Technology is not the major obstacle
Today I have been attending the ITU Regional Human Capacity Development Forum for Africa in Kampala. Before I got to make my presentation, I listened with fascination to Brian Neilson from BMI-TechKnowledge in South Africa as he painted a picture of the telecomms landscape here. I must confess to being shocked as to the low Internet penetration and even lower broadband usage. The only bright spot was the very high take-up of mobile phones and the extensive and productive uses to which they are being put. I began to question whether my presentation, which positioned the current pressures facing the l&d community in the context of a proliferation of new media options and bandwidth, really made any sense to this audience when most of those opportunities were some years away.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the greatest obstacles in the way of new l&d practices are not so much technological (although this is obviously still a significant issue in Africa) but psychological. If Africa had all the computers and bandwidth it could possibly need right now, would that mean a huge upsurge in the use of technology to make learning more accessible and efficient? No, because l&d is a conservative profession and it would still take time for the community to overcome their fears, engage with technology, re-skill and commit. And if the Western World is anything to go by, that process will take quite a few years. If Africa starts now to prepare its l&d community, by the time it is fully engaged the technology will have arrived.
Internet access is, of course, not an end in itself; what you access has to be worth the effort. As Dorothy Gordon, from the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Exellence in ICT in Ghana pointed out, when Africa finally goes online, it will find very little digital content of quality that has been created by Africans for Africans. It's one thing to provide knowledge of ICT; it's another to foster the design and communication skills needed to generate great content. Again, the problem is not purely an African one. Design and communication skills are not yet in abundance in the Western l&d community.
posted by Clive Shepherd @ 4:17 PM #
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Perhaps Africa will bypass "traditional" learning and development in favour of location-based, at-time-of-need, performance support from both packaged content and instant access to peers and "experts". Fast, fluid, bite-size - all you need is a mobile. Get a smartphone and the mobile bandwidth can be harnessed for multimedia and augmented reality apps. Let's hope they leapfrog us and save themselves some pain... :-)
I think the common wisdom is that Africa will skip the internet and go straight to mobile. Africa pretty much leads the way, perhaps after places like Bangladesh, for micro-payment systems and professional support via mobile. There is a prof at UCT in IT, I think, who documents it all and jets about.
I think you will find that useful technology is taken up fast in Africa. Everyone can tell the time. Machines to slice your bread in supermarkets were very popular (immediately killing a tradtion of doorstep sandwiches) but zebra crossings were ignored.
I think you also have to be wary about innocently projecting the class structures of the UK onto Africa. The political economy - the structures of who has and who will stop other people having - is quite different. I think, btw, that our 2nd universtity in Bulawayo had satellite connections for a remote campus 10 years ago. Our internet at the university was duff, but we had two email networks (esanet and healthnet) that we used until commercial internet kicked in. We had satellite TV across the southern part of the continent - don't know about the north. SA Breweries reconciles its accounts by satellite in Tanzania. We had fibre optic cables laid in Harare 18 years ago. MK has copper - hence most people here don't have broadband.
If you want to see the movers and shakers in Africa, look at what SA Breweries are doing and Anglo-American/de Beers. Among the technology providers - Econet and I think it is, mnet. UNDP had satellite linkups in Harare ten years ago with video conference calling.
And btw, the difficulty in UK is not that l&d professionals are technology shy - they are political economy shy. They don't want to call the Emperor's Clothes. They'll be fine as long as no one else does. Sadly, for them, someone will. The 'hunna hunna' over Web2.0 is exactly that. We seeing a lot of Emperors with no clothes, and a lot of tailors embarrassed because their invoices are now suspect, journalists and academics red-faced for their description of the said clothes, and a disoriented public who are saying - you mean clothes mean something else. But instead of asking their clothes, they've gone in to the vendetta business. Which does seem to be the general outcome of Emperor's Clothes stories.
I grew up in South Africa and moved to the States in 1999. What struck me when I moved here was the low penetration of mobile phones. People who were using them were still using the large satellite phone-looking cell phones. In South Africa cell phones were tiny and their size was generally compared to that of a small tea cup. In the mid-90's text messaging was already prolific in SA, mainly because it was (and is) cheaper than calling a person.
My point is that most people in SA are VERY comfortable with cell phones and using them to send and receive text-based messages. I would have to agree that mobile learning will be an excellent method to deploy training in developed parts of Africa.
I would caution against using the blanket term Africa. Africa is about 3 times larger than the States and it encompasses a myriad of geographies, cultures, socio-political realities and economies. There is no single solution for African development or training. In the case of South Africa and the surrounding countries mobile learning may become a reality in pretty short order.
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