Young people face myriad obstacles in finding work, and more than 71 million are unemployed globally. Many of these youth have limited job search skills, poor labor market information, and difficulty accessing jobs, obstacles more pronounced for marginalized youth and first-time work-seekers. Digital professional platforms may give some youth a…

This paper focuses on a study conducted in two historically disadvantaged schools (deep-rural and semi-urban) in South Africa where the rising access to mobile technology implies that the long-standing promise of mobile learning is becoming accessible despite the lack of recent research. This research aims to investigate the relationship between…

This paper shares reflections and stories from a collaborative design process between the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab and a global network of community-based educators to develop a creative coding app called OctoStudio, which supports children and families to create and share interactive projects on mobile devices. The app…

Over several years, first-year pre-service education students regularly experienced difficulty with engineering graphics activities. Research has already established that these activities require the use of well-developed spatial visualisation which is, for the most part, determined by a persons' spatial experience. The importance of this study…

New research from UNICEF Innocenti and Western Sydney University explores the question: what does well-being mean to children in a digital age? This first-phase report prioritises the voices of children, collected through workshops with over 300 children from 13 countries along with analysis of existing survey data from 34,000 children aged 9-17…

Notwithstanding the benefits that information and communications technology (ICT) offers to learning processes, the majority of learners in rural and township areas in South Africa either do not have access to computers and the internet, or they lack sufficient skills to exploit the benefits of ICT. This lack of skills and access to computers may…

This study sought to evaluate the instructor and learner preparedness for online learning in Sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, the study explored the devices lecturers and learners use for teaching and learning, their level of digital proficiency, access to internet connection and finally, their level of satisfaction of connectivity cost, speed…

Whereas there exists a complex pattern of interrelated factors that act as determinants of the successful implementation of ODL in developing countries, most point at differences in access, use of, or impact of ICT. In addressing an area of research that has not received any attention, this study reports on an investigation into the relationship…

International studies reveal that students have more freedom, as well as unstructured and unsupervised time, which makes them susceptible to problematic internet use (PIU). Although students are a risk group for PIU, no evidence of local research on internet use among students could be identified. This article reports on a study on the nature and…

This research was aimed at the investigation of mobile device and computer use at a higher learning institution. The goal was to determine the current use of computers and mobile devices for learning and the students' reading speed on different platforms. The research was contextualised in a sample of students at the University of South Africa.…

This publication demonstrates the potential of dynamic literate environments and the importance of nurturing a culture of reading and writing, examining four different contexts: digital environments, intergenerational settings, community libraries and prisons. The case studies, from UNESCO's Effective Literacy and Numeracy Practices Database…

This paper interrogates the currently pervasive discourse of the "net generation" finding the concept of the "digital native" especially problematic, both empirically and conceptually. We draw on a research project of South African higher education students' access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)…