MobilED – A Mobile Tools and Services Platform for Formal and Informal Learning

Abstract

The MobilED initiative is aimed at designing teaching and learning environments that are meaningfully enhanced with mobile technologies and services. The MobilED deliverables are to develop a set of scenarios and guidelines of how mobile technologies could be used for teaching, learning and empowerment of students within and outside the school context; a set of concepts and prototypes that will be developed into a MobilED platform that facilitates and supports the scenarios and guidelines developed and testing, evaluation, dissemination and sustainability strategies for the MobilED platform in real contexts with real people. The first phase of the project included the design, development and piloting of a prototype platform where multimedia and language technologies (voice, text, images) are used via the mobile phone as tools in the learning process. The first 2 pilots focused on the use of low-cost mobile phones, which are readily available in the developing world. It consisted of the development of a mobile audio-wikipedia, using SMS and text-to-speech technologies to enable access to information as well as the contribution of information using voice. The application was tested and results compared between a poor, rural school environment and an affluent private school environment in South Africa. The second phase of the project looked at the use of more advanced mobile phones with multimedia capabilities. It consisted of a joint project between the “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” schools, called “Street Memory” which enabled learners to gather multimedia (sound, voice, video) information and make the results available to the community.