EDITOR Gary Marsden gaz@acm.org

were much more guarded in their communication with these friends than they were with the people they knew in real life. Showing that teenagers are the same the world over (and across time periods, as well), most of their conversations on MXit were about parties or how their friends were doing—just a few hours after spending all day with them at school. Many children reported that their parents did not know how to use MXit, giving this medium an exclusive feel and opening the way for conversations that could be free from parental observation.

In order to further explore the potential of mobile ICT systems in education, the principle researcher started work as an IT teacher in a high school in South Africa. As part of this exploration process, he registered as a MXit user. Most of the students were surprised by his presence on MXit; some were threatened by what they considered to be an invasion of their space. This presents an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, we want to use a technology the students are familiar with, one they’re excited about using and that fits in with their daily routine. But if our intervention leeches out their enjoyment of MXit, then we will have ruined our relationship with the students in destroying a technology they see as theirs.

maintain total focus while chatting to the teacher about school. They felt that in talking to their teachers it meant that teachers should be on the top of their reply list, disrupting the way in which they normally communicated.

MXit and Education

As an initial, tentative intervention, extracurricular support sessions were offered via MXit. At first the students did not make use of this facility for asking question on how to do an assignments, instead they asked questions like “how are you?” and “can you get me this girl’s number?”

After observing and interviewing the students about this behavior, it became clear that they were upset that not only was an adult invading their space but also that schoolwork was being pushed into their social space. Moreover, some students reported concern that their friends might notice they were communicating with their teacher, which is “uncool.”

One unexpected observation was in relation to the latency in the MXit system. To overcome this, most children have multiple chat sessions running concurrently so that they have the potential to get a message from one of the available friends— despite their legendary thumb-typing prowess, replies from friends could take more than 20 seconds to be delivered, which they deemed too long. However, some of the students felt that they must

The MXit Bots

The realization that students were responding purely out of politeness, in a way that disrupted their normal use of the system, led us to explore other uses for MXit in education. One lead we pursued stemmed from the observation that MXit users experienced a lot of delay in using the system. In fact, depending on the particular child and the friends that were online, up to 50 percent of conversation time could be spent waiting. We therefore built a bot that would send information to any user who sent it a blank message—“bot” is the term for any program participating in an online chat. The information related to the material being taught in class.

The children started to “talk” to the bot whenever they were waiting. As the bot could respond faster than any human, they could use it to fill in the gaps in conversation time left by their friends. Although the bot was clearly invading their social space with school information, the students still kept using it. It would seem that the relief from the tedium of waiting, which the bot provided, was sufficient to overcome the fact that it was sending nonsocial communications.

While it would be hard to prove any direct correlation between the students’ receiving communication from the bot and their grades improving, the system grew in popularity. In fact, the bot started to be used by students from other schools. In the two weeks preceding the final examinations, there were more requests received than in the previous year. Clearly, the students perceived the bot service to be beneficial.

After the examination period, we interviewed a number of the students. Most of them felt that the service was useful and that they would not have been able to answer some of the examination questions without the information the bot provided. Whether or not this is strictly true is hard to say, but it was clear the bot had played some part in their motivation to learn. Having seen this initial bot, the students were able to make suggestions about services and features of future bots, which inspired us to take the intervention further.