Students’ Habits Appear Captured by WhatsApp

Abstract

Exploring students’ habits of using WhatsApp is important: such introspection helps students to reflect, and improve their actions. Habits are subconscious thoughts that drive students, for example, to use WhatsApp, even without concentrating on their learning actions. Habits are formed after students have repeated the same action. Twelve students, registered for a Bachelor of Education degree in Mathematics Education at a university in South Africa, were selected to participate. The objective of this study was to understand students’ habits of using WhatsApp in the learning of mathematics. Reflective activities, focus-group discussion, and one-on-one semi-structured interviews, framed by interpretive case study, were used for data production. The students’ habits revealed that The Tree Three Rings Theory was useful when applied as the learning framework. Such application of the theory generated three categories of habits of WhatsApp usage. Categories were social, discipline/disciplinary, and personal habits. The university at which these students were registered prescribed Moodle as the learning management system (LMS). However, the students mostly used WhatsApp. As a result, they used WhatsApp even during face-to-face classes. It appeared that students had been ‘captured’ by WhatsApp, using it as their ‘master’, instead of using it as both their ‘master’ and ‘servant’. The study concluded that, although there were elements of both personal and discipline habits, the social habits drove the learning. Consequently, this study recommends that students should reflect; using social, discipline, and personal actions as taxonomies of education habits, in order to address societal, individual, and the mathematics education needs.

Can Teachers’ Identities Come to the Rescue in the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

“…For example, in 2009, when WhatsApp was introduced by Jan Koum and Brian Acton (erstwhile Yahoo employees) for Smartphone communication, teachers saw a teaching and learning resource to be used for educational activities. The two leading SMSs (Facebook, and YouTube) also attracted many teachers when they were introduced (Khoza & Mpungose, 2020 ; Khoza, 2020b ). The SMSs are used as a teaching and learning resource which is defined as any object or person that communicates education (Khoza & Biyela, 2020 ).…”

“…This hints that, although the majority of participants had missed aims as the long term-goals of personal identity, P1, P2, and P6 had weblogs and WhatsApp to represent elements of personal identity. This identity is observed through habitual actions when humans engage their life activities (Czerniewicz & Brown, 2014 ; Khoza, 2020b ). However, P6, supported by P1, P2, and P8 indicated that he was driven by natural identity more than professional, societal, or personal identity.…”

Exploring the Migration to a Digitalised Curriculum at UKZN

“…Facebook and WhatsApp were examples of SMSs used by UKZN staff and students to communicate what they were doing. These two SMSs are among the most popular [7]. Staff and students had their personal and/or UKZN Facebook pages that they used for social and/or professional activities [4].…”

“…For example, ZVCT, which was launched in 2013, was founded in 2011 by Chinese-American businessman Eric S. Yuan in California for business meetings and conferences, not for formal education. In 2009, WhatsApp was introduced by Jan Koum and Brian Acton as a communication resource for Smartphone and other mobile phone users, not for formal education [7]. As a result, these resources are driven by societal identities that may be understood through formative assessment [5,13].…”

“…Some examples of popular SMSs are Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and others. Pragmatic curriculum is a teaching and learning environment driven by resource users' needs in selecting and utilising relevant resources/technologies required by the user's situation [7][8][9]. When the COVID-19 revolution compelled HEIs to migrate to a digitalised curriculum (DC) (online learning), the migration was dominated by either a performanceor a competence-based curriculum [10,11].…”