The May 26th Edutech podcast (available at edutechpodcast.com), a regular podcast devoted to trends in educational technology, features an interview with Vosloo, who heads the m4lit project in Capetown, South Africa. Vosloo states that one of the problems with literacy in South Africa is that children don't have ready access to books. Only 7% of public schools have a functional library. Mobile phone adoption, however, has been high - up to 90% for urban youth. The idea of the m4lit project was to examine whether these mobile phones could be used to promote longer-form reading with teenagers. A story that would be appropriate for the mobile format was commissioned and episodically (initially) made available for download. Additionally, a social component was incorporated, allowing the students to make comments and offer suggestions for a sequel. Although there was a significant drop-off in readers after the initial chapters, Vosloo says that there were still 17,000 downloads of the final chapter.
Vosloo says he loves books and he doesn't see the format as replacement, but rather, a complement to traditional books. "You basically have got to go fishing where the fish are, right? Kids have got cell phones; they love them and they've got them, and if that's a way to reach them and if that gets them reading, maybe they'll go and take a book out of the library, or maybe they'll read a newspaper whereas before they didn't."
Information about the project is available at http://m4lit.wordpress.com/ and at Steve Vosloo's website http://vosloo.net/.
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