mHealth, SMS, and African schools

I stopped in at Wayan Vota's TechSalon on mHealth at inveneo on Tuesday morning. (mHeatlh = "mobile health," essentially the use of phones, handheld computers and other portable devices to meet healthcare needs and improve healthcare systems.)

Karen Coppock, VP of VitalWave Consulting, presented information about their new-ish report culling trends and examples from over 50 mHealth projects. (A project that I worked on in 2003, Teledoc, was among the group they looked at.) 

The VitalWave report shows mHealth used for: 

• Remote monitoring (6 projects) 
• Remote data collection (14 projects)
• Communication and training for healthcare workers (5 projects) 
• Disease and epidemic outbreak training (7 projects)
• Diagnostic and treatment support (9 projects -- including the now-defunct but lamented Teledoc!)
• Education and awareness (6 projects)

Much, much attention was focused on SMS, used for one-to-one communication and used as a broadcast / narrowcast medium to reach mobile-phone users. SMS--because it's cheap, it's nearly ubiquitous (for those who can read), and connects directly to incentives in the form of airtime--is becoming the killer app for health, agriculture and community development in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

But not in education. Sure there are a few initiatives. And teachers have relatively high levels of mobile-phone ownership, (OK, I'm guessing here, prove me wrong). But the primary constituents--kids--don't own phones. And the few mLearning initiatives that target educators and schools, a couple in  Tanzania and South Africa, haven't really taken off. 

Whyzzat?

Here's an example: 

Vodacom and Nokia were collaborating to offer mobile based educational content to remote schools. The Project 'BrigeIT' uses a Nokia N95 and a TV set on the client side. A teacher is able to send an SMS to request material and a file is downloaded to the phone on such a request. This multi media file can be played back on the TV set. There are still some issues on energy that the project is grappling with.

 

Television -- even without broadcast content -- is NOT the killer app for schools in the region. Electricity, toxicity (what happens with those CRTs?) and the high cost of usable content are all barriers. Not to mention the fact that the data-download over Vodacom's GPRS network is going to cost _somebody_, even if that somebody is Vodacom for the purposes of the field test. 

Finally, why not just load ALL the damn content on a DVD and send the thing to the school so the teacher can browse without peering through the tiny aperture of her mobile phone screen at whatever index of, say, social studies content is sent in reply to her SMS? (Sure, portable DVD players cost somewhat more than CRT-based TVs, but they use way more power and release way more toxics at the end of their lifecycles. [Well, not way more, perhaps. But lots of lead...])

Where's the SMS-based teacher-development project that drives teachers to upgrade their subject knowledge and try new approaches in the classroom? Or OUT of the classroom?

(More on SMS and schools, and on the relationship of mHealth & eHealth, soon.) 

 

No smart phone for you!

From 4 March edition of The New Vision (daily paper in Uganda) by way of Digital Learning:

EXPENSIVE mobile phones are a liability to teachers, information and communication technology (ICT) state minister Alintuma Nsambu has said. Nsambu encouraged teachers to instead invest in cheap computers that would help them move with the modern technological trends. 

“That flashy phone can have more features than a computer but cannot do certain things. It can also be easily stolen and you go back to zero,” he said. (snip) "Students are learning via the Internet. It will be difficult for a computer-illiterate teacher to stand in front of such children,” he cautioned. 
...

Robert Ssebukwu, the education ministry commissioner for ICT, said teachers had been offered refurbished computers at sh300,000.

300,000 Ugandan Shillings is about US $150. A Blackberry Curve is available for about US $325, WITH pay-as-you-go pricing or a monthly subscription of about US $45.

The MOE-subsidized computer doesn't seem like that bad a deal, until you factor in connectivity costs ($174 set-up for broadband, with monthly costs of $2,300 for 512 Mbps*) and whatever you need to do to keep your refurb running. And you still need to have a phone...

* I do realize that individuals in Uganda won't be signing up for broadband. Teachers make a little more than US $100 per month. Uganda's overall Internet pricing, however, is among the most expensive in Africa.

The origin of 1:1 computing!

 The state of Maine was the first in the United States to leap into one-to-one computing. The Maine Learning Technology Initiative describes the impetus behind the decision to provide every student and every teacher with a laptop:

Immediately, everyone recognized that education represented the most crucial area for this major change and Gov. King recalled a conversation he had had with Seymour Papert a year or two previous where the idea of how to transform education was discussed. During their conversation, Papert convinced King that a major transformation would happen only when student and teachers worked with technology on a 1 to 1 basis and that any other ratio would not produce the transformation everyone sought.

I'm curious about many things, but foremost are my questions as to what "the transformation everyone sought" is. It's possible, even probable, that we've spent so much time describing truly empowered learners that everyone, or at least everyone who has an opinion within a certain closed context, does understand and seek the the same transformation of the traditional. 

But if that's so, it's also likely that the understanding and seeking have been at least partially emptied of specifics. 

While the stakes for Maine--it's a small state in the largest national economy on earth--are significant but not epochal. If 1:1 computing fails there, well, at least _something_ positive will probably happen, even if it's only an increase in the number of computer technicians. 

But 1:1 computing has rapidly--really rapidly, considering that Maine launched its program only in 2002--been adopted by developing countries. Driven partly by one of Papert's proteges, Nicolas Negroponte, 1:1 computing has made appearances in the education systems of Uruguay, Rwanda, Brazil, Ethiopia and elsewhere. The stakes in these countries, and the consequences of anything other than success, are much, much higher. 

(At one point in 2004 I was hanging out with a bunch of kids in a village in Rwanda. I asked them if they wanted some soda, you know, Fanta or something. Most schools I've been to in Africa, soda lubricates interviews. These kids, though, would have none of it. "Could we have some meat,  please?" School fees and uniforms and lost wages were all barriers to the participation in school of these kids. And yet education, literally mastering English if nothing else, held so much for them in terms of opportunity.)

Does "everyone" (who counts) in those countries understand and seek the same transformation? And if so, is it the same transformation as that sought by "everyone" (who counts) in Maine?

 

Local nomads (really local)

The NY Times reports on the connection between kids using schooldesks that allow them to stand up in class and improved academic performance. While research has yet to be completed... 

We just know movement is good for kids,” Ms. Bormann said. “We can measure referrals to the office, sick days, whatever it might be. Teachers are seeing positive things.”

Compare this approach to the WAP-delivered test-preparation content discussed previously for Senegal. In contrast to requiring that kids have mobile-phone accounts...

“We’re talking about furniture here,” [Ms. Reisenger] said, “plain old furniture. If it’s that simple, if it turns out to have the positive impacts everyone hopes for, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”

 

It is.

(One wonders, also, the degree to which stand-up desks might be a "disruptive technology" in the discipline-centered classrooms of so many countries. They would certainly be a cheaper technology, more easily implemented, with more easily assessed impact.)

Finding that niche between smart phones and netbooks...

... Is going to be very difficult. CNET reports that Intel and LG Electronics: 

are working on a new class of product that are mini-computers that can also be used to make phone calls using a wireless Internet connection. Intel sees the category of product as something that is somewhere between a smartphone, like the Apple iPhone, and a Netbook, a scaled-down version of a notebook computer. 

This is happening because Intel sees opportunities for growth in the midst of the economic downturn. While mobile phone sales were off about 12 percent worldwide last year, smartphone sales rose about 22.5 percent. Intel doesn't make mobilephone chips (ARM, TI, and QualComm do, according to CNET). LG electronics, on the other hand, makes many different phones, a few computer monitors, and zillions of kitchen and laundry appliances. (They don't appear to make computers.) So, together they are envisioning a phone-like device that's a little bigger, a little faster, a little more usable than a smartphone, and REALLY popular:

Intel argues that consumers need a device that's more powerful than a smartphone but not as bulky as a Netbook or laptop. The idea is that consumers who buy a MID could use it to watch high-definition video, make phone calls using the Internet, or download information from the Web while on the go.

Now, the above are all activities that I do, reasonably frequently, on my phone, as per the CNET article: 

Not surprisingly, Intel's vision of a MID is exactly why many people want to buy a smartphone like the iPhone. 

The Intel/LG device will in fact make phone calls--via wireless when it's available. Which highlights the primacy of the network. I don't believe that my phone right now--a 3G iphone--is keeping me from doing much that I want to do (except, ironically, make Skype calls on wireless). A faster network, I know, will result in higher utility from my already-robust smartphone, and will also lead to more applications, more services, and more sophistication in both. Network quality (speed, coverage, reliability and cost) are the limiters of my experience, not the phone itself. 

(Oh sure, I don't like typing on the iPhone anymore than anyone else does. But I don't really consider it a productivity tool as such, I consider it an information and communication tool. A Web reader, etc.) 

And the CNET article makes an interesting point in this regard: 

So far, wireless operators have done a poor job of providing people with a single subscription for multiple devices. 

It's true of course. As the three or four main mobile telcoms fight over the smartphone subscriber markets, they haven't found much advantage to bundling 3G access for non-phone devices with 3G access for smartphones. I suppose that letting me use my iPhone as a 3g modem for my laptop might afford me some increased degree of mobility/communications, but hell, I live in Oakland, I can almost always find WiFi in conjunction with a cup of coffee.