A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact.
MKFC (Multicultural Popular Education Centre) Stockholm College origins are from the inclusive Nordic education system.
Education in the Nordic countries is free and includes all age groups and education levels originating from the grassroots movements. The Nordic education tradition has supported MKFC in designinga roadmap to creating inclusive, sustainable development and economic growth driven by education.
MKFC Stockholm College moved its courses online in 2001. eLearning has enabled MKFC to reduce its costs and increase the quality at the same time. We are therefore able to provide education to developing countries with very low fees.
The following is the executive summary of M4Girls, prepared by the Mindset Network and Neil Butcher and Associates, and reprinted here with permission from Mindset.
The M4girls project is a partnership between Nokia, Mindset Network, and the Department of Education (North West Province) to test the provision of educational content on a mobile phone platform to girl learners. The project targeted the development of Mathematics competencies in Grade Ten girl learners from underserved communities, and aimed to empower girl learners in the following ways:
• Access to mathematics (as a pilot subject area and driven by priority areas in education in South Africa);
• Exposure to a complementary platform of curriculum-aligned Mathematics content (Mindset content) on mobile phones; and
• Exposure to technology in the form of mobile phones.
The project aimed to:
The M4girls project is a partnership between Nokia, Mindset Network, and the Department of Education (North West Province) to test the provision of educational content on a mobile phone platform to girl learners. The project targeted the development of Mathematics competencies in Grade Ten girl learners from underserved communities, and aimed to empower girl learners.
The target audience is grade 10 girls in the North West Province of South Africa.
Whilst learners’ reports during the focus groups point to the phones mainly being used to listen to music, other general benefits of having access to a cell phone such as Internet access and communication were noted, and this made learners more confident and technologically savvy. During the interviews, it was observed that learners displayed a sense of accomplishment as they described proficiency in using various phone functions. Thus, exposure to technology in the form of cell phones was well received by the MP group. Positive attitudes towards using technology for learning, together with the reports of high cell phone usage (by both educators and learners), indicate the potential of using cell phones for e-learning or m-learning.
Although changes were detected in attitudes towards technology on the part of learners during the project, the findings of this pilot was that there was no significant change in attitudes towards technology and school as a direct result of the technology used by the MP group in the project, given that post-project results for both the comparison and MP groups were generally quite similar. That, is whilst perceptions of technology were enhanced, these perceptions improved across both the MP and comparison group and the extent to which the M4girls project alone contributed to this is unclear.
Nokia Life Tools aims to give users direct access to information that can change how they do business. Launched in 2008 in India, Nokia Life Tools deliver agricultural information, educational resources and entertainment to users over SMS. At the end of 2009, Nokia Life Tools expanded to Indonesia.
The service allows subscribers to receive updates on chosen topics – market prices, news tips, weather forecasts, English lessons, exam preparation, or entertainment. The SMS-based service sends basic text messages on an icon-driven interface; the delivery system ensures that the service works wherever mobile phones work. The information that is sent out to the consumer’s mobile phone is targeted to the person based on his or her location.
The tools’ primary services are agricultural and educational; entertainment is supplementary, providing users with ringtones and sports updates among other services.
Nokia Life Tools aims to:
Nokia Life Tools is an SMS-based service that provides hyper-localized information to its subscribers in three sectors: agriculture, education, and entertainment.
The target audience of Nokia Life Tools are users in emerging markets who want access to reliable agricultural information (including market prices, weather forecasts and crop recommendations) and educational opportunities (such as English language instruction).
According to Dinesh Subramaniam, senior manager of communications for Nokia, collaborations with local partners such as agricultural boards, meteorological departments and educational boards have helped create the hyper-local information needed for the service to run.
One of the biggest challenges facing the program is the initial collection of data; creating specifically targeted information for different regions takes time and manpower, which limits the speed with which the program can be rolled out to new countries.
The Vodafone Americas Foundation is announcing the last call for nominations for the second annual Wireless Innovation Project, a competition to identify and reward the most promising advances in wireless related technologies that can be used to solve critical problems around the globe. Proposals will be accepted through February 1, 2010, with the final winners announced on April 19, 2010 at the annual Global Philanthropy Forum in Redwood City, California.
Editacuja is a Brazilian startup focused in knowledge management and contend development services for education, training and culture.
Integrate emerging technologies to provide innovative solutions to companies, universities and schools, enabling cross border iniciatives with high ROI
Works with a multi-media approach, enabling mobile, press, audiovisual and web media services and products.
With a multi-disciplinary team, Editacuja adds value and knowledge for projects that can educate and relate.
Editacuja Integrate Technologies
This guest post was written by Joshua Haynes who is studying for his Masters of International Business, at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Reposted with Hayes' permission.
Projet Alphabétisation de Base par Cellulaire (ABC), conceived of and spearheaded by Tufts University professor Jenny Aker, uses mobiles phones as tools to aid in adult literacy acquisition in rural Niger.
Adult literacy in rural areas faces an inherent problem. In Niger, for example, there are no novels, newspapers, or journals in native languages like Hausa or Zarma. The 20% of Nigériens who are literate are literate in French. The vast majority of rural villagers have struggled to maintain their livelihoods since time immemorial without ever knowing how to read a single word. What’s the point of literacy if there is no need for written materials?
Christelle Scharff is an associate professor of computer science at Pace University in New York. In our occasional series of mobile innovators, she is discussing her work with the Mobile Development and Web Design for Senegal project that teaches students to develop mobile applications.
We have recently written about the proliferation of mobile bootcamps to nurture the next generation of mobile app developers in Africa. Christelle Scharff and her colleagues Anita Wasilewska from Stony Brook University, and Mamadou Bousso, Ibrahima Ndiaye and Cheikh Sarr from the University of Thies coordinated the camp in Senegal that is now expanding in reach. The students there developed three mobile phone applications, including an educational game (Wannigame) and an application to manage sales and expenses for local artisans.
To date, the project has also trained 22 teachers in Senegal in a training organized with Manobi. Most of the teachers did not previously identify mobile application programming as a field of study. The do now! Take a look at Christelle's work.
Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles.
The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the small group (there are usually six or fewer participants per program) comes together and is trained for three to four days in the basics of mobile reporting (both how to use the technology and in basic journalism). Then they return to their communities, and for a period of six months, use the phones to make video reports on local stories.
The Voices of Africa Media Foundation teaches young journalists in Africa how to use mobiles to create news videos. The nine month training program allows the students to gain online exposure for their work, while also providing free online feedback from instructors.
The target audience for students is young Africans with an interest in journalism; the program is especially trying to reach young women to join their program in order to have equal male/female participation. The viewing audience is primarily located overseas and in major African cities where the Internet is more easily accessible.
Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles.
The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the small group (there are usually six or fewer participants per program) comes together and is trained for three to four days in the basics of mobile reporting (both how to use the technology and in basic journalism). Then they return to their communities, and for a period of six months, use the phones to make video reports on local stories.
Qton Solutions
Qton provides development and government organisations in the emerging markets with appropriate mobile and web based applications.
With extensive experience in mobile applications and software development Qton has a knowledgeable team committed to supplying affordable and effective solutions.
Aim
To assist organisations achieve their aims by enabling basic mobile phones to:
Project ABC, implemented in collaboration with Catholic Relief Services in Niger and Christopher Ksoll (Oxford University) and Travis Lybbert (University of California-Davis), is an innovative, three-year pilot program to use cell phones as a platform for literacy in Niger. The purpose of the pilot program is to use information technology (mobile phones) as a complement to traditional literacy training, providing households with the opportunity to practice their literacy skills via SMS.
The Mobile Citizen Project, which aims to fund and support mobile initiatives for social change in Latin America, launches today. The program is a project of the Science and Technology Division of the Inter-American Development Bank, with the support of the Italian Trust Fund for Information and Communication Technology for Development. MobileActive.org is a media partner, powering the Program's "Ideas Box."
According to the project's press release, the "Mobile Citizen Program aims to accelerate the development and implementation of mobile services to address acute social and economic problems. We will provide support to develop citizen-centric solutions that target low-income groups in urban and rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region."
BridgeIT is a program that uses mobile phones to bring educational videos to rural classrooms - a mobile teaching tool deployed in The Philippines and Tanzania, is changing the way teachers and students interact.
The program develops videos in the subjects of math, science, and life skills, and provides schools with the technology necessary to use the videos in their classroom - everything from the mobile phones that receive the videos to the televisions that play them. Teacher training and lesson plans that promote the integration of the educational videos into regular classroom activities are also provided.
In the context of the rapid growth of mobile phone penetration in developing countries, mobile telephony is currently considered to be particularly important for development. Yet, until recently, very little systematic evidence was available that shed light on the developmental impacts of mobile telecommunication.
The Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, has played a critical role in filling some of the research gaps through its partnerships with several key actors in this area.
The objective of this paper is to evaluate the case of mobile phones as a tool in solving development problems drawing from the evidence of IDRC supported projects. IDRC has supported around 20 projects that cut across several themes such as livelihoods, poverty reduction, health, education, the environment and disasters. The projects will be analyzed by theme in order to provide a thematic overview as well as a comparative analysis of the development role of mobile phones. In exploring the evidence from completed projects as well as the foci of new projects, the paper summarizes and critically assesses the key findings and suggests possible avenues for future research.
BridgeIT, a mobile teaching tool deploying in Tanzania, is changing the way students and teachers interact in the classroom. The program, launched in 2007, allows teachers to download educational videos (focusing on math, science, and life skills) onto mobile phones. The phones are then connected to classroom televisions which display the videos. Students watch the videos, which usually run four to seven minutes, and then teachers use BridgeIT-designed lesson plans to build on the ideas set forth in the videos.
The short educational videos are transmitted to teachers in 150 schools in seven regions of Tanzania (Lindi, Mtwara, Pwani, Dar es Salaam, Tanga, Dodoma and Kilimanjaro). In a country in which classrooms are often overcrowded (the program originally aimed to reach 10,000 students; due to crowded classrooms and teachers teaching multiple classes through the day, BridgeIT lesson plans have so far been taught to more than 40,000 students) and the demand for books greatly exceeds the supply, lessons via video are an effective way to reach a large number of students.
BridgeIT has two main goals; 1) to use mobile phone and digital technology to increase achievement among primary school boys and girls in math, science, and life skills, and 2) to increase the quality of teacher instruction in Tanzanian primary schools.
BridgeIT creates four-to-seven minute videos in subjects such as math, science, and life skills and distributes those videos via mobile phone to classrooms across Tanzania. BridgeIT-trained teachers then incorporate the videos into lesson plans.
The target audience is primary students in rural Tanzania, and their teachers.
The project worked closely with the Forum for African Women Educationalists to create female-centric roles (portraying women in the videos in professional settings such as scientists, doctors, and leaders). The project originally aimed to reach 10,000 students, but greatly exceeded that number due to more teachers being trained in BridgeIT technology. Preliminary results show that student attendance and class participation (especially for female students) have risen in BridgeIT classrooms.
The lack of reliable Internet access forced the project to embrace a mobile-centric plan, so the deployment in Tanzania became a true pilot program rather than just a reworking of the Philippine Text2Teach program (on which BridgeIT was based). Schools must have electricity in order to use the program, leaving some of the most rural and in-need populations out.
The International Youth Foundation (IYF) invests in the extraordinary potential of young people. Founded in 1990, IYF builds and maintains a worldwide community of business, governments, and civil society organizations committed to empowering youth to be healthy, productive, and engaged citizens. IYF programs are catalysts of change that help young people obtain a quality education, gain employability skills, make healthy choices, and improve their communities.
IYF is based on the premise that throughout the world there are thousands of effective programs and approaches making a profound and lasting difference in young lives. Rather than build new programs from scratch, our mission is to identify programs “that work,” strengthen their impact, and expand their reach so that many more young people may benefit.
All of IYF’s program activity is clustered around four issue areas, which form the core thrust of IYF’s global youth initiatives. These are: Education, Employability, Leadership and Engagement, and Health Education and Awareness.
Here are some mobile events for the month of October that we thought are noteworthy and of interest to the MobileActive.org community. If you know of others, please mail us at info at MobileActive dot org.
The first Mobile Web Conference in Africa is a two-day event in Johannesburg that focuses on some of these key questions: How will the mobile industry evolve to a point where the vast majority of people have access to the mobile web and the content they want to view? How can societal and economic problems be tackled by the development of the capabilities of the mobile device?
PopTech explores major trends shaping our future, the social impact of new technologies, and new approaches to addressing the world’s most significant challenges. Several PopTech Fellows are part of the MobileActive.org community, including Deb Levine from Isis.inc, a leader in using mobile phones for sexual health education.
This paper looks at the diffusion and applications of mobile phone technology in education in Asia and Africa, compared to North America. It indicates that Asian distance education can be the global leader in the development of educational uses for the mobile phone; and it considers the potential for mobile learning in Africa and other developing regions. The paper concludes that it would be a disservice to learners and instructors if Asia and Africa were to cast their lot with web-based learning. By comparison, mobile phone technology is widespread, easy to use, and familiar to learners and instructors.
WildKnowledge (WK) are a spin out company from Oxford Brookes University in the UK. WK enables members to create and share mobile recording forms (WildForm), decision trees (WildKey), maps (WildMap) and diagrams (WildImage). These tools enable the user to make informed decisions in the field and gather good quality data. This collated data can then be uploaded and shared as part of collaborative projects. Most of our members are UK school children and students, we are keen to explore new areas both geographically and contextually. All WK applications are wep apps and can work on any device with a web browser from a mobile device to a laptop (functionality will vary according to browser's capabilities).
Mountain Lakes BOE
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One Shoe mobile
