Learning through the New Media

There are so many of these multimedia cellphones in the world

Image: http://i.treehugger.com/images/2007/10/24/cell-phone-landfill.jpg

As the New Media continues bridging the digital gap between the rich and poor nations, many new ways of applying it are being sought. I was happy to learn from the Washington Post Newspaper, that More than 300,000 people in Bangladesh, one of Asia's poorest but fastest-growing economies, have rushed to sign up to learn English over their cellphones, threatening to swamp the service even before its official launch on Thursday 19 November 2009.

Majja Palmer and Amy Kazmin quoted Sarah Chamberlain, the manager of the service that: "We were not expecting that kind of response -- 25,000 people would have been a good response on the first day, instead, we got hundreds of thousands of people." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/13/AR2009111304245.html

The project is a brainchild of the BBC world service Trust, the international charity arm of the broadcaster. It is the first time cell phones have been used as an educational tool on this scale. Bangladesh boasts of 50 million phone connections as compared to only 4 million Internet connections.

Through its Janala service, the BBC offers 250 audio and text-message lessons at different levels -- from basic English conversation to grammar and comprehension of simple news stories. Each lesson is a three-minute phone call, costing about 4 cents.

All six cellphone operators in Bangladesh have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by 50 percent to make it more affordable.