My 7th semester in my PhD journey.
I am working on Mobile learning for my thesis. While working on this topic, I found out one thing. We, us or most of the educators or researchers, are basically working or researching on new methods for education fields. Nevertheless, many of them are working on something that might be useful for future education such as artificial intelligent, robots, games, virtual world, mobile applications, gamification and etc. But, all these technologies require few things, first, technologies, not normal technologies but advance technologies, second, advanced gadgets, and also lastly, the most important thing, money. Well, I believe in developed countries, all the mentioned above is not an issue for people or students staying there, but, how about for people in third world countries or less developed countries or even under developed countries. While researching and working on advance technologies in teaching and learning, shouldn't we also think about the less fortunate children around the word?
I am working on Mobile learning for my thesis. While working on this topic, I found out one thing. We, us or most of the educators or researchers, are basically working or researching on new methods for education fields. Nevertheless, many of them are working on something that might be useful for future education such as artificial intelligent, robots, games, virtual world, mobile applications, gamification and etc. But, all these technologies require few things, first, technologies, not normal technologies but advance technologies, second, advanced gadgets, and also lastly, the most important thing, money. Well, I believe in developed countries, all the mentioned above is not an issue for people or students staying there, but, how about for people in third world countries or less developed countries or even under developed countries. While researching and working on advance technologies in teaching and learning, shouldn't we also think about the less fortunate children around the word?
I mean, if, let's say, we could work on a project, using the cheapest featured phones, without internet connection, with solar charging ability,just SMS to help the children in these countries to learn?
How? you might ask. It is simple, back to the most basic! Don't think about advanced technologies, advanced gadgets. Why? Because in these countries, they could not afford it and we could not get so much funding to support it too. In that case, back to the basic, meaning, use the cheapest and approachable resources to help them.
If you ask me how, my idea is to use SMS, the kids can key in certain number to the server, of course, it should be free. Then they can key in that number and ask different questions with their own language, of course, there will be a databases somewhere, which the volunteers around the world, based on their skills and language abilities, to answer their questions. It might be simple questions like, how to speak certain sentences in English or else, what is the meaning of certain thing. Whatever the question is, one or two volunteer from this project will work together and provide them with answers.
This is a dream, and idea, not that big not that small. But compared to all the robots, AI, virtual world, this little dream might be able to help lots of people who are lacking of the basic facilities to study or have financial difficulty in learning. The value of us staying in this world, of course, is to develop the countries, but at the same time, I believe, education is one important factor in order for a country to be developed!
A small dream and I hope it could be realized soon.
