Abstract:
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.
