In authors or contributors

Designing appropriate learning technologies for school vs home settings in Tanzanian rural villages

Resource type
Conference Paper
Authors/contributors
Title
Designing appropriate learning technologies for school vs home settings in Tanzanian rural villages
Abstract
Smartphone- and tablet-based learning systems are often posited as solutions for closing early literacy gaps between rural and urban regions in emerging economies. These systems are often developed based on experiences with students in urban contexts, limiting their success rates with children from rural areas who have had little to no prior exposure to technology. To explore how such technologies are used in different learning contexts, we deployed an early literacy learning application in school and home settings in a rural village in Tanzania. We use Rogoff's theory of instructional models to understand and describe the interaction between learners, adults, and peers. We found that in the presence of a school teacher, the instructional model was primarily "adult-run" where information was almost entirely disseminated by the teacher, while in home settings, the instructional model was similar to a "community-of-learners" model where children collaborate with other peers and adults to achieve their learning goals. We use these instructional models to surface six themes of support and scaffolding that were expressed differently across settings, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the instructional models observed in providing support across these themes.
Date
2018
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies
Place
New York, NY, USA
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Pages
1–11
Series
COMPASS '18
ISBN
978-1-4503-5816-3
Accessed
2020-11-18
Library Catalogue
ACM Digital Library
Citation
Uchidiuno, J., Yarzebinski, E., Madaio, M., Maheshwari, N., Koedinger, K., & Ogan, A. (2018). Designing appropriate learning technologies for school vs home settings in Tanzanian rural villages. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3209811.3209881