16 November 2008 / 1:17 am / Posted in Learning
I was recently reading a paper from Nokia Research entitled “Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication.” From this paper, several observations were derived. Three main observations are outlined in the image above.
With the proliferation of devices such as the Apple iPhone, I believe that basic issues are still not addressed.
UNESCO defines a person being literate as someone
“… who can, with understanding, both read and write a short simple statement on his or her everyday life.”
According to the CIA, in countries like India and continents like Africa have roughly 40% of its population are tagged as illiterate. India has a population of an estimated 1.129B people, not including those who weren’t able to go through census. That would mean that in India alone, about 452M people are illiterate!
While the Philippines boasts a literacy rate of 92.6%, it still falls short of 6.4% compared to countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan and even Russia. Falling short of 6.4% means ~5.6M people in the Philippines being illiterate. On the other hand, it is also pretty interesting to note that Singapore’s literacy rate is .1% below that of the Philippines’.
Although these statistics do not reflect the majority, I believe that the challenges illiterate mobile phone users face in learning are common and universal to literate people as well — even if not applied to mobile phone usage or interaction. For both structured and unstructured learning, these challenges hold true as they form a person’s basic and overall learning experience. Inconsistencies in the experience, for instance, could lead to what Dewey suggests as a “mis-educative experience.”
As the paper would suggest, using icons and/or audio alone doesn’t solve the problem as these do not assure the learner’s understanding of the material. Design of these solutions may go around the problem but it is still better to solve the root causes of a problem. If these are challenges even for textually literate and proximate literate people, what more for illiterates?
That said, how can we then ensure that a learner has a consistent learning experience, that the learning delivery uses a great mental model, and that there wouldn’t be any language issues in the goal of effective and efficient learning?
