MILLEE: out-of-school learning with cell-phone technology in Northern India

The picture above shows a shack in which boys spend most of their time during the mango season. They even sleep here in the nights.

Here's a glimpse of the inner side of the roof. The boys spend so much time here that the inside of the shack’s roof becomes a convenient spot to stash things that are important to them or that they use regularly.

Cell-phone sharing varies based on gender. Here, the boys fight for possession of the phone

By contrast, these girls wait for their turn with the phone.

1. What are you most excited about accomplishing so far as a HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition winner? How has winning this award helped your project accomplish this goal?

To date, our most significant accomplishment was a two-week field study in a rural district in North India. The study took place in June 2008, and involved us interacting with over 45 children from 20 village households. The participants were familiar with cellphones, since most of their families own at least one cellphone each. We are excited about the findings from this study. These lessons will inform how we can better integrate cultural aspects about rural life in India into our technology designs for informal learning, which is one of our priorities for the Fall 2008 semester.

The goal of this exploratory study was to identify opportunities for informal learning that e-learning games and other software applications on cellphones can facilitate. Out-of-school learning is especially critical in this context, for at least two reasons. Firstly, out-of-school learning can complement a public school system in which teachers are often absent or inadequately prepared to teach the official curriculum. Secondly, a substantial fraction of children in rural India who are school-going age do not attend school regularly because they need to work for the family in the agricultural fields or homes. As such, we envision that educational applications on a mobile device, such as a cellphone, can enhance access to education when employed as learning tools in out-of-school settings, such as the fields or home. In this study, we therefore sought to identify these scenarios in the everyday lives of the rural children, and to understand some of the cultural factors that might influence technology adoption in these scenarios.

As our first step in addressing the above questions, the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning award provided us with the resources to travel to the above site. The team that conducted the field study was exceptionally well prepared for the cultural challenges. It comprised three graduate students (Matthew Kam, Deepti Chittamuru and Anuj Tewari), and six undergraduate research assistants. Matthew is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Computer Science with a minor in Education. As the leader of the MILLEE project, he has previously made seven trips to India totaling seven months on the ground. Deepti is a native of India who is a Master’s candidate in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Deepti was first taught the social norms in village life by her grandparents when she was growing up in an Indian village. Her education on rural culture continued over a seven-year stint as a social worker in India prior to graduate school at Berkeley. Deepti speaks five of the official languages in India, including Hindi, which is the predominant language in North India. Anuj is in the Ph.D. in Computer Science program at Berkeley. He was a volunteer in MILLEE for two years prior to graduate school and was familiar with the above rural district, which was close to his hometown.

On this trip, we spent our first week getting a glimpse into the everyday lives of the children who live in the above rural district. We carried out participant observations, after which we constructed “a day in the life of a child” accounts of their everyday lives by analyzing our field data. In the process, we were struck by some of the major differences in their lives that were delineated along the social fault lines of gender and caste.

In particular, two observations stand out. Firstly, regardless of age or caste, girls are expected to clean the home, help with cooking, wash dishes, carry water, wash clothes, gather firewood and get fodder for cattle. On the other hand, boys are responsible for agricultural work and are not expected to do housework. As such, it is socially unacceptable for girls to travel farther than an hour’s walk from home, whereas boys who spend most of their time indoors are frown upon by their parents. Girls from the lower castes are the exception, since they need to be outside to find daily-wage jobs. Secondly, while boys from both the upper and lower castes spend several hours in the fields, their free times differ markedly. While the lower-caste boys have to be at work as hired laborers, the upper-caste boys have time to play in the fields. That is because the upper-caste boys are present only to oversee the former working in the fields, which belongs to the former’s families.

These observations have profound implications on when and where children in rural India – both boys and girls from the lower and upper castes – can use cellphones to learn outside formal schooling, as well as the social circle that they have access to for peers to engage in cooperative learning with. From the accounts of the children’s everyday lives, we identified opportunities for them to use cellphones for informal learning. For instance, a child can play an e-learning game on a cellphone during his or her free time before going to bed. As another example, boys from the upper castes can share a cellphone to play an e-learning game, when they are on watch in the mango groves. In total, we propose nine scenarios for cellphone-augmented learning in out-of-school settings.

In our second week, we sought to investigate the extent to which the proposed scenarios were culturally feasible. To do this, we gave the child participants and their parents a feel for some of these scenarios, by loaning them cellphones preloaded with e-learning software prototypes developed by us. We encouraged the children to experiment and come up with their own ways of using the cellphone applications to learn. We observed several interesting ways in which children use the cellphones, which varied from how we had originally expected the above scenarios to play out.

One of our observations involved differences in how girls and boys shared the phones, both among and between themselves. For example, in rural Indian homes, parents tended to allocate the choicest resources, such as food that is hot off the stoves, to their sons, such that the mothers and daughters ate only after the husbands and sons in the families had eaten. This gender bias carried over to their behavior with cellphones. We observed that any boy who was playing an e-learning game would pass the phone to another boy beside him after he had completed the game, but never to a sister in their company. Similarly, any boy who saw a girl playing an e-learning game would demand that she hand the phone over to him. She did so because women have been socially conditioned to accede to such requests from the males in their households.

This observation suggested that even though we had envisioned a child playing an e-learning game on a cellphone while at home, it is almost likely that the boys will monopolize the cellphone at their sisters’ expense. One design implication is that e-learning games intended for this scenario have to designed as collaborative games, with specific design features that required boys to share the game with their sisters in order to make progress in their gameplay. There were other design implications resulting from our field observations that we do not discuss here, due to limited space.

The MacArthur grant enabled us to cover the travel and accommodation expenses for the above field study. This funding was especially instrumental for providing six undergraduate researchers, who implemented the software applications that we piloted in the second week, with the opportunity and tremendous satisfaction of observing rural children engage with their prototypes. We should note that the undergraduate researchers are local engineering students based in India, and hence are familiar with the local languages and customs to assist with our field study. In preparing them to participate in fieldwork, the graduate students in MILLEE enjoyed introducing them to participant-observation techniques, and were thrilled to see some of them applying the concepts readily in the field. By volunteering in MILLEE this summer, the undergraduates had their first taste of participatory design, in which local stakeholders are actively involved throughout every stage of the technology design process. We would not have the resources to facilitate this unusual cross-cultural learning experience without the MacArthur grant.

Moving forward, the DML award has made it possible to build a solid foundation for MILLEE, on top of which we are pursuing new collaborations to scale up the project. We are particularly excited to have the Byrraju Foundation come on board as a new partner. The Byrraju Foundation is a non-government organization based in South India. It currently works in 180 villages in the state of Andhra Pradesh, and is impacting the lives of a million people. When the MacArthur funding cycle is over, we will be working with the Byrraju Foundation to investigate the extent to which our lessons from North India are applicable elsewhere, on a larger scale. We currently plan to collaborate on a large-scale, longitudinal study with 800 rural children that will commence in mid-2009.

The boy, the brother of the two sisters, attempts to take the phone away from them.

Since the girls have been conditioned to accede to requests from male members of the family, they gave the phone to him. Not only were they denied a chance to play the game on the phone but they also had to hold the phone for him.

2. What are your goals for the next three months?

The above field research in the summer of 2008 provided us with emerging models for cellphone-enabled learning in out-of-school contexts in rural India. Our goal for Fall 2008 is to develop software prototypes around these models, so that we can evaluate these models more comprehensively in the field. We are working with a local English teacher in India to design our prototypes, so that they will target a curriculum that is aligned with local language learning needs.

These prototypes will be piloted between December 2008 and March 2009 with the above rural community. Two of the above undergraduate researchers, Anuj Kumar and Akhil Mathur, will participate in this semester-long field study. Their involvement will fulfill their requirements for their senior honors thesis research, and we are delighted that the MacArthur grant will make this unique educational experience possible for them.


3. Is there any kind of assistance, advice, PR, communications, networking, or any other kind of support from fellow Digital Media and Learning Competition winners or HASTAC staff that could help you with your project in any way?

As we ramp up to expand MILLEE after the MacArthur funding cycle, one of our next steps is the above collaboration with Byrraju Foundation on a large-scale, longitudinal study with 800 rural children. This deployment is expected to commence in mid-2009. If successful, we can make a more compelling case to governments and major NGOs to adopt our work. Positive learning results will also convince cellphone manufacturers and wireless carriers that a customized, ultra-low cost cellphone model can be developed for rural education. Similarly, positive results will enable us to make a stronger case to third-party, non-profit Indian content developers on the feasibility of targeting the cellphone platform in their computer-aided learning initiatives for underprivileged children in India. These content developers currently target the desktop computer platform, which has a limited reach in developing regions due to electricity and infrastructural barriers.

We have been contacting suitable funding channels to support the Byrraju expansion, and would benefit from fellow DML winners and HASTAC staff who know of contacts and channels that we may have overlooked. While financial resources are crucial, in-kind sponsorship is equally invaluable. Our wishlist includes 235 programmable cellphones, wireless subscription plans in India for these cellphones, laptops, video cameras and frequent-flyer miles.

Looking at a longer-term horizon, we would like to explore the literacy challenges in underserved communities beyond India. We would appreciate assistance in introducing us to potential collaborators.