Education

In the 21st century, many educational thinkers recognize that something new is happening to education. All over the world, digital and mobile technologies are rapidly changing the way young people learn, show what they know, and share their ideas outside the classroom. Still, few students have the chance to apply the ways they learn and share ideas to their classroom learning. Even fewer teachers and school districts have the chance to incorporate the convergence of personal expression, networked learning, and mobile communication to their everyday classroom practice.

Blogging, wikis, twittering and Facebook, the widespread use of mobile devices, are all challenging the fundamental assumptions of what an education must provide to its young people in order for them to succeed or even cope in this newly connected world. And Nokia is leading the way by providing new ways for students to engage in education and learning.

Mobile Learning Institute
The Mobile Learning Institute (MLI) makes use of the latest mobile and digital technologies to personalize learning and share the results. Two prominent projects that MLI has been involved in are the Earth Day Challenge and the Envision 2020 project.

Using mobile devices in new ways has always been a cornerstone of the Mobile Learning Institute. With the Envision 2020 project, students are invited to imagine the future using the key skills they’ll need for success in the years ahead. In a rapidly changing world, with rapidly changing technology, it offers residencies that give middle school age youth training in 21st-century literacy skills. It does so in a way that encourages participants to think positively about their future and to examine their own life goals and aspirations.

This year, the Mobile Learning Institute Earth Day Challenge camps will give young people the opportunity to explore Nokia technology more fully through new, innovative projects. Select camps will include: community mapping using global positioning systems, data collection and analysis, and mobile ethnography. These new classroom activities, to be piloted during the 2009 summer program, will become part of the Mobile Learning Institute curriculum during the 2009–2010 school year and be used across the United States and around the world.

Last year the Earth Day Challenge gave young people the chance to share their views on Earth’s future and everyone’s role in combating climate change. It brought over 1,000 young people from around the world to express their thoughts, concerns, and solutions for our global environment in short films.

Check out last year’s submissions and the winning entry ‘The Earth is Warming’ on ovi.com

The Mobile Learning Institute is implemented in partnership with The Pearson Foundation. The Pearson Foundation extends Pearson’s commitment to education by partnering with leading nonprofit, civic, and business organizations to provide financial, organizational, and publishing assistance across the globe.

ImfundoYami ImfundoYethu
The most recent “Trends in International Mathematics and Science” study, which benchmarks academic performance on those subjects, ranked South Africa as one of the worst performing countries in the world. Worldwide, girls tend to not perform as well in those subjects either. Recognizing these disparities and the need for education for all globally, Nokia has devised a solution.

Recently, Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks have partnered with a South African social network platform called MXit to provide a pilot for mobile mathematics learning. The partnership is in collaboration with the South African vice-president and president’s offices. The project, called “ImfundoYami / ImfundoYethu”, is built to enhance the traditional learning environment through a medium widely accessible and of considerable interest to students. Students in Gauteng, the North West and the Western Cape provinces will use their own handsets to access the mathematics content on MXit.

This project is a model of how personal mobile devices can be used free of charge for formal learning or other government services, and exemplifies Nokia’s corporate responsibility goal to harness the power of mobile technology to improve learning and education amongst youth.

M4Girls
Another of Nokia’s community involvement programs called "M4Girls" (Maths for Girls), which was implemented last year. Nokia worked to engage schoolgirls from cities in the North West Province of South Africa, in new ways to learn maths skills using Nokia’s 6300 mobile devices.

The M4Girls project is a partnership between Nokia, Mindset Network, and the South African Department of Education to test the provision of educational content on a mobile phone platform to female students. The project aimed to empower students in the following ways:

  • Access to mathematics (maths was used as a pilot subject area)
  • Exposure to a complementary platform of curriculum-aligned Mathematics content from Mindset on mobile phones
  • Exposure to mobile technology.

The aim of these projects is to find sustainable, scalable and affordable solutions to learn maths via mobile devices. From the pilot, we have seen that using M4Girls has increased the girls’ competency in mathematics. The students readily used the mobile technology, and communicated with their friends outside of the study group, indicating that it presents a viable platform for teaching.

See more of our community involvement projects at http://www.nokia.com/corporate-responsibility/nokias-cr-map.