Laura @ CET

In a magazine article I was recently reading, five Economist writers were asked which they thought was the most important year ever in history. Two of the suggestions related to Christianity (5BC, the birth of Christ, and 1204, the time of the Crusaders) and two related to technology. The year 1439 is the estimated year of the invention of the Gutenberg’s printing press, and 1791 saw both the birth of Samuel Morse, and the invention of the telegraph by the Chappe brothers.

The choice of the year 1791 reminded me of the first time I realised the extent to which the telegraph was the precursor to email and sms, all those enablers of “the global village”. It was after reading a delightful book called The Singing Line, written by the great grand-daughter of the man who laid down the telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin in Australia. It was a charming account of what one could reasonably expect to be a boring read, and got me thinking of the vision and persistence it took to create the infrastructure for something whose effects were very hard to imagine. How time and space would be altered by that telegraph line was pretty much like science fiction at the time.

All of which is a circuitous way of historically contextualising the launch here in CET of the sms tool for Vula, our online learning environment. Cell phones are ubiquitous in higher education in South Africa, and the use of sms is very common indeed, thus offering numerous opportunities for learning both alone and in combination with web-based environments. Although the development of the sms tool was complicated and expensive, one of the advantages of belonging to an open source community is that the tool will be immediately available to all in the Sakai community.

We in CET have been exploring and developing the possibilities of mobile learning in interesting ways for a while now, as can be seen on the CET web site (see Mobile Project at http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/projects and Dick Ng’ambi’s work on the research output page). I look forward in coming months to sharing the ways that the sms tool is being used. We know immediately of its administrative value and take-up, which is not insignificant given how it frees up busy academics. But there are also exciting and un-thought of pedagogical and research related uses which will no doubt surprise and interest us all.