A Reality Check on Student Mobile Adoption and Content Creation in Resource-Constrained Environments

摘要

Although the African continent's adoption of mobile devices and access to networked resources are often euphorically conceived as a mobile revolution and a technological miracle respectively, the South African mobile technology landscape does not perfectly fit these hyped theorisations. Notwithstanding the impressive uptake of mobile technologies, differential adoption of mobile phones and gradations of access to educational resources persistently plague South African students' ownership of mobile devices and use of online resources. To debunk the aforementioned myth about the mobile revolution and universal access to online educational resources, Keller's (1984, 1987) ARCS model and a departmental climate survey were drawn upon to unravel Computer Science and Informatics students' ownership of mobile devices and the extent of their participation in the creation of online content. Findings suggest that notwithstanding the moderately high ownership of low-end mobile phones, smartphones, and laptop computers, the ownership of other intelligent devices (PDAs, tablets, netbooks and e-readers) and digital recording devices (digital cameras, audio and video players) is still highly differentiated and constitutes an emerging social phenomenon. Student modest adoption of social networking technologies (like Facebook and Twitter) for content creation is juxtaposed by a disturbing non-use of other Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, Google documents and mobile instant messaging applications. The implications of these dynamics for pedagogy include the need for educators to demonstrate the relevance of using mobile technologies for student meaningful learning, broaden student knowledge and confidence in the academic appropriation of emerging technologies and enhance their academic satisfaction with new technologies. This could be enabled by using pedagogical strategies that directly draw on particular emerging technologies to ensure student productive adoption of these technologies.