By Paul West

PAG-L Member

It is good to see everyone in the PAG-L Group again, even if it is via a Skype connection! Since I am unable to join you at this meeting, this technology helps to bridge the distance of 13,361 kilometres.

According to a UNESCO publication, we are faced with over 200 million young people out of school by 2015. By other estimates, there may be over 400 million young people who will be outside of the formal education system by the same time. All efforts aimed at providing education to young people need to be advanced as fast and as far as possible, but I believe that we need to consider some radically different approaches for millions of people who will never see the inside of a traditional classroom, or have the benefit of a teacher, trained or otherwise.

Sugata Mitra’s experiments with his ‘hole-in-the-wall’ technology have shown that illiterate children are able to learn to surf the Internet in a language they have not heard, and an alphabet they have never seen. This has been possible without the benefit of a teacher or specially created courseware. This experiment has been taken forward by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, where a ‘Digital Doorway’ has been created. This device somewhat resembles an in-lobby ATM machine; it contains three computer screens, keyboards and track pads and can be connected to the Internet. It has a large disk drive that includes a copy of the ‘eGranary’, which is a collection of many internet sites, selected by the WiderNet Project of the University of Iowa. These websites, full of learning content, can be surfed at ‘super Internet speeds’, because the data is local and does not even need an Internet connection. If an Internet connection is possible, more can be surfed and interactive learning becomes possible. The terminals have educational games installed, which encourage young people to become competitive in areas such as solving mathematical problems. Terminals such as these, installed by agreement in shopping centres, markets and community centres, can be used to reach the unreached; they can also carry learning content and community knowledge that is locally developed. Each machine can potentially serve hundreds, if not thousands of young people who are unable to find a place in a school.

When developing educational programmes, we need to consider the learner, where she is, what technology she may have access to and how she normally uses that technology. If we are able to tap into what is a normal technology in her life, we have a greater chance of involving her in learning. Access to cell phones in South Africa is reported to be at about 98% of the population. Cell phone networks reach some of the most rural parts of the country and even though the cost of a phone call is considered expensive, there are technologies to help reduce the costs.

The recently released Apple iPad has been hailed as another step forward in the revolution of education. I compared the top-of-the-range (64Gb, WiFi & 3G) and found that the version on sale in the USA for USD800 was on sale in South Africa for the equivalent of USD1,200. One must wonder how taxes and profit-taking can make a 50% increase in price and what the impact of this is on the device’s educational potential. The NetBooks, priced at around USD400 to USD500 can also cost significantly more in developing countries, also reducing their potential for use in education. Educational planners can now consider Micro-NetBooks priced at well under USD100 each. The constant in these devices is that they can all open webpages (if connected to the Internet), word processor files (e.g. txt, doc, rtf, odt) and PDF files. The guideline for policy makers is to use file formats that can be used on any of the presently available devices such as txt, doc, rtf, odt. More complex multimedia formats are the most likely to fail when transferring between devices.

MXIt provides a text message (SMS) service at a small fraction of the cost of regular SMSs, because it combines Internet technology with cell phone technology. If institutions are able to adapt to the technology, many learners would find it a natural fit with their lifestyle (over 14 million users; 35,000 messages per second transferred between users).

Other Social Networking technologies need to be considered. If FaceBook users were to form a country, the country would be the third largest country in the world with a population of over 400 million people. This global network of people absorbs 500 billion minutes of people’s time each year, each of whom have an average of 130 ‘friends’, who interact with over 160 million pages, groups and events. For those who are connected and need more education, this is a significant medium of communication. FaceBook has surpassed Google in terms of its hit-rates and is used by many as a primary source of news and information. On a more professional level, LinkedIn is growing rapidly adding an estimated new user every second. With over 70 million registered users in over 200 countries, LinkedIn  is a potential network of well connected people who could be called on to help in the construction of a global education infrastructure.

To overcome the inertia to provide services to the unserviced 200 million young people and many more under-serviced people, we will need to embrace unconventional forms of education. One may imagine Digital Doorway devices with self-learning content installed (literacy, entrepreneurship, etc.); bite-sized pieces of appropriate learning content being delivered via cell phone to subsistence farmers (animal health, soil nutrition, etc.); and daily updates on suitable life-skills topics via FaceBook. We need to embrace a wide range of unconventional distance education methodologies that include printed material, cell phones (mobiles), and the Internet (FaceBook, LinkedIn, MIXIt, etc.). While much of the content will need to be aimed at delivery only (one-way), some of these technologies will also provide for interactivity in the new modes, made possible by social networking.

Open Educational Resources, popularised by UNESCO and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has the potential to provide the world with learning content to complement technologies used by masses of people. The WikiEducator project initiated by the Commonwealth of Learning is one repository of open content and online workshops, where content is in development. Open Educational Resources may be adapted and used by anyone, making them ideal for global sharing without intellectual property concerns.

To make learning content or learning programmes internationally transferrable, global projects should bear in mind that over 100 countries already have or are in the process of developing national qualification frameworks. The Transnational Qualifications Framework initiative of the Virtual University for the Small States of the Commonwealth seeks to make qualifications easily transferable across borders. Educating a person in one country should not be wasted if they migrate to another country (or if the person moves to another province or state within the same country). Rules for quality assurance in education must be the same, no matter who the provider – be they created by governments or private sector; Funding of education should be focused on providing the best possible service to learners and less on idealistic choices of who should ‘get the business’.

Education needs to be linked to sustainable livelihoods. Learning programmes therefore need to be pragmatically appropriate to the geographic region, climate, culture, etc. Although content may vary greatly between region, country and local area, the VUSSC initiative found it possible to create common learning materials to suit countries from the Caribbean, to Africa, the Indian and Mediterranean Oceans and the Pacific. This has been accomplished through international teams of educators from these countries and not by academic writers from other countries writing on their behalf. Transfer of ownership is an area to be built into global projects at the beginning of the venture and not a step to be carried out later in the process when decisions have already been consolidated.

Technology guidelines for the future need to take into account reliability of equipment (can it last?), the availability of local technical support (projects or companies that just deliver equipment are of little use in the longer term), the ease of use (is it standard and known or a new system no one knows), can it be run on solar, water or wind power generators and can it cope with erratic power supplies. Delivering equipment needs to be complemented with orientating educators where they are available and taking into account in the project design when no teacher is available to learners.

Finally, we need to remember differences between how people approach, perceive and use technologies. Women and men, younger people and older people may be perceived to use technology in one way only. We need to take care to not base global projects on wide generalisations and stereotypes. “Girls in the South” (South = developing countries) are not all the same, nor are “boys in the North” (North = industrialised countries) the same. There is a challenge of underachieving boys and men in both the Caribbean countries and in North America. There are challenges of barriers for girls and women in Europe and in Africa. The challenges vary and need to be considered within the project design.

Thank you once again for including me in this year’s meeting, although at a distance. I look forward to meeting with you without needing to use distance-learning technology next year!

LINKS:

Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra

http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ 

Digital Doorway by CSIR

http://www.digitaldoorway.org.za/index_main.php

VUSSC by COL

http://www.vussc.info/eGranary

http://www.widernet.org/egranary/ 

Transnational Qualifications Framework

http://www.vussc.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=123&Itemid=2

MIXIt:

http://www.mxitlifestyle.com/