L'ecole nomade?

 e-Learning Africa's newsportal has an interview with Philippe Steger, founder of WapEduc, a platform delivering learning resources to the mobile phones of secondary students in France and, as of this year, in Dakar, Senegal. (Heads up: The interview is in French.)

My quick run-through of the WapEduc site suggests that its resources focus on test preparation, which is to say on drill, static content, and comprehension/memorization/performance-style follow-up questions. WapEduc content duplicates or complements the presentation-based classroom and its textbook-format resources. It's a tool that supports learning outside of school in ways that are cognate with traditional pedagogy. 

The service is free in Dakar, however users need to pay airtime charges plus data costs. Obviously, kids need to have phones or access to phones as well.

(On the heavily plus side:  WAP--or Wireless Application Protocol--as I understand it, means that kids don't need to have smart phones [phones capable of reading html and other 'normal' Web protocols. WAP displays on your street-bought Nokia 2200 just fine.)

There are several questions that pop to mind: 

• WapEduc focuses on getting students through tests (and so through school). Is there a problem with that?
• How significant are the costs in Senegal? What  regulatory or policy steps can be taken to ensure that all kids with phones don't face cost barriers?
• WapEduc is running a 100-student pilot in Dakar, to be followed by a roll-out to 1,000-2,000 students if the results are good. What kinds of results would be considered "good"? (Using the phone? More time studying? Better scores on tests?)
• The need for WAPified learning resources in effect creates a gate around kids' exploration (WAP don't do porn). For most teachers and most parents--in developing or developed countries--this is not a bad thing. But the content has to be text based. What are the pros and cons?

Finally, and most interesting, the WapEduc catchphrase ("I learn when I want and where I want") corresponds to the mobile (or some might say "ADHD-compatible" or even "twitchy") lifestyles to which many youth aspire. What are the costs and what are the benefits, in terms of learning and cognitive development, of enabling greater mobility and more multitasking in the pursuit of higher levels of secondary-school completion? 

(Is, in other words, the vision of WapEduc something like a Senegalese kid skating a ramp in downtown Dakar, or bounding through some Parcours routine, stopping to catch his breath, and dialing up an algebra problem on his phone?)

More on WapEduc in a while....

I've got your low-cost device right here...

According to Wikipedia, 73 million people in China access the Web using mobile phones. (I've seen figures as high as 170 million, but that would equal the total number of Internet users in China as of 2007. Seems doubtful.) 73 million is about 30 percent of China's 253 million Internet users. A just-released study by Vital Wave Consulting states manufacturers of low-cost computing devices--sub-notebooks, ultraportables, whatever--are targeting the emerging middle classes in countries such as India, China and Indonesia. There are few devices specifically designed for the majority populations of these countries--rural, poor, off-the-grid, and generally faced with choices that make access to information a luxury. 

Why is this? What about the 2 billion or so people at the bottom of the pyramid, don't they comprise a massive market for low-cost computing and Internet access?

I think, perhaps, not. 

According to Richard Fuchs of IDRC, mobile Internet access (or using a mobile phone to access the Internet) is growing faster in developing countries than desktop Internet access. (I met a guy installing 3G in Bengal in 2003. I worked on a project using GPRS in Haryana State that same year. We were "mobile Web" before we knew what it meant.) 

Putting the next nail in the coffin of consumer-oriented low-cost computing in poor countries, according to Simon Batchelor of Gamos Consulting, the introduction of 1 mobile phone into a village in Africa increases productivity 10x, while the second phone increases productivity <1x. Villagers share information. (Both of these nuggets of information have been shared with me directly, I can't find them on the Web.) 

Thus, given the growth of the mobile Web in developing countries, combined with the tendency for the information and communications provided by "first-access" devices to be shared among poor users, well-managed design, manufacturing and distribution of low-cost, low-power computers by commercial entities is not going to target the poorest of the poor, or even the generally poor. Those 2 billion poor people, as a market, can be cut down to maybe 20 million early adopters, because they'll make crucial information available to others in their villages. And even those village-based pioneers of Internet usage are going to--based on cost, based on their living circumstances--opt for mobile-Web devices not tiny laptops. 

Hell, I can update my facebook page using a free application specifically designed for my mobile phone. Which would suggest that the device that's going to crack open the Web make life-critical communications available to the world's rural poor is going to be an iClone.