Nokia are doing interesting things with cellphones like providing Braille SMS on their phones. However, the plan to teach English to poor rural children in India using cellphones seems like a bad promotional gimmick rather than an honest effort at education.
A project based at Carnegie Mellon University will study how effective games on cellphones are at teaching English to students in rural India.
Led by a professor at Carnegie Mellon, professors, graduate students and undergraduates have been working on developing games over the last six years. Now, because of financial support from Nokia, the professors will be able to lend 450 cellphones to children in villages in Andhra Pradesh, a region in the south of India. The children with games on the cellphones will be compared with children who will not play the games and will learn English in a traditional classroom setting.
Have Nokia invented a revolutionary means of communication and language learning?
Should we enroll those test students in India in “Twitter University” where the world is given context in 140 characters or less?