Reflections on this week’s readings...

One of the readings in Moodle this week was quite interesting.  The mLearning: a Platform for Educational Opportunities at the Base of the Pyramid, focused on the work the telecom industry is doing in the developing world to help promote education and learning.  It was interesting to read through the projects that these telecom companies were implementing to help promote learning in rural locations or in cultures where it was not accepted that girls should go to school and be educationed.  Providing access through mobile networks for learning opportunities can have great benefits for those who have limited or no opportunities, but a few thoughts ran through my head as I was reading about the work of these telecom companies.

My initial thought regarding this article was: these telecom equipment companies and operators are being very generous in offering these services.  However, my next thought was: wow, they have a test bed to work with, they can test new technologies “in the field” and at the same time promote these projects as being good corporate citizens and maybe even write the projects off their books.  I understand that this document was created by the telecom industry to promote its charitable work, but these projects however well intended they are, have large costs associated with them.  It is important to step back and ask, what are these companies gaining from participating in such projects?  Most likely it is more than just good public relations. 

Many of these projects seem to be subsidized in one form or another by the telecom company, the government – which typically owns the telecom company, or by an NGO.  If communities, schools and learners become dependent upon mobile networks for their learning, what happens if this subsidization seizes?  All of the resources students depend upon could become prohibitively expensive to access or not accessible at all.  This would be frustrating and demoralizing for learners as they begin to feel empowered by their learning activities.  What would happen to these subsidies if the telcom company has a couple of bad quarters of financial results or if the government can no longer afford subsidies due to a financial crisis?  The risk is that learners would be dependent upon these subsidies and that their learning could stop due to a lack of access.  

Another thought that popped into my head about the risks associated with telecom providers in developing countries is that governments can have authoritarian control over the mobile networks.  This year provides a striking example when looking through the spectrum of the Arab Spring.  Many authoritarian regimes initial response to the protests was to forcefully try to stop them.  One of the first tools these regimes used to “control” its citizens was to monitor or outright block telecommunications networks and turn off access to social networking websites.  As I was reading about these mobile projects, I thought about how frustrating it would be if learning ceased at the whim of the government when it felt threatened by its citizens.