Kids, Education,
and Cellular Handsets
Jakkaphan Tangkuampien
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.
MXit Interface
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
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
MXit and Teenagers
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
