Using WhatsApp for co-creation of learning resources: A case of a South African university

Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Using WhatsApp for co-creation of learning resources: A case of a South African university
 
Creator Rambe, Patient Chipunza, Crispen Ng’ambi, Dick
 
Subject Education- Educational Technology WhatsApp; MIM; collectively generated resources; dialogic interactions; learning resources.
Description 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.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor Central University of Technology, Free State
Date 2020-09-22
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Qualitative Research approach
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/td.v16i1.791
 
Source The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa; Vol 16, No 1 (2020); 15 pages 2415-2005 1817-4434
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://td-sa.net/index.php/td/article/view/791/1366 https://td-sa.net/index.php/td/article/view/791/1365 https://td-sa.net/index.php/td/article/view/791/1367 https://td-sa.net/index.php/td/article/view/791/1364
 
Coverage Educational Institution in South Africa — The study participants comprised 72 black African Human Resource Management students at a University of Technology in South Africa.
Rights Copyright (c) 2020 Patient Rambe, Crispen Chipunza, Dick Ng’ambi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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