I was encouraged by John Traxler's post on 

Learning with Mobile Devices Somewhere Near the Bottom of the Pyramid as it makes points that are dear to my heart. I have copied part of it below and commented on it - my comments are indented.

Learning with Mobile Devices Somewhere Near the Bottom of the Pyramid

Professor John Traxler

I am grateful for the chance to contribute to the current debate on the potential for Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in education in Africa. It is clearly a debate about important issues.

Mobile phones hold out enormous promise as the single ICT most likely to deliver education in Africa, and to do so on a sustainable, equitable and scalable basis. I think however that so far, we have not often seen much progress beyond fixed-term, small-scale and subsidised pilots and it is worth exploring whether mobile phones can really deliver their promise.  (snip - see  https://edutechdebate.org/affordable-technology/learning-with-mobile-devices-somewhere-near-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid/ for full post )

Something is wrong and we need to dig beneath the surface. What are my reasons for advocating such caution? (snip - see  https://edutechdebate.org/affordable-technology/learning-with-mobile-devices-somewhere-near-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid/ for full post )

Of course, in saying this, I am caught between funders who want results, policy makers who want simple robust bases for policy, the development community talking about predictable unexpected consequences, social scientists telling us reality and experience are contingent and postmodernists telling us that the grand narratives of the Western European mind, of which development is undoubtedly one, are all broken and dead.

I notice there is no mention of the learners in this list and wonder what would happen if we started with the needs of people who want to learn.

Why not find some adults who want to learn and who now have (or could have) access to the Internet via mobile phones. I suggest a focus on adults with non-formal learning objectives (where the learners are following their own interests and needs, and judging for themselves when those needs have been met). At this point I would avoid a traditional formal learning situation (with set courses and accreditation). Similar investigations could be done in a more formal learning context, but I would argue the case for starting off such research in a non-formal situation that was completely fluid and guided by learner interests. That way we could see what would emerge without the limitations of set approaches and pre-web institutional approaches to learning and teaching.

I suggest adults because I have in mind "learning pioneers" who will push forward the boundaries of how mobile phones can be used to enable learning. I don't want them to be partly in an existing "formal education system" while they are pioneering learner-directed learning enabled by mobile phones.

I suggest that the pioneers should be supported in various ways. Financial barriers would be removed. The learners would be on individual learning journeys, but they would be given support and advice (mentoring). This would have several purposes. It would help them to explore options regarding the direction of their studies and help them to decide next steps on their learning journeys regarding content. It would help them to develop appropriate technical skills (and socio-technical skills) as they needed them.  Access to the Internet is more that doing a google search, or accessing the online resources of MIT or the Open University. It is knowing what online spaces are useful for what purposes, when and how to "go there", how to behave in order to get the most out of the networking and knowledge sharing opportunities that exist and so on. Barriers of isolation would be removed (through online and face to face support groups).

If some of the learners in the project are people who are teachers so much the better. If teachers have used phones successfully in their own professional or personal development then, I suggest, they are likely to want to share the benefits of such an approach with the students and pupils that they teach. That is how genuine sustainable innovation will come about in educational systems. Good teachers are concerned with how their pupils and students learn (not just what they learn). If teachers find that mobile phones are good learning tools enabling effective learning strategies they will want to make those benefits directly available to those they teach.

I do base these suggestions on various relevant experiences and investigations:

Regarding Africa, learners, phones and the Internet.

• I have done what the academic community would describe as field-work (and I describe as working holidays) in Nigeria and Kenya over a period of several years.
  
• I have worked with various teachers and learners there.
  
• I also work online with my contacts in Africa when I am in the UK. 
  
• I've been squeezing maximum communication through minimal communication infrastructure between UK and Nigeria for over ten years - through a creative combination of the Internet and local informal offline communication networks. 
  

• I've been a self-directed online learner for over ten years - but it's been easier for me than for the mobile phone users because I've been able to do my learning via a laptop - previously PC - rather than via a phone and I am bandwidth rich (with an affordable monthly contract for 24/7 access, and fast downloads - not paying by the minute for slow downloads).
• I have been studying aspects of teaching and learning "in a post-web world" for ten years.

• I do understand about the issues of ICT in Education - hidden costs, how the interests of manufacturers and others influence change rather than the change being driven by input from teachers etc,
•  I was a classroom teacher doing innovative work with a  "micro-computer" with my infant class way back before the Dept of Trade and Industry took steps to introduced the BBC computer to schools in the UK, over a quarter of a century ago..
  
• It saddens me deeply to see that very few lessons seem to have been learned from those early days.
  
• I don't let myself imagine how much money, time and good will have been wasted repeating variations of the same mistakes. I hope they were genuine mistakes rather than cynical self-interest and exploitation - although it is hard to see how people, such as those providing hardware, can be so unaware that they continue with the same mistakes for so long.
  

(snip - see  https://edutechdebate.org/affordable-technology/learning-with-mobile-devices-somewhere-near-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid/ for full post )

A colleague recently remarked that every technology embodies an ideology; I realised that the implication was that every educational technology embodied a pedagogy, embodies a specific set of ideas about teaching and learning. This ideology or pedagogy may be that of the designers or the manufacturers; the technology may however be appropriated by users and learners and the ideology or pedagogy embodied within the technology becomes theirs not the original or intended one. This issue represents one of the challenges to transferring strategies for educational technology from one culture to another, even from one community or sub-culture to another, especially when we recognise how many slightly different communities and sub-cultures inhabit phonespace and cyberspace.

It is arguable that access to the Internet ushers in opportunities for a very different pedagogy which is worth exploring. This is why I advocate exploring learner-directed non-formal learning outside of traditional institutional frameworks - i.e. individual but within a supportive group, "flat world", person-to-person exploration of information and co-creation of knowledge, where there is no fixed teacher-role and fixed learner-role and no set syllabus or examination. I suggest taking the kind of collaborative information-sharing and knowledge-creation that is emerging in online communities of interest as the jumping off point for an exploration of mobile-phone enabled learning, rather than nailing our explorations down to existing institutional structures. (I'm not advocating this for all subject areas, just some - if someone is going to learn to be a brain surgeon then I'm as keen as anyone else to know they have done accredited training.)

Finally, one obvious way to enhance sustainability and scale is to consciously exploit learners’ own devices, to base national or institutional strategy around the phones that individuals choose, own and carry everywhere. Of course, institutional culture and regulations may actually prohibit phones on the premises and much needs to be done in order to address issues of standards, infrastructure and performance, of access and equity, of content and training but the main hurdle is teachers’ and officials’ perceptions about loss of control and agency in the class-room, about suddenly letting the animals run the zoo. Fortunately some countries, South Africa, for example, are starting to explore these issues and make progress on a major prerequisite to sustainable learning with mobile devices.

It is a bit sad to have to exclude people who do not have their own devices, but there is a logic to it. One way to find appropriate possible learners with their own devices could be through Facebook (I'm surprised by how much some of my African contacts manage to access Facebook, but I understand that the cost of accessing Facebook in Africa is lower than would be expected given the cost of going online for other reasons. This access cost issue is why I suggest help with the online costs of joining in the learning project).

There’s a lot going on in this blog and some prevailing assumptions and generalisations may have been addressed with just a different set of assumptions and generalisations; the aim was however not to convince but to unsettle, and perhaps to encourage more caution and scepticism.

I welcome anything that unsettles the apparently entrenched approaches that have given us over a quarter of a century of people repeating the same mistakes in slightly different ways in ICTs in education - mistakes which I'd summarise as top-down and technology led. (More discussion of this topic at 10 Worst Practices in ICT for Education http://www.ictworks.org/news/2010/08/30/10-worst-practices-ict-education ). As a teacher, learner and outside observer with no influence on research priorities or policy making I find it infinitely depressing to see the tragically huge amounts of money that have been spent in reaching this point. It doesn't have to be done this way - there are alternative example that do build from reality, make the most of what is to hand and accept constraints of what is affordable. I know the example of what  we did in 2004 - 2007 with the Teacher's Talking project  - http://www.dadamac.net/projects/education-and-training/teachers-talking. Other people may know of other local examples.

Incidentally, regarding mobile phones, and their increasing availablilty. Back in 2004, when helping rural teachers to think how to explain about computers to their pupils we discussed typewriters and how a computer could be used as an '"intelligent typewriter" - with a memory, and editing facilities etc. By 2007 we were able to use mobile phones as the starting point. We could consider the keypad for input, the little screen for output, and people's experience of storing phone numbers, of editing, sending text messages, and maybe using the calculator. Even if teachers did not have a phone of their own, they knew someone who did. Now of course some have smart phones and (funds permitting, and phone coverage permitting) they can even show their pupils use of the Internet.

Learning with mobile devices somewhere near the bottom of the pyramid is still our best bet.

Agreed. I wonder if there is anything we can do to help get some related projects off the ground?.

John Traxler's full post - uninterrupted by my comments - is at https://edutechdebate.org/affordable-technology/learning-with-mobile-devices-somewhere-near-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid/