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Reinterpreting the Digital Divide
digital divide: the gap between people with effective access to digital and information technology and those with very limited or no access at all.
The digital divide is understood to be the gap between those who use and are familiar with computers and technology and those who aren't. I'm 17, African-American, live in a considerably urban neighborhood in Chicago, and would seemingly contradict many of the statistics about race and ethnicity and their relationship to the digital divide. I have broadband internet, I use it frequently, I know my way around the computer, and I like using it. These are just basic things, but some statistics suggests that many people of my demographic aren't fluent in even these simple tasks. Based on what I’ve seen, I have to wonder whether the digital divide isn’t more complicated than it is sometimes described.… more
Then there's the issue of academia vs the real world.
I "created" the 1:1 laptop program at a middle school in 1998 during a three year interval in a 20 year IT consulting career that started with designing interactive multimedia learning technologies for foreign languages for the military and ended with delivering effective client-server business applications to small businesses where I built the WAN, deployed the computers, trained the staffs, kept the servers online and analyzed which business operations could be improved through which suite of technologies. Seeing teachers and students in "their" environment (I also taught high school computer classes during that phase) and then seeing the rest of humanity use technology for their jobs has convinced me that "academia" is a different planet in a different galaxy.
The fastest learners and earliest adopters of technology in the office were usually children of immigrants who went to terrible schools in disadvantaged minority neighborhoods. They grew up with the ethic, "Get a good education; make your family proud of you!" The others grew up with adults hovering around worrying about their kids' self esteem.
The "Digitial Divide" has long been abandoned as a concept in the real world; businesses can teach everything a person needs to know for his professional life regardless of whether he or she was an exchange student from a country with no running water or a child of Russian or Chinese hackers and software engineers.
What is most needed? Teachers who actually know what it is like to NEED technology to get their jobs done and not get fired. Yes, "vision" matters. But the students' vision is less critical than their mentors' and teachers'. I attended SALT (Society for Applied Learning Technology) conferences for years and listened to the blind "sharing" with the blind about all this "cool stuff". They just used big words to describe the elephants none of them could see.
If there is a Digital Divide, it is between the academics who analyze technology and have huge budgets to get research hardware (the "have nots") and the hard-working staffs in corporations who use whatever technology they can scrape up to produce real value for the global economy (the "haves").
(For the record, I "got" a multimillion dollar budget in 1990 to use in an educational institution to create a "program" to research and develop educational technology systems that other teachers never learned how to use. I "got" my business clients in 2005 to spend a fraction of that to lower their overhead and improve their productivity. I used to be one of those "losers" in academia, so maybe I just described myself in this comment. But at least I repented and changed directions.)