Tweet Here’s the abstract of a paper Nicci Pallitt and I just had accepted by the journal Language & Education: ‘Grand Theft South Africa’: Games, literacy and inequality in consumer childhoods By Marion Walton and Nicola Pallitt Discussions of ‘game literacy’ focus on the informal learning and literacies associated with games but seldom address the [...]
Grand Theft South Africa? Local game literacies
Mobile literacies – bridging the gap between phone and book.
Many urban teens in South Africa are mobile-centric internet users,
whose first and primary way of accessing the internet is via GPRS-
enabled cellphones. The m4Lit project used mobile social networks to
experiment with mobile publishing for teens. The pilot phase of the
project attracted substantial interest – over 28 000 teen subscribers
signed up to read an ‘m-novel’ on their mobile phones. The
project was less successful in encouraging teens’ writing of fiction,
largely owing to constraints of authorship on mobile platforms. The m4Lit
research project documented mobile literacies among teens living in
low-income townships in Cape Town, including the role of indigenous
literacies (isiXhosa) in the project, teens’ interest in the m-
novel, their use of mobile social network MXit (15 million registered
users in South Africa) and the mobile web.
m4lit: Mobile phones for literacy
TweetFrom this week, South African teens will encounter the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project, which launches today. m4Lit centres around Kontax, a teen m-novel, or a novel designed to be read on a cellphone, in either English or isiXhosa. Readers will be able to access the series from WAP-enabled cellphones (or from computers) and they can [...]
Children, parents and mobile phones – global study
TweetI’m at the IAMCR conference in Mexico City. There are quite a few papers focusing on mobile media use on the programme, and I’m trying to attend them where possible. If I have time and battery power I’ll post a few reports here in the next few days. Aiko Mukaida from NTT DOCOMO’s Mobile Society [...]
One Laptop per Child
TweetI heard a lot of skeptical comments about MIT’s 100 dollar laptop project on a recent research trip to Prato, particularly from the Brazilian participants. Everyone talks about a “digital divide”. So it’s easy to assume that’s all that’s needed to solve the problem is the right gadgets which would allow poor/black/developing country people to [...]