report of the village celebration of 'state day'. This was very popular for a few days afterwards. There was also a mis-match between the most popular stories made and those people most preferred to watch – stories on education, student issues, entertainment and farming were the most commonly created, while those on entertainment, student issues and health were the ones people liked the most. Many people spoke about the attraction of more personal stories on the touch screen display, despite the lack of a 'personal' topic icon or category for classifying them. For example, a story showing a series of children talking about themselves was very popular with their peer group.

Story types created during the trial

These story examples show just how different and how similar the use of media sharing technologies can be across the global digital divide. In Budikote village, the provision of an ICT system like StoryBank for sharing information about a health issue or crop problem is perceived as a serious working tool for health professionals, farmers and other workers, and of genuine potential value for village development. At the same time, the system also allows new forms of personal expression for the wider community, through combinations of pictures and sounds. Like any other children and teenagers in the developing world, those of Budikote are delighted to have their 'fifteen minutes of fame' (in two minute chunks) by sharing recorded thoughts, achievements and experiences with their friends. The local phone and repository architecture of the StoryBank system doesn't yet match the coverage of an internet-based YouTube or Facebook system, but its use begins to show a similar revolution in personal information sharing not so far removed from the examples we started with. The difference is that it is used here as a community resource for work-related as well as personal information, and mediated by a device which is accessible free of charge to almost everybody in a spoken language community: the text-free Bluetooth camera phone.

This article was written for receiver

Acknowledgements: the StoryBank Project is funded by the EPSRC. In addition to the authors the team includes Dorothy Rachovides, Eran Edirisinghe, Will Harwood, Mounia Lalmas, Dhamikke Wickramanayake, Paul Palmer, Arthur Williams, Roger Tucker, Ram Bhat and Maxine Frank.

Contact: David Frohlich and Matt Jones

------------------------------------------------------------

Share this page

Mobile learning in ‘developing’ countries – not so different

john_traxler — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:00:39 +0000

John Traxler

John Traxler is Reader in Mobile Technology for e-Learning at the University of Wolverhampton and Director of the Learning Lab in rural Shropshire. He has been involved in much of the definitive work in mobile learning in the UK, including the EU mlearning Project, the UK MoLeNET programme and the international mLearn conference series. He has also contributed to the thinking and practice of mobile learning in sub-Saharan Africa. In this piece he makes some observations about mobile learning in the so-called developing world. Traxler questions whether the dichotomy between 'developed' and 'developing', usually the basis for such thinking, is helpful, and whether mobile phone technologies reinforce, replicate, reduce or merely confuse 'digital divides' between the 'developing' and 'developed'.

Traxler's site

Javascript required to view this content

Artwork by Long Wen

All artworks in this receiver issue are part of a student project by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

...........................................................................................................................................................................

To start with 'mobile learning' is certainly not merely the conjunction of 'mobile' and 'learning'; it has always been taken to implicitly mean 'mobile e-learning' and its history has to be understood as a response to, reaction against and a development from the experiences of 'conventional' e-learning, its perceived inadequacies and its perceived limitations. Over about the last ten years 'conventional' e-learning has been exemplified technologically by the rise of virtual learning environments (VLEs), such as WebCT and Blackboard, and the demise of computer-assisted learning 'packages', by expectations of ever increasing multi-media interactivity, power, speed, capacity, functionality and bandwidth in networked PC platforms. Pedagogically, we have seen the rise of social constructivist models of learning over previous behaviourist ones. All this is however only really true for Europe, North America and East Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa the term 'mobile learning' is recognised but as something grafted onto a tradition of open and distance learning and onto different pedagogic traditions, ones that have concentrated on didactic approaches rather than discursive ones. Mobile learning in these parts of the world is a reaction to different challenges and different limitations – usually those of infrastructure, poverty, distance or sparsity.

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, this infrastructure is characterised by:

poor roads and postal services
rural areas of considerable sparsity of population, and of nomadism, pastoralism and subsistence
poor landline phone networks, often or previously state-owned or state-run
unreliable and intermittent mains electricity
little or no internet bandwidth outside one or two major cities
often just internet cafés or hotels in some large cities
few modern PCs or peripherals in the any of the public sectors
little or no user expertise, especially outside bigger towns

These characteristics are however often balanced by:

lively, entrepreneurial and energetic mobile phone networks
the potential for solar power, or other locally produced electricity
a regulatory and licensing system in a state of flux
high levels of mobile phone ownership, acceptance and usage, usually on a 'pay-as-you-go' basis, and sophisticated sub-cultures of use expressed as languages, protocols and etiquettes specific to communities of mobile users

Whilst it is possible to characterise much of sub-Saharan Africa as 'developing', not 'developed', we should be cautious about making assumptions based on these terms.

The first of these assumptions is that e-learning evolves along some predetermined trajectory and that this leads to mobile learning. This trajectory involves first mains electricity and buildings, then desktop PCs, CD-ROMs, email and local area networks, then VLEs, broadband connectivity and multimedia content and finally mobile learning. Having reached this last stage, a country has 'caught up'. Alongside this assumption is another one – that 'e-learning-developed' countries are one homogeneous category and that 'e-learning-developing' countries are another equally homogeneous category. The process of development is the process of transferring countries from one category to the other. A sad consequence of these assumptions has been the drive to market large, expensive and prestigious conventional e-learning systems in parts of sub-Saharan Africa that do not have the capacity or the infrastructure to exploit them. The developed/developing dichotomy in fact conceals more complexities (including aspects of technology access and use, and of dependency, disadvantage and division) than it reveals, and every new technology, including mobile phone technology, has the potential to create new dimensions to disadvantage, but also to trouble other, existing dimensions of disadvantage.

Looking at policy, infrastructure, resource distribution, organisational issues, culture and pedagogy suggests that rural communities, ethnic minorities and the urban dispossessed, whatever the setting, share many attributes of disadvantage with societies in sub-Saharan Africa. An editor asked me to write a piece on mobile learning and remote communities and was surprised when I asked to include communities of homeless people sleeping on the street outside my English university. A debate framed in terms of developed/developing is intrinsically problematic and also obscures other dimensions of disadvantage such as ethnicity, gender, age and regionality. In the context of the current article, we should be conscious of what mobile learning in sub-Saharan Africa can teach us wherever we work.

That said, let us look at examples of mobile learning based on mobile phone technologies in sub-Saharan Africa and discuss their significance.

SEMA

In 2003, the Government of Kenya announced the introduction of free primary education, leading to an increase in primary enrolment of nearly one million. The subsequent fall in the school population pointed to a retention problem aggravated by over-crowding and under-training. A major challenge was to increase the numbers of trained teachers rapidly whilst at the same time improving the quality of the school system. The UK Department for International Development (DFID) helped the Kenyan Ministry of Education in the development of an in-service distance learning programme (SEMA) specifically intended to meet the needs of 200,000 primary school teachers. Alongside print, video, radio and audio there was an SMS component. This provided a secure, free, managed messaging service that connected teachers and officials in local clusters in order to provide study support material and group chats about current topics. This underwent small-scale field trials in early 2006 and larger field trials in late 2006. The system was free to authorised users via a short-code. The messages themselves have a limited and predefined syntax, each type starting with a keyword, and the system was been extended to gather and analyse schools' enrolment data. At the end of the second trials, the technical and organisational achievements of the system were impressive. Twelve districts in 8 provinces and the Ministry itself were involved and the total number of users was about 8000. About 85% of the registered users were active on the system and over 3000 participants were female. Users consumed over a quarter of a million SMS messages. The system should have undergone a final evaluation in early 2008. Sadly, the political situation currently precludes this but fieldwork will start as soon as normalcy is restored. Exploring teachers' attitudes and expectations will be crucial to developing a sustainable system embedded across the education system.

Curiously, in the course of lengthy technical specification meetings for the SEMA project attended by Ministry officials, practising teachers, technical developers and various other stakeholders, there was a chance conversation with a representative of the Kenyan National Examinations Council, responsible for administering national attainment tests to children through the schools, about the Council's difficulties ensuring that head teachers registered all the eligible children. Some months later, the Council had talked to consultants and technologists and now publishes an advertisement in the national press giving a premium rate phone number for parents to message that automatically replies with details of their children's test registrations. The scheme is self-financing and transparent.

University of Pretoria

The University's Unit for Distance Education has a very high proportion of students who are serving teachers in remote rural areas in South Africa where there is very little infrastructure for access. In common with elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the students generally do not have access to computers, the internet or any other technology (only about 1% have email access). However, most have mobile phones. The Unit started using SMS for basic administrative support during 2002 in three existing training programmes for in-service teachers offered by this unit, focussing on reminders of important dates for activities like contact classes, examination registration and examinations, as well as notification of study material distribution.

More recently, the Unit explored the use of SMS for academic learning support purposes. It ran a second exploratory pilot project in one of its modules where asynchronous academic SMS learning support tools have been introduced to explore how registered adult learners experience these tools. Academic mobile phone interventions included: a chance for students to pose their academic questions via SMS and receive specific feedback on this; the chance to phone in and listen to a series of carefully designed mini-lectures on specific academic issues via interactive-voice-response technology; various interactive multiple-choice quizzes delivered to mobile phones by SMS and instructional SMS pointing students to specific academic resources required for specific tasks. This illustrates that the priorities in sub-Saharan Africa are pastoral, academic and organisational support blended into whatever are the elements of the course.

MobilED

In South Africa, the MobilED project aims to design teaching and learning environments that are enhanced with mobile technologies and services. There are various phases, scenarios and deliverables; the first phase of the project included the design, development and piloting of a prototype platform where multimedia and language technologies (voice, text, images) are used via the mobile phone as tools in the learning process. The first two pilots focused on the use of low-cost mobile phones, which are readily available in the developing world. It consisted of the development of a mobile audio-Wikipedia, using SMS and text-to-speech technologies to enable access to information as well as the contribution of information using voice. The application has been tested and results compared between a poor, rural school environment and a nearby affluent private school environment in the suburbs of Pretoria, South Africa. The basic technology components that are used in the project are: mobile devices and networks such as GSM phones, multimedia phones, internet, tablets, PDAs, the XO laptop, etc; Wikipedia; social software such as MediaWiki, blogs, knowledge building tools, etc; open source language technologies such as speech interfaces, audio usage, etc; and open source telephony and software frameworks and platforms. This system is technically and pedagogically one of the most imaginative and exciting, showing us how to use SMS messaging to interrogate a database, in this case Wikipedia, and how to use text-to-speech to provide content for learners.

In South Africa, the MobilED project aims to design teaching and learning environments that are enhanced with mobile technologies and services ...

DEEP

The Digital Education Enhancement Project (DEEP) researched the impact of mobile technologies on teachers' pedagogy and practice and carried out two research studies specifically on the use of handheld technologies. The first study took place in 24 primary schools in Egypt and Eastern Cape, South Africa, with 48 teachers and over 2000 pupils. The teachers carried out and evaluated a sequence of school-based professional development activities using a range of new technologies, including handheld computers, funded by DFID. In this study, the HP Jornada 565 Pocket PC was viewed primarily as a source of personal support for project teachers. All were novice users of handheld computers. A range of professional development activities, created as illustrated e-books, was installed on the handhelds. Videos, audio clips, web links and classroom resources related to these activities were also provided. A second study involving 28 teachers in 14 schools in the Eastern Cape funded the NGO bridges.org. New professional development activities have been devised specifically for this study, orientated towards handheld use for the Eastern Cape context, and e-books developed with the local culture, literature and environment in mind. Each teacher has an iPAQ (with Pocket Excel, Pocket Word, Pocket MSN, i Task, Outlook, Microsoft Reader, Calculate, Games, iPAQ image zone) and professional resources. This project showed how handheld technologies with no connectivity could still catalyse a dramatic improvement in teachers' professional development in deeply rural communities.

Conclusions

Handheld computers, media players and laptops are few and far between in sub-Saharan Africa whilst mobile phones are universally owned, understood and accepted, so it is hardly surprising that 'mobile learning' becomes synonymous with text-messaging. The dominant educational modes are didactic or 'instructivist', certainly not discursive, so whilst messaging is sometimes used to transmit content, it is more often used to support, administer and manage students, often distance learning or in-service students. This is a reasonable sustainable model since students already own phones. Where it is possible to provide handheld computer functionality, as either PDA or smart-phone, content delivery, activity and interactivity become possible and attractive.

The mobile phone will undoubtedly be the technology of choice for a host of reasons for the foreseeable future and text messaging in the near future will be the preferred medium. Increasing the proportion and quality of educational (rather than pastoral, organisational and operational) messaging is a challenge everywhere in the world and may not even be culturally appropriate or acceptable in some developing countries; developing local and sustainable business models for mobile learning is still a challenge, too – in both the 'developed' and the 'developing' worlds. It is however still very likely that mobile learning can make a large, varied and growing contribution to the well-being of many, many people as it evolves and engages with different societies and cultures, because mobile devices are such a ubiquitous and universal part of people living their lives.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: John Traxler

------------------------------------------------------------

Share this page

Mobile communication in the developing world – a design challenge

neil_clavin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:02:33 +0000

Neil Clavin

Neil Clavin is a design manager for Vodafone Group User Experience. He worked as a user experience designer for BBC New Media & Technology and as a research assistant for Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London, before joining the Vodafone User Experience Concept Development Team based in Düsseldorf, Germany. There, he leads concept design for mobile communication, information and entertainment experiences. In his paper for receiver Clavin argues that for better design, we must first of all understand different user needs around the world. The prime design challenges he sees are: richer communication, social tools and reconfigurable interfaces.

http://www.vodafone.com

Javascript required to view this content

Artwork by Ren Lin Xiao

All artworks in this receiver issue are part of a student project by the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

...........................................................................................................................................................................

"I want my phone to last for as long as I live," remarks Rajesh as he shows off his new Nokia phone. The phone cost Rajesh about a month's salary and he protects it with a plastic cover against dirt and scratches. It has a monochrome screen, a keypad and no web browser. We stand admiring the phone in the small, spartan tenement Rajesh shares with six other men in the slums of Mumbai.

Of the 1 million people who become mobile phone users every day, 85% live in the developing world. In India there are 8.3 million new mobile phone users every month; India adds only a mere 6 million PC users in a whole year. In Africa 20% of the population now have a cell phone, a quadruple increase since 2001.

Operators and manufacturers have historically designed for advanced countries. Mobile interface design has been aimed at literate, numerate users who follow text-based menus, sometimes read instruction books and have built mental models for how mobiles work based on previous technologies.

Current mobile interfaces and services are not designed for the developing regions of the world – many users have problems reading and writing, some services are not relevant and native languages not always supported. Many users complete only the basic functions of dialling a number or answering an incoming call.

Simple low literacy interfaces

Rajesh runs a fruit stand in Kandivali, an upper-middle class neighbourhood in bustling Mumbai. Business is brisk as housewives filter down the street shopping for groceries. Rajesh's phone rings – it's a call from a customer seeking a home delivery. In India, traders will make home deliveries at no extra cost. Rajesh confirms the order, hangs up, then turns to a colleague and asks, "Can you save this number for me?"

There are 799 million illiterate people in the world. Nearly half of them live in India. Low literacy users have a basic grasp of numbers and can easily make and receive phone calls. However, problems arise with reading or writing text-based messages.

Users with reading problems cannot use text menu based interfaces to store contact details, and as a result insert numbers directly to the phone. If a user needs to save a contact he will ask a literate colleague to assist with the procedure. So quite often users' phonebooks contain a maximum of only 5-10 numbers. Research shows a direct relationship between the amount of contacts and the number of calls made. To increase the number of calls made, operators must ensure that it is easy and intuitive to use the contacts book.

Simple low literacy interfaces will enable users to send messages, use the phonebook and further services.

A radical alternative was recently announced by Indian operator Spice Mobile completely dispensing with text-based interfaces by offering an ultra low cost device without a screen. The Spice Rs800 promotes the "power of the spoken word" for illiterate and visually impaired users with a Braille keypad and voice interfaces.

Social and community tools

"The only reason I am in Mumbai is to earn money to support my family," confesses Rajesh. Rajesh grew up in a small rural village in the Bihar region. He lived there with his parents, brothers and sisters. When Rajesh's father passed away, he was sent to the city to work and provide for the rest of the family. Family ties and the home village exert a strong influence on Rajesh and offer stability from the turbulence of the city.

"When I feel like it and when I have money, I visit my family in the village. I bring gifts or give presents to my colleagues who travel there to transport," he comments. The train journey from Mumbai on the western coast to Bihar in the north east bordering Nepal is very expensive and over 48 hours long. As a result Rajesh visits maybe once or twice a year. Alternative ways of maintaining contact over a distance become very important.

In many developing regions workers leave their rural village, partner, friends and family to work in the city and send money home. The city may be hundreds of kilometres from their village. In India for example high transport costs and long distances can mean a man may not see his wife and children for 1-3 years.

Besides using a mobile device for voice calls there is a desire for richer remote experiences between urban workers and the rural family – like receiving and sending images, videos and messages. Media blogging to a shared space can help reinforce family bonds. A current Nokia project will allow Kenyan users to post personal information such as CVs, family history and prices via a voice interface to an "audio homepage".

Migrant workers rely on a social network of colleagues and friends in the city to send goods and run errands between the city and home town. Mobile social networks could alert a user to associates' travel plans between the city and rural village.

Services like Dopplr can easily be adapted to provide alerts to a migrant worker of his/her contacts' future travel plans.

Legacy devices can be adapted to provide a two way communication interface for audio-visual messages and blogging. Community based kiosks with similar functionality could also be deployed and shared in a village or rural area.

Useful social tools will enable migrant workers to share experiences with remote family, locate each other to send goods home and communicate with family via legacy devices.

Better native language support

Back at his one room tenement Rajesh shows us his collection of music and movies – local Bollywood entertainment from Bihar. He smiles as he inserts a disk into the dusty player mounted on a corner shelf, lyrics sung in Bhojpuri, a dialect of Hindi, fill the room. "This is my language, my music. It makes me feel closer to home."

Not all of the developing world's problems with mobile interfaces are due to illiteracy. Native language support in mobile interfaces is so limited that even if a user can read and write he may not be able to understand the text.

For example a basic "ultra low cost" mobile device sold in India supports only 2 languages – Hindi and English. Whilst Hindi is spoken by 40% of the population, over half do not have access to native language interfaces. The Constitution of India recognizes 22 official languages in addition to 393 less common vocabularies. Different languages use different alphabets. For example Hindi contains 58 letters. Alphabetic variations mean that each language will need a bespoke keyboard for text input.

Manufacturers of low cost devices for the developing world have to date aimed for "economies of scale" – providing a single model for the entire developing world for local market customisation. It will be in their interest to design devices which do not require customized keyboards on a country or regional basis. Native language support will be improved via reconfigurable touchscreen or audio interfaces for other languages and alphabets.

A different world

How should current mobile operators and manufacturers design their products and services to meet the needs of developing markets?

The current mobile experience is designed for a literate section of the world who can expect interfaces in their native language. Another section of users have problems navigating text-based interfaces and need to reinforce links with the families they have left behind.

For successful mobile experience design we must provide alternative interfaces, social tools and better native language support. The mobile experience for developing regions will be rich with audio-visual communication, genuinely useful social networks and reconfigurable interfaces.

Designing for these user needs creates better experiences also for advanced countries. Simpler audio-visual interfaces will benefit children, elderly people and users with learning difficulties. Social networks will mature from hipster hangouts into tools for achieving meaningful and progressive goals. Touchscreen devices will become cheap enough for anyone to afford and the languages of cosmopolitan populations fully supported.

Understanding the needs of and co-designing with users like Rajesh will create a more useful, usable and engaging mobile experience for all of us.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Neil Clavin

------------------------------------------------------------

Share this page