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2010: A year in review

This is my “brag pack” for 2010. Read the one for 2009.

What I did
As fellow for 21st century learning at the Shuttleworth Foundation I spent the year focusing on my m4Lit, or mobiles for literacy, project. It was launched in 2009 as a pilot initiative to explore whether teens in South Africa will read stories on their mobile phones. It turns out that they will, and based on the success of the pilot phase, I was given another Fellowship year.

Phase 2 of the project essentially involved i) offering more content (which our readers had asked for), ii) improving the user experience, iii) growing the user base, and iv) working towards sustainability.

The Praekelt Foundation was brought in to redevelop the content management system. The new system publishes to a mobisite, www.yoza.mobi, as well as onto MXit (before these were two separate systems), with additional features for interactivity such as easy commenting, voting and reviewing. I called the new offering Yoza Cellphone Stories, and assembled a freelance team to help me run it: top South African authors, an editor, graphic designer, moderators, and social media mavens.

Yoza was launched in August with fourteen stories. Today there are twenty-one stories — in English, Afrikaans and isiXhoza — and growing. Publication of new stories happens on the first of every month, with writing competitions happening all the time.

What worked
1. Publishing a broader range of content, such as soccer (Streetskillz), chick-lit (Sisterz) and teen issues (Confessions), in addition to the Kontax teen adventure series, was very well received. We also published five Shakespeare plays that are being studied by South African learners.

From 2009, our m-novels have collectively been read more than 60,000 times, our readers have posted more than 40,000 comments and submitted more than 10,000 competition entries!

Feedback from our readers is mostly positive: it is clear that we are educating as well as entertaining our readers.

“I must say: the story line it self is gripping, for somereasen everytime i read the kontax stories am kept at the erge of my sit. They are always grattifiying and i can hardly wait for another1. Thank you to the contax team cause for the 1st time in years i am reading again and i lov reading now, and am a guy so you i just dont lyk readin. So thank u again guyz you da best,” by Mphuthumi Busakwe, commenting on Kontax 5: The Sext Files.

“Gr8 story guyz.. I can’t wait 4 th nxt one 2 b published. I’m totally addicted! Love th fact tht Jayden nd Latoya r bck 2gethr. P.s Please give us more than one chapter a day,” by Ms. Makes, commenting on Sisterz 2: Hidden Danger.

“2 all soccer lovers,esp players,here r technical tips,grab them. Gud luck 2d team!” by Assah, commenting on Streetskillz 2: Silver’s Treasure.

It is also clear that there is an implicit conversation happening between the story — and sometimes the Yoza brand — and the readers. We create interesting and deliberately provocative scenarios in the stories to elicit reader opinion, and they usually respond in full force. An example is the comments on this Sisterz chapter (first read the WHAT DO YOU THINK comment prompt on that page).

2. The new interface is more user-friendly and easier to maintain. The actual CMS will be open-sourced.

3. Being on MXit in Kenya has given the project a greater profile.

4. Our stories have also been published on Young Africa Live on the Vodafone Live portal, as well as on MYMsta.mobi, loveLife’s mobile social network. Two high school teachers in the Western Cape have been in contact to say that they are using Yoza in the English classroom.

5. The READ Educational Trust runs an annual Readathon competition, and for the first time teens could enter the writing competition on Yoza via their mobile phones. We also ran writing competitions in conjunction with the Sunday Times and The Sowetan newspapers.

6. We have an open call for writers to contribute stories to Yoza. So far three have been published by authors from Lapa Publishers.

Stockholm Challenge7. The m4Lit project received an Honourable Mention in the Stockholm Challenge award, and has received much media coverage, both locally and internationally, including from School Library Journal, Global Post, City Press, Argus, EP Herald, The Times, M&G Online, Rapport, West Cape News, ITWeb, Soulbeat, Drum Beat, Mashable, Puku, Idasa, GSMA Development Fund, Educational Technology Debate, 5fm, YFM, East Coast Radio and the Voice of the Cape.

Bottom line: Throughout the year I have said, and still say, that the cellphone is a powerful learning and communication tool. Instead of viewing it as a distraction and a hindrance to education, I believe it should be viewed as an essential part of the solution. It is the e-reader of Africa, a device onto which we can quickly and easily publish content to a wide audience, as well as through which young people are given a voice. The high-levels of engagement on Yoza has shown that participatory culture is alive and well in Africa, although here it is via MXit comments and not Youtube videos.

What still needs work
1) Yoza is not producing enough content to feed the mobile monster. Our readers want more and they want it now. They don’t like waiting for the first of the next month to get their next story fix.

2) There is a novelty factor to m-novels. The Yoza stories have not had as many reads and competition entries as the first Kontax stories. Although more comments are made on Yoza stories than before. This novelty-factor has forced us to continually try to improve the user experience and offer targeted content.

3) Sustainability is still not resolved. At this stage, m4Lit has not secured any revenue other than the Shuttleworth Foundation funding, although a number of positive conversations are currently underway for sponsorship.

Future plans
A clear business opportunity has emerged. Our readers are crying out for content about issues, e.g. teen pregnancy or how to handle money. Below is a word cloud of what our readers told us they want to read about. As you can see, it covers the full range of “issues”.

Non-profit organisations, governments and corporates want to communicate their messages to young people, e.g. healthy sexual behaviour or financial literacy. Yoza is the bridge between these groups.

We now have a platform to run Yoza, a team that can offer full-service mobile content campaigns, and a MXit footprint in South Africa and Kenya, with plans to grow into other countries. We are well-placed to transition from Yoza the “cellphone stories library” to Yoza the “mobile social marketing service”. A major milestone is to secure a big first sponsor.

We want young people across Africa to use their phones for reading, writing and learning – and believe that this can ultimately be a positive influence on their lives. In short: more content, more users, more participation, and greater impact.

Living out loud
As Fellows we are required to “live out loud”. On the topic of mlearning, I am a regular event speaker and panelist. I have presented on m4Lit at TEDx Soweto (watch video) and Tech4Africa, eLearning Africa in Zambia, and twice at the World Bank in Washington. I recently gave a thematic keynote at the Open Innovation Africa Summit in Kenya, and at the International Seminar on Mobile Technologies for Learning and Development in Barcelona.

I have been Interviewed by BBC’s Digital Planet as well as PRI’s The World, which is broadcast on National Public Radio in the USA. I regularly write for the M&G’s The Teacher. I am an advisor to the Department of Basic Education on its Guidelines on e-Safety in Schools.

Overall it has been an exciting year and I feel that the project has made a significant contribution to mlearning in Africa. I would like to thank the Shuttleworth Foundation. My three-year fellowship provided a wonderful opportunity to develop innovative projects and live out loud in the mlearning space. I look forward to seeing the work that was begun during my fellowship continue to grow.

Education for All in Africa

On Monday I gave a keynote presentation at the Nokia Open Innovation Africa Summit in the Great Rift Valley, Kenya. The presentation looks at the Education for All goals and how mobile phones can support their achievement. Questions were asked in order to get the delegates into problem solving mode!

Education for All mLearning presentation, Open Innovation Africa Summithttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=openinnovafricasummitsvnotes-101202154525-phpapp02&stripped_title=open-innov-africa-summit-sv-notes&userName=stevevosloo

View more presentations from Steve Vosloo.

Benefits of mlearning

MoLeNET, a multi-year project in the UK to explore the role of mobile technologies on learners, teachers and institutions, has found the following benefits of mlearning:

  • increased creativity and innovation;
  • greater ownership of learning by learners;
  • real world problem solving; and
  • the development of complex ideas and knowledge transfer.

According to the second MoLeNET report Modernising education and training: Mobilising technology for learning by Jill Attewell, Carol Savill-Smith, Rebecca Douch and Guy Parker: “handheld technologies proved to be very useful for work-based and vocational learners … and also helped to engage reluctant learners and those who have not previously thrived in educational environments.”

One manager at a college involved in the project had this to say: “It has been almost like having a new baby! The most wonderful, exciting journey and, at times, most tiring and frustrating. The afterglow is that we have created something that will continue to grow and become more stable and more embedded within our culture of delivery.”

m4Lit on the BBC (again!) and at the World Bank

BBC World ServiceJune was a good month for m4Lit. It were featured on the BBC for the second time: I was interviewed on the World Service radio programme Digital Planet (listen live). The episode featured other interesting ICT projects in Cape Town — definitely worth a listen.

The World Bank’s infoDev programme held it’s annual symposium in Washington DC and I was invited to sit on a panel to discuss the m4Lit project. The symposium was called Clean Green and Mobile – Making Technology Work for the Poor. There was a high level of interest in the project and it’s findings.

It's about reading, not paper vs pixels

In Nadine Gordimer advocates book over screen, the Mail & Guardian reports on a defense of the printed book against the onslaught of technology by Nadine Gordimer, Nobel laureate and one of South Africa’s most distinguished literary figures. Below is my response.

Nadine Gordimer (Image: United Nations Photo. License: CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0)

Dear Nadine,

I too love the form of a book, the weight and smell of it, the feeling of the paper. I would be devastated if books were to vanish, relegated to museums. But one can’t ignore the changes that are happening in the world, nor the advantages that new technology offers. Books are highly durable — read on the mountain top without fear of the battery dying — but prohibitively expensive. Without libraries, our youth can’t access books. I agree that we desperately need libraries, but must concede that we probably won’t see them built and stocked for some time (if ever).

What our youth do have, however, are cellphones. The project that I lead, called m4Lit (mobiles for literacy), takes this book-poor/cellphone-rich context of South Africa — indeed of most of Africa — as a point of departure. If cellphones are what’s in the hands of young people then that is what we have to work with. On a mobisite and on MXit, we’ve published two short stories called Kontax, written in conventional English. In 7 months we’ve had over 33,000 reads of these stories. We asked young people to leave comments on chapters — over 3,000 received so far — and have run two writing competitions (e.g. make up a character you’d like to read about in the next Kontax story) with over 4,000 entries submitted. Through their comments, some of the readers have said that they don’t like reading books but that reading on their cellphones is fun and enjoyable. A few others have indicated that reading Kontax has changed they way they think about reading, from “that is something that I don’t do” to “this is fun.”

A key feature of phones, which books don’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 learner 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.

True, a cellphone needs a charged battery, but today’s kids have a habit of finding power one way or another. As a device it offers a viable distribution platform for the written word, not printed on paper but displayed in pixels. I think we need to acknowledge that while the pixel isn’t as soulful as a page of paper, it is infinitely better than nothing. Publishing format aside, 33,000 kids are reading and that is a good thing.

A cellphone is a viable complement, and sometimes alternative, to a printed book. If we want our youth to read, we need both. Viva the book! Viva the cellphone!

eLearning Africa: Envisioning our global learning future

Yesterday eLearning Africa, held in Lusaka, Zambia, kicked off with a pre-conference workshop titled Envisioning Our Global Learning Future. I sat on a panel with Prof John Traxler (UK) and Jacqueline Batchelor (SA). To begin the workshop we each had to take a particular position on the future of global learning and offer that to the group. Our viewpoints needed to be somewhat divergent and deliberately provocative to get the discussions going. Below are some of the key points.

eLearning Africa workshop (Steve Vosloo, CC-BY-SA)

John: “Rethink the digital divide”

  • We no longer talk about society without technology. It’s inconceivable. In the same way, it’s no longer viable to talk about learning without technology. It’s no longer sensible to talk about technology and learning as two separate things — they are the same thing.
  • Technology makes borders of learning less relevant.
  • We shouldn’t look at learning in terms of previous notions of (PC-based) digital divides. Mobile phones have moved technology from the “top” (privileged) spaces, defined by scarcity, to the “bottom” (everyman) spaces, defined by abundance. So we need to rethink elearning, which includes mlearning, in new notions of divides.

Jacqueline: “People and pedagogy first, then technology”

  • We need to think about people and pedagogy first, not technology.
  • Tech is disruptive: it unbalances the dynamic between teacher and learner. For the first time the learners are the experts and this has a negative impact on the teaching-learning environment of the classroom.
  • It’s no surprise that mobile phones have been banned in some schools!
  • There is too much technology for teachers to keep up with — it’s overwhelming for a group that is already over-stressed and over-worked.
  • Policies and practices need to be adapted first, before we introduce technology into learning spaces.
  • Unless we put people first and develop and adopt a pedagogy that suits a technology-based educational environment, then the technology will only continue to fail us.

Me: “Technology will save education”

  • I started off by pointing out that today’s technology (new, pioneering) is tomorrow’s resource (taken-for-granted) — based on this paragraph from a piece by Douglas Adams: “‘Technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things.” Textbooks were once technology, but now they’re learning resources. Computers and mobile phones will be mere resources in the not-too-distant future. We need to think of technology like this.
  • Education is broken. One reason for this is that it hasn’t changed in a hundred years, while the world outside of the classroom has changed dramatically.
  • There is an urgent need for educating learners on e-literacy and information literacy. How can this happen without technology?
  • Tech has radically changed the way we live, work, play and communicate. Why shouldn’t it radically change the way we teach and learn?
  • Some argue that tech has failed education, that is has made no difference to the grades of learners over the last 25 years. I would say that is because the tech hasn’t been fully integrated into the education system. PCs are in the computer room, teaching and learning stays the same in the classroom.
  • Education needs a major overhaul. Technology is our only option to avoid the “crisis of relevance” facing young people today.

A discussion followed, with lots of interesting perspectives coming from delegates across Africa. John pointed out that when elearning is driven by ministries, departments and corporates then it is based on a particular way of thinking: controlled, top-down, expensive, tethered. Mobile phones threaten that paradigm. John is not sure if that is a recipe for success or for frustration.

Jacqueline, who is a teacher, told us that technology complicates teaching because the software doesn’t work properly yet, or that learners have different phones with different OSs, or that not everyone has a phone that can access the internet. Until the “technology works” it’s going to be very hard to get it into schools.

At the end we admitted that there are no easy answers to the global learning future, and that many problems are not unique to Africa. The truth of tech or people first lies in the middle. Both are needed.