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

  

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

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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.

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...

  

  

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

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