The REAL digital divide?!?
How many of you grew up with computers at home, or in the classroom? I distinctly remember playing Carmen Sandiego on my home PC, and The Amazon Trail at the Mac at my elementary school.
While I think this Economist article is an important and necessary read, I think it's worth pointing out to an American audience that we have a pretty significant digital divide in our own country.
Internet penetration is currently just below 70%, if I recall correctly, and it may not get much higher. In agricultural communities in the Mid-West or in rural Appalachia, the digital divide doesn't have the disastrous effects that it does in our inner cities and suburbs. It is in these latter areas that not having access to a word processor or to Google really hurts students in the classroom and adults who can't compete for IT jobs.
I worked for a few months with the Digital Village project, a Hewlett Foundation initiative in the low-income urban neighborhood of East Palo Alto, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from Stanford. It's bitingly ironic that such a low-income neighborhood with such low levels of Internet access exists in such close proximity to Stanford and Silicon Valley. I worked with Plugged In!, an afterschool program geared towards exposing kids to technology-- not through homework, but through art, music, and other entertaining purposes.
The value here is in introducing people at as young an age as possible to high-tech, so they become comfortable and savvy with it as soon as possible. Even if you have computers at the library, it's not likely that many adults in the community will use it unless they have been previously exposed to the technology in question. This is why our highest priority should be on computers in the classroom.
4 Comments:
I agree that there is a digital divide in this country and that something needs to be done about it, but I don't think putting computers in the classroom is going to solve the problem.
Education Week's Technology Counts cited the ratio of students per Internet-connected computer as 4.1:1 nationwide and 4.5:1 in high-poverty schools. Not much of a difference. Simply putting computers in the back of a classroom or off in a computer lab is not going to get students to use them or bridge the digital divide.
That's true, it's not a cure-all, but I'd be interested in seeing (a) the difference in these computers -- the applications they offer and the status of the hardware, and (b) what training or support is offered by the school to get kids involved. When I say "put computers in classrooms" I also mean integrate computers into the curriculum, whether for research or for the arts.
It's also the case that a computer in a classroom in a low-income neighborhood may in fact be the only computer that those students are ever exposed to, which ups its importance.
But having a computer in the home makes a big difference. I spent a lot of time playing old DOS-based Sierra games (King's Quest, Space Quest, etc) when I was a kid, and it certainly made me more comfortable with computers later in life. There's a certain instinct that I think you get from using computers at a younger age.
My god! You had Macs in your elementary school? I think of such a time and the Apple II+ and Apple IIe. Once I got to middle school I was impressed with the IIgs systems--all in color!
I've taught computer literacy classes to adults, including adults younger than myself who didn't go to a school with the tech resources that mine possessed. So start 'em young.
Once again, we have a skill that must be developed, and the best time to begin is when we are young.
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