| Sbu hits it off with a girl at a party before she disappears, leaving her mobile phone behind her. Who is she? Why does no one from her contact list know her? Why is she getting threatening messages? Thousands of teenagers in South Africa have been thrilled by the ingenious mystery story of Sbu, his friends and the missing girl. They were reading the story on their mobile phones, delivered by a remarkable mobile website or “mobisite”. The Shuttleworth Foundation originated a thrilling story project with a team of professional authors, web designers and researchers from the University of Cape Town. Their goal was to use mobile phones to familiarise teenagers with the written word and to get them writing. Project manager Steve Vosloo of the Shuttleworth Foundation will present interim results at eLearning Africa 2010. South Africa is short of books. In 2006, half the households in the country did not possess a single leisure book. Books were in short supply in schools and homes. However, South African teenagers do have mobile telephones. Ninety per cent of urban teenagers have a mobile. So could mobiles deliver books to teenagers as they do in Japan? Could teenagers use their mobiles to write texts longer than simple chat messages? To explore these questions, the Shuttleworth Foundation, founded by the staggeringly successful South African software developer and pioneering self-funded space traveller Mark Shuttleworth, set up the m4Lit project – text messaging for “mobiles for literacy”. The project commissioned Kontax, the world’s first m-novel published in English and Xhosa. This teenage mystery story was published on both the website (www.kontax.mobi) and on the country’s most popular mobile instant-messaging platform, Mxit. The pilot phase ran between August and December 2009, developing the story, running competitions and conducting research. The assumption behind Kontax was that language, being central to thinking, communication, and learning, reflected the aspirations of the Revised National Curriculum Statements (NCS 2005) for school education in South Africa. This placed emphasis on language learning as the central contributor to the overall curriculum. Steve Vosloo’s team published their story on mobile phones with very little time for research. “We really did not have a lot of time to come up with a story – a month in fact”, said Steve.
“We chose the company Clockwork Zoo, which already had a writing team, and took on Sam Wilson, an experienced m-novel writer, as lead author. We held four story-development workshops with teens in Langa and Khayelitsha, two low income settlements in Cape Town. They helped us to create the characters and the plot. The teens in the workshops told us they would like to read a mystery story about love and suspense. Clockwork Zoo designed the character images and the chapter illustrations”. An Enormous Success The Shuttleworth Foundation organised a public relations campaign for the launch of the story and worked on marketing with the Mxit mobile instant-messaging platform. In the first three months of publication, over 12,000 teenagers read the story on their phone. Overall readership reached 30,000. There were 300 comments posted online, and 1500 entries arrived after the announcement of a competition for sequel ideas. Steve Vosloo explains, “We aimed at 14 – 19 year olds. In the end, we got most of our uptake from that group but we had the same number from the 19 – 24 year olds, which surprised us”. In order to evaluate the story, the project team used various methods, “all with their own challenges and complications”, according to Steve. An indicator of success was the number of subscribers and story readers. The team interviewed a number of teenagers in Cape Town. Dotty, 16, said, “It's great. For me it’s really hard to pick up a book to start reading, but I don’t mind reading on my phone”. Reports, summary presentation and press release for the pilot phase are at: http://m4lit.wordpress.com/reports/ Steve Vosloo’s presentation “The Cellphone Is the eBook Reader of Africa: South African Case Study” will include a description of the m4Lit project and of Kontax. Insights and lessons learned will be shared with a discussion of the potential of mobile stories in Africa.
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