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 [...]

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.