M-Ubuntu: Teachers Building an M-Literacy Collaboratory

• Grant Amount: $68,000 (Innovation in Participatory Learning Award, 2009)
• Principal Investigator: Naomi Tempies, Learning Academy Worldwide, Johannesburg, South Africa

Project Summary

Applying the Zulu community-based problem-solving concept of Ubuntu — best translated as “I am because we are” — M-Ubuntu uses inexpensive, low-threshold mobile phone technologies to promote mobile literacy (m-literacy) by empowering local teachers to connect to each other and to literacy coaches in the United States. M-Ubuntu focuses on two reform-minded schools and their enthusiastic teachers and learners — Spectrum, near Johannesburg, which contends with crime and other social dislocations accompanying urbanization, and Ramosadi, located near Botswana, which struggles to serve orphans — and links teachers in primary schools across South Africa.