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Platforms.jpg
By Michael Gallagher

The power of free: improving access to mobile learning platforms

July 20, 2015

The recent move by the network provider Cell C (one of the largest network providers) in South Africa to provide free access (no data charges) to social media platforms such as Whatsapp and Facebook was not only a well thought marketing plan but also meant more connectivity for students across the country. With many existing examples of how social media can be used to support learning, amongst other platforms, Whatsapp as a platform has been used by innovative educators to provide learning information. This also considering the mobile device as a complimentary platform with an ever growing penetration rate across the world with the mobile phone as the highest used device accessing the Internet, this according to the recent ITU report.

This also follows the much petitioned request also by children in South African schools to have Wikipedia freely accessible. Wikipedia is now also freely accessible to children in South Africa, opening up a world of knowledge. These initiatives were not the first initiatives of freely available resources with other leading companies such as Vodacom and MTN (also a network provider) having also enabled its users to access applications such as MoMaths freely, enabling more access to learning while increasing mobile learning platforms for students across the country.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In News Tags ICT4D, Internet access, mobile learning, South Africa
← Open research, scholarship and learning resourcesDigital education and cultural needs: finding a balance →

Recent Posts

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A few caveats at the onset here. This reads a bit more like an academic piece which it largely is. It is drawn from something larger I wrote a bit ago for another paper. It might also read like an attack on the SDGs, which is not my point. The point here is that the SDGs have generated some incredible results and I sincerely support them, but we must be mindful of what is being mobilised in our pursuit of them. My focus is education and I suggest that the provisions of the SDGs related specifically to that field suggest particular scaled interventions (or at least make those approaches particularly attractive). Scale exacts pressure on particular types of education.

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As part of my association with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh (a version of this post appears there as well), I recently traveled with colleagues to deliver a three day workshop on digital education for Syrian academics who have been displaced by the conflict. The University has worked for a long time with the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), a great organisation providing urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks.

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With artificial intelligence (and perhaps with all things technological), we as humans seem to run the gamut between dystopian visions of complete AI takeover and dysfunction (think HAL) and utopian daydreams of gracious ubiquity where personal assistants attend to the less pleasant aspects of daily life (think every edtech advertisement ever, and an increasing portion of Amazon’s advertising budget it would seem). AI is pervasive, regardless of how you critique it.

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