As another South African citizen I have to agree with Johan Viljoen [26 Feb 96] from Pretoria Technikon: we are in danger of creating a new form of global apartheid with us "electronically literates" becoming the privileged elite. The use of technology, portable or not, does not offer a solution for this problem. Most of IT supplies a ledge for those who already have a toe hold.
The language problem in South Africa is not going to be solved overnight. Here is no Germanic base for the young learners to find toe holds and to scramble onto the ledge of English empowerment. The 1990s has seen more young learners motivated to be part of this new nation--others want it yesterday. The danger of introducing technology to the masses is that the short-cuts will be seen as the real thing--particularly in the light of our trying to telescope evolution into a smaller, "quicker" time frame. There is no stopping technology now, except if it were as "freely accessible" as the Internet (I would not be able to afford e-mail, etc., if it were not one of the perks of my institution). The closest I have been to IT's empowering is seeing the cumulative empowerment of the word processor used at the undergraduate level in my unit (a computer-assisted language)--it has been very successful at third-year undergraduate level--not earlier. A thousand 286XTs could alter the writing world forever!
The observations made last week by Stan Supinsky (ala John Underwood) re: the "dialog that occurs in front of the screen rather than on it" are pertinent. But the user who speaks English as Another Language is also encouraged to respond to the screen (machine to human interaction) because of the longer turn-taking intervals--they are not pressurized to respond.
My concern is that while the rest of the English speaking world is designing an IT back-pack--which could also assist the disadvantaged communities to get a toe hold on literacy--we are forgetting that a pair of shoes might be a better idea.