Abstract
Although culturally diverse students have potential to create enriched learning resources, it is difficult to harness students’ agency and to aggregate individual contributions into a meaningful learning resource. This is one of the challenges facing higher education institutions in South Africa where institutions are increasingly cosmopolitan and culturally diverse, but production of knowledge has largely remained skewed in favour of those students with unlimited access to learning resources, the Internet and peer networks, anywhere, anytime. Although the appropriation of emerging technologies such as mobile phones has enabled a digital sharing culture, this social practice has not been harnessed for co-creation of learning resources. This article reports on a study that sought to uncover the extent to which the use of WhatsApp-enabled phones facilitated the co-creation of learning resources in a human resource management programme at a university of technology in South Africa. The article employed Amartya Sen’s capabilities framework to analyse WhatsApp interactions of 72 participants from underprivileged backgrounds. The article concludes that leveraging students’ capabilities, including rich culturally diverse knowledge, is not a mere outcome of access to a tool such as WhatsApp, but requires pedagogical designs that exploit the affordances of the tool.
Highlights
The phenomenal surge in ownership of mobile phones among South Africans and at South African higher educational institutions (SAHEIs) has accentuated the clarion call for the integration of such devices into tertiary teaching and learning
The claim about universal mobile ownership among students at SAHEIs is corroborated by Shava, Chinyamurindi and Somdyala (2016) who reported that most Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) students owned smartphones with instant messaging, data and information exchange and speedy Internet access capabilities
The popularity of smartphones presents an opportunity for HEIs to integrate student-owned mobile phones into institutional information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure, the academic uptake of mobile phones for instructional purposes at SAHEIs has been disappointing
Summary
The phenomenal surge in ownership of mobile phones among South Africans and at South African higher educational institutions (SAHEIs) has accentuated the clarion call for the integration of such devices into tertiary teaching and learning. The claim about universal mobile ownership among students at SAHEIs is corroborated by Shava, Chinyamurindi and Somdyala (2016) who reported that most Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) students owned smartphones with instant messaging, data and information exchange and speedy Internet access capabilities. The popularity of smartphones presents an opportunity for HEIs to integrate student-owned mobile phones into institutional information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure, the academic uptake of mobile phones for instructional purposes at SAHEIs has been disappointing. Some scholars have attributed this mobile inertia to the following:
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