University of Cape Town | jak@cs.uct.ac.za
In South Africa, perhaps not unlike in the rest of the world, most parents find themselves unable to afford school fees for their children. Yet a surprising observation that can readily be made is that most students do have access to a cellular phone and can make proficient use of the device. The explanation for this oddity isn’t obvious, but the potential use of the cellular phone already in the pocket of many school-going children is an enticing prospect for those looking to improve the quality of education. This is especially true in a country where the school-leaving qualification program has a pass rate of only 60 percent—this with the definition of a pass as low as 30 percent for some subjects. The work reported in this article took place with students who attend schools where class sizes are 40 to 60 and whose parents are not able to cover the full cost of school fees and textbooks.
it is our responsibility as technology designers and researchers to leverage that potential.
Many researchers have already commented on how the value of a technology to a person will force them to overcome any hurdle as prosaic as a poorly designed interface. To use MXit, users have formidable tasks: The phone must be set up to use data services; the interface is crammed onto the small screen, and it is often impossible to see who sent the most recent message; there are handset inconsistencies between how text is entered for an SMS and how text is entered in the MXit client.
Despite these difficulties, MXit users have managed to learn and use it to achieve their overall goal of communication—within South Africa at the moment, the number of MXit users is greater than the total number of landlines installed in the entire country!
Like any new social network technology, MXit had a quiet period before it gained sufficient traction to make it viable as a communication tool. Viewed with frustration by adult users, teenagers were spurred by the value proposition and persevered to the point where almost every high school pupil in South Africa with an appropriate handset has MXit installed.
MXit ( www.mxit.co.za) is a South Africa–based instant message service designed to run on almost every cellular phone currently in use. The result is that most phones with at least GPRS and Java capabilities can run a version of MXit allowing the majority of cellular users access to a much cheaper chat platform than the already popular SMS—typically, a character sent by MXit is one-thousandth the cost of a character sent by SMS. It is no surprise then that this platform is popular with children of all backgrounds: It allows them to chat with their friends instantly and cheaply.
However, MXit is not uniformly welcome in schools. There have been many sensationalist newspaper reports of MXit being used for underhanded purposes. These reports are reminiscent of the early days of the Web, when many negative stories circulated about the potential harm it would inflict upon our children. Like the Web before it, MXit has huge potential as a positive medium, and
When we started investigating ICT interventions in South African high schools back in 2006, MXit was already highly popular and seemed like a good infrastructure around which to base our work. Primed by the press reports, we were worried about the abuses of a social network composed almost entirely of teenagers. However, when we started to interview the children, it became clear that their friend lists were made up almost entirely of friends from school. They treated those people whom they knew only from MXit with suspicion, and the children
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