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TechnoratiA key gathering focused on m-learning in Africa took place in Lusaka, Zambia at the end of June. The 3-day leadership summit entitled "Go Mobile! Using Mobile Learning to Teach 21st Century Skills" is one of four events aimed at bringing together stakeholders in education to introduce the idea of m-learning and to demonstrate the possibilities of mobile phones in the classroom.
According to John Traxler, Co-Director of the International Association for Mobile Learning, m-learning refers to “any educational provision, where the sole or dominant technologies are hand-held devices." Steve Vosloo, the Communication and Analytical Skills Fellow for the Shuttleworth Foundation, adds that at the Zambia summit which he attended, participants discussed what m-learning means today. He says that students and Teachers in Africa are demonstrating that m-learning is no longer tied to these devices, but to what they enable. “This is not', Steve says "just e-learning gone for a walk[...] Mobile devices can enhance extend learning assessment and administration, social networking, and identity development”.
For example in South Africa, Doctor Math, built on the mobile social network Mxit, allows students to complete tutorials, homework, and testing outside of school, and allows teachers to support students and monitor progress. Many more students have access to mobile phones than they do to a computer outside of school.
In Zambia, the Pearson Foundation is involved with the Sara Communication Initiative run by UNICEF. The Initiative uses an audio series, animated films, comic books, storybooks, audiocassettes, posters and guides to narrate the story of a fictitious adolescent girl who faces pressures and challenges often experienced by young people in Africa. Digital storytelling workshops allow teens to create stories about peer pressure in their community and share it through digital media. During the same week as the Go Mobile! m-learning summit, cellphones were used for the first time in the Initiative's workshops, turning the narrative into something that could be brought home.
The summits, sponsored by the Pearson Foundation and Nokia, gather delegates in different African countries to discuss local and content needs for future mobile-based learning and teaching projects. Tanzania and Zambia have recently hosted summits, South Africa and Angola will host them in the coming months. Delegates include education ministry officials, curriculum experts, school masters and teachers.
In a recent interview with MobileActive, Steve Vosloo noted that m-learning summits have two main goals: To introduce and popularize the mobile phone as a tool for engaging students, and secondly, to identify local content needs. Examples of this may include applications that support grade submissions and attendance in remote locations or projects that explore how texting can be used in literacy.
So, what did participants learn? Educators said that mobile phones “can support our teaching process”, that they can be used for distance learning, and that “if you use a cellphone in the classroom you make teaching and learning more interesting, because that is what excites the learners.” Participants learnt that [you] don’t have to be the expert with the phone […] to be in control, and that “it is quicker to access information on the internet through cellphones than on PCs”.
The true value of these sessions, according to Vosloo, was the transformational effect that he witnessed among the Zambian participants. He emphasized that “the perception of cellphones in the classroom clearly developed from nuisance to something that had true potential to engage students, and support teachers in their work”. The key word here is support, as it was widely recognized that the purpose of m-learning is not to replace the teacher student relationship, rather, to enhance it with a new dynamic that can transcend the classroom.
By the end of the sessions, the participants had compiled a list of what they wanted. The list included “educational policy to be changed to support m-learning in the classroom”, a Zambian syllabus with aligned content on the web, discussions dealing with cellphone misuse and risks around m-learning, and "lower prices for cellphone handsets and tariffs [so that] more learners can use them in the schools.”
Mobile penetration in African countries is the second fastest growing in the world (with India the fastest growing mobile market). Participants in the Zambia summit admitted that “the children are ahead of us, they use cellphones all the time. The problem is the mindset of the older stakeholders: teachers, parents and the general community.”...what a learning opportunity.
Apart from the transformation of the delegates from “anti” to “pro” m-learning, the summits being held this summer demonstrate a very important point to the growing m-learning community. As Vosloo points out, each country has its own particular needs. “We need to share our learnings and resources, but most importantly we need to create solutions that can be adapted and customized to the local conditions.”
There is a momentum that is hard to ignore behind mobile technology in education in Africa, in particular. It's already in the classrooms, whether educators and administrators want it or not. Mobiles have been banned in schools across Africa just as they have been banned in school across North America, the difference being that mobile technology is quickly proving itself to be a source of economic gain for the owners of portable phones across resource poor economies, and is recognized as a source of social returns by both children and the adults that they look up to.
Click below to see a short video interview of Steve (done by the Pearson foundation) after he attended the summit in Zambia. Steve added some images and his own videos of Zambian learners (grade 11), who were attending a digital storytelling workshop that lasted a week.
defining mobile learning
OK here's another angle - mobile learning is implicitly to many of us in western europe or north america, actually mobile e-learning. It grows out of a continuation of / reaction to the perceived successes and perceived frustrations of (tethered) e-learning We bring an e-learning or perhaps even a learning mindset to it and add on the 'mobile'.
Rather than conceptualising it as learning made mobile, how about conceptualising it as mobility made educational? That would put it in the area of enquiry alongside studies of tourists, displaced persons/refugees, gypsies/travellers/circus folk, nomads or perhaps alongside the study of aspects of transport or movement.
Of course outside western europe and north america (and on closer inspection, I think mobile learning is defined very differently in these two land masses) mobile learning is growing out of a tradition not of e-learning but of ODL, open & distance learning, or perhaps out of service delivery, part of attempts to improve health, employment, trade and so on.
One of my critiques in looking at (tethered) e-learning in Africa has been that whilst most people would acknowledge the cost, organisational and infrastructural problems associated with VLEs, PCs etc, they ignore the fact that any educational technology embodies a bunch of pedagogic and cultural assumptions and we can't just transplant a VLE into a different culture with wholly different traditions. Neither can we with mobile learning. So I'd watch out for definitions of what we do that attempt to be culture-free. Mobile learning is going to be different things to different people in different places.
mobile learning - a definition
Thank you, John, point well taken.
If anything, we hope to emphasize the context and evolving dimensions of m-learning.
We would be thrilled if you would continue to help us define m-learning for the Mobile Active Community.
For more on defining mLearning, please see John's piece on the Current State of Mobile Learning (2007), originally published in the International Review on Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL).
mobile learning - a definition
the 'definition' cited is something I've moved away from and i think dates from maybe 5 or 6 years ago when perhaps we were pre-occupied with the technology. I know it's potentially sterile and pedantic to quibble about definitions but i think i'd prefer to talk about societies where movement and connectedness are prevalent and practically universal and perhaps see the learning in that context. That said, I think the mobile learning communities have done a remarkable job in taking learning to people, places, communities, times and events that were previously too remote or difficult to access and have significantly enriched, enhanced and extended the meaning and impact of learning.
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