#ict4D: the complex mLearning challenges for specific ethnic groups #mlw2013

Leslie Dodson from the University of Colorado on The mobile utitly gap and literacy challenges in oral-language communities: sms use by Berber women.

These are my live blognotes coming from UNESCO's mobile learning week enriched with tweets from Ronda (@glam_mobileleo).
Leslie used an epigraphic research approach and working in the field for 8 to 9 months.

For those interested in the number of challenges that can be encountered when diving into a mLearning project with very specific target learners... this is it!

Pressing issues
conventional wisdom assumes

• women with mobile phones can text
• illiterate women and numeration
• mobiles obscure gender

this is not the case

• many women are only able to use expensive voice services
• functions that rely on counting or nubmer sequences are confusing
• cultural restrictions on communication between men and women extend to mobiles

These issues are bigger than a community of Berber women (approx. 500 billion women are illiterate)

Population: women and work

• Berber communities: tribal, traditional, Muslim, conservative, rural, arid and poor.
• Women lack formal education
• women's livelihoods are tied to the Argan tree (oil production, or as a home lifelyhood). 

Unseco has designated Morocco's Argan forests.

The technology

• simple, broken, secndhand, counterfeit phones
• few smart phones
• relatively broad network coverage and available power

the goal of the project

• expand the use f available mobile phones for personal and instrubmental communicatoin
• explore the challenges of moving from oral communication (speaking and calling) to texting in a non-text based community
• avoid a  formal educational approach because of shame and fear

A complex language environment
2 spoken dialects
Darija: an amagamation of Arabic, French and Spanish words
Tachelhit: one of numerous Berber dialect

2 official written and spoken languages
Modern Standard Arabic and French

3 alphabets: Arabic, Latin script, Tifinagh script (Glyph-based, not widely used).

The texting utility gap
due to the complex literacy and language environment, women's mobile use is basic ("What is literacy when u have 2 spoken dialects?")
they are unable to benefit fro many phone features ("My phone only speaks #French but I dont speak French.")
they face socio-cultural and psycho-dynamic deterrents to learning
illiterate women are paying a tech tax because they cannot text
they are forgoing service benefits

• unable to take advantage of mobile bonuses
• cannot access development initiatives
• missing out on training opportunities

coping strategies: high visual literacy

• many users identify words and numbers as visual packets of information (Berber women in #Morocco use small pieces of paper to identify words/numbers on phones)
• they rely on pattern recognition to identify phone numbers
• they memorize keypad sequences
• they use paper to assist in phone use
• they identify contacts with icons, names and numbers
• they rely on scribes

personal communication: mobile support for literacy in the Coop

• informal education
• situated learning
• adult women get to choose the literacy they want
• highly motivated to learn latin alphabet
• the mobile provides the alphabet at their fingertips
• multimedia use ("Multimedia includes chalkboards, alongside other tools we use..." )

If you do not have common devices, it can be very hard to collaboratively learn. There was a lot of struggle with directions to enter letters, some mobiles have capital and small letters which felt like different alphabets to the women.