MobilED as hybrid media
July 27th, 2007
Africa, hybrid media, m-learning
Shareideas.org and the ICT4D section of the World Bank’s Development Gateway both recently highlighted an application called MobilED. It is a mobile-learning application, piloted in South Africa, which allows students to (a) query Wikipedia via SMS messages (b) hear the results of the query played back to them as audio text and (c) post new entries to their own class’s wiki by recording audio off their handsets.
I haven’t seen the system first hand, but I think it is interesting for two reasons:
1) It is a hybrid media form, which complicates all the theorizing some of us like to do about text messages, mobile calls, internet sites, etc. What is it? A web application? A mobile application? A mobile web application? My bet is the kids don’t care as long as it helps them learn and is easy to use.
2) Its hybridity accomplishes something still relatively rare: it breaks down the walls between web content and SMS content. In doing so, it demonstrates a way in which some rich, dynamic internet content can be made accessible to (and can be created by) communities using relatively affordable & common basic mobile handsets. Since the worldwide ratio of mobile users to internet users is roughly 2:1, this is a good thing for both groups.
4 Responses
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jdonner July 31, 2007 at 5:19 am
Thanks very much for pointing out my mistake about the Development Gateway. I have updated the post accordingly.
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[...] mobile telephones are in the developing world. Discussion & research by Jonathan Donner. MobilED as hybrid media [...]
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[...] way into all sorts of interesting projects in the developing world; Storybank, Digital Green, and MobileEd are just a [...]
Development Gateway Foundation was started by the World Bank but became an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2001. It has evolved considerably since then, in terms of its programming and its partners and donors worldwide.