I managed to make it out to Morocco briefly last semester while studying in London, and among all the sights, sounds, and smells there's one indelible image I can't seem to get off my mind. I'll just let the story speak for itself:
A friend and I were winding down from a long day of exploring the souks, and we ended up and getting wrapped up in conversation with two English-speaking guys -- who I later found out made money as tourist guides, getting referral fees every time they brought an American lured by his or her home language to try out a favored restaurant or riad. We followed them to a nearby bar of theirs to just sit down and chill, and I noticed two of their friends on a padded bench, disinterested in the beautiful evening action around them and wrapped in a smartphone screen.
The main guy was looking down into his Samsung smartphone running Android, and the ubiquitous American top 10 pop song "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO was blasting from his phone. It seemed a little strange, because the music at these steamy Moroccan bars was all traditional and atmospheric, and the most American music I had heard on the trip was blasting out of used electronics stores. "Party Rock Anthem" didn't exactly fit within the ambiance.
But then I noticed his friend, a slightly lighter-skinned young man with curly hair but a similar leather jacket on, lean over and jab at the screen with his index finger sequentially in time with the beat. The video wasn't actually a music video, it was just images of the song's lyrics. The main watcher was trying to follow along. He already knew the lyrics from hearing the song dozens of times, but he matched sounds with the words he was seeing on screen.
His friend spouted words of encouragement during the breaks in the song. First in Moroccan Arabic, but after he noticed I was watching intently he switched over to English: this apparently was how he himself learned English over the past year. And knowing English fluently was a major life upgrade for him. Now he was dating a Moroccan girl who was leaving to study and work in Canada. And he was able to converse flawlessly with tourists, leading to a new income source as a street guide.
The first lesson is one to app developers who want their new product to change the world in some material way: teaching English to Moroccans with an android app is a noble goal, but you really need to know (and might be surprised by) how people are solving the pressing need today. In this case it was something I would have never expected -- these young guys were literally learning through the YouTube app on their smartphones by following along with lyrics videos. Nothing can replace venturing out into the field and figuring out what users actually want.
The second takeaway is just pure amazement. I'm so surprised that people are using technology this way, and that Moroccan twenty-somethings are streaming American music videos on tiny handheld devices that almost all of them possess. And surprisingly, many of the guys we met didn't just have one mobile phone: they had two, three, or even more, with a whole suite of different SIM cards from different providers to save dirhams. The classy bros in LMFAO might be enabled more to help teach eager young Moroccan men than Khan Academy, Rosetta Stone, or even their own government. And that is a true revolution in education.