Digital Divide(s)

Ever wake up in the morning and think, “Wow! My digital divide really hurts!?!”? Neither have I. Nevertheless, the digital divide may be hurting all of us as an educational community, even though we don’t feel it in an immediate way.

Let’s backtrack a bit: what is the digital divide? The Wikipedia entry on this topic reads thusly:

“The term digital divide refers to the gap between people with effective access to digital and information technology and those with very limited or no access at all. It includes the imbalances in physical access to technology as well as the imbalances in resources and skills needed to effectively participate as a digital citizen. In other words, it is the unequal access by some members of society to information and communications technology, and the unequal acquisition of related skills. The digital divide may be classified based on gender, income, and race groups, and by locations.”

Clearly not everyone has access to the same technology. Occasionally, I am still surprised when a young adult tells me that he or she either has no Internet access at home or is still using dial-up. Except for the very young or very old, I think that many of us expect that we are consistently wired (unless we are very young or very old), when the truth is we aren’t all hooked up. My kids have been computer users from a very young age; heck, when they are at their grandfather’s, they’re surfing and playing and learning non-stop. My nine-year-old schools me every once in a while on some computer issue. But he’s also got a grandfather who has inexplicably taught himself at an elderly age to build computers, as well as a father who uses a computer daily for work, entertainment, and professional development. At any rate, my parents have never used computers, and I didn’t get Internet access until I was in my twenties; the generational divide is quite pronounced when comparing my Ma and Pa and my digitally-bedeviled offspring.

But what about others? George Sciadas’s research paper “The Digital Divide in Canada” discusses some of the complex issues surrounding this topic. Sciadas has used statistical analysis to break down some of these issues. However, nothing is as simple as we might want:

“From one year to the next, as more people use the Internet, there are more ‘haves’ and fewer ‘have-nots’. When groups of people are delineated by income (or any other variable), though, each one has its own penetration rate. The divide then becomes a relative concept whose measurement involves comparisons of the ‘haves’ between ‘have-more’ and ‘have-less’ groups.”

At first glance, a reader might think that the digital divide is not a big issue. But when Sciadas looks at income and age in regards to computer usage, we can see that there are actually some pretty big discrepancies. For example, it might not be a surprise that many of those with lower incomes in Canada appear to use computers less, and 15-17 year-olds use the Internet way more than even those aged 30-34. Overall, Sciadas concludes that the “divide is generally closing, but the gap between the highest and the lowest incomes persists.” If that is the case, the digital divide may continue in some form or another for a long time. The Wikipedia entry on digital divide does not dispel this outlook:

“In small towns and rural areas, only 65% of residences accessed the Internet, compared to 76% in urban areas. The digital divide still exists between the rich and the poor; 91% of people making more than $91,000/year regularly used the Internet, compared to 47% of people making less than $24,000. This gap has lowered slightly since 2005.”

However, the points above mainly focus on one element of the digital divide, which is different forms of access to technology – mainly computers and the Internet. An article entitled Web 2.0 in Schools: Our Digital Divides Are showing! points out that the digital divide could be looked at on four different levels:

“The first level of digital divide is access. Access to adequate amounts and types of hardware is an ongoing issue, but we’re now seeing access play out in schools in terms of bandwidth available for applications like streaming video and audio.
The second level of digital divide is skill and Web 2.0 tools present a new professional development and personal mastery imperative for many schools.
The third, and emerging, level of digital divide is policy. All too often in schools, we’re seeing technology policies that enforce slow hardware replacement cycles or restrictive use and filtering policies that block Web 2.0 applications.
The fourth digital divide, motivation, cannot be overlooked. That is, we’re seeing children, teachers, media specialists, and administrators all having different motivations to either adopt, ignore, or actively thwart learning innovation with Web 2.0 tools.”

Personally, I think access and policy are two elements that are often closely linked. Is YouTube blocked because of bandwidth or content issues? A text expert in a school I was in recently responded to class problems accessing Web 2.0 by saying “we’re all trying to squeeze everything through one little pipe” - meaning there’s only so much the divisional and school system can handle. The teacher-librarian working with the students at the time could not take solace in the fact there was nothing to be done on a classroom facilitator level, but I could only applaud her perseverance. On some levels, I would say that skill and motivation can be pretty closely linked as well. I believe that if many teachers and students could see how easy and engaging many Web 2.0 tools can be, they would be motivated to adopt some of them. But change is never going to be easy, and although I have not witnessed personally anyone “actively” thwarting learning innovation with Web 2.0 tools, I also have not seen a lot of time or incentives given for educators to do so.

An article written by Sherril Steele-Carlin entitled “Caught in the Digital Divide” tells readers that not only might there be a digital divide along economic, societal, racial, and geographical lines, but gender as well. “According to Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age (2000), a recent study by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation Commission on Technology, Gender, and Teacher Education, a majority of high school girls are totally disinterested in technology education, and fewer women than ever before are entering technology fields.” The article also touches on the idea that a lot of “people, however, question whether a digital divide fueled by ethnic, geographic, societal, or economic factors exists.” From the plethora of evidence I’ve seen now, I’m beginning to think that there is not one digital divide, but many.


So what does all of this mean to educators and students? What can we do to work towards bridging the divide(s)? First of all, educators need to recognize, if not a tangible divide, then at least the reasons why many think there is a divide. In other words, be aware of all of the reasons why students may not be as comfortable or familiar with technology. Are students not completing assignments utilizing tech tools because they are lethargic or because they are frustrated with working on the computer? If we’re diving into Web 2.0 tools and becoming surprised when students are stumbling when using MySpace or FaceBook, maybe some students aren’t as wired as we think. At the same time, Web 2.0 tools may be part of the solution, as Ilan Tsekhman suggests:

The most obvious potential for Web 2.0 applications is that they provide free tools to the user which would otherwise require expensive software packages, one example of this is using the free Google Docs service to replace Microsoft Office. The concept of providing applications as internet services is known as "cloud computing". Parallel to this is a movement towards what is called "thin computing" where the majority of the computing processes of a task are handled by a central server as opposed to on the users local machine. Thin computing promises to lower the system requirements of common online tasks and therefore lower the costs of computing itself.

In fact, others have proposed that free online tools could benefit those with lower incomes in any part of the world. Also, using Web 2.0 tools may be advantageous for adult learners as well. An amazing project in Uganda saw a group of farmers exploring websites, SMS, blogs, RSS feeds, Google Maps, Flickr, Picasa and Skype, and it has been suggested that their experiments helped them to strengthen organisation, planning and information sharing within the community which improved their livelihoods considerably.

But closer to home, the digital divide is a gigantic problem that isn’t going away, and it needs much more than individual teachers, teacher-librarians, or administrators to create a solution. I’ll leave it to Will Richardson to have the last word on starting to decrease the divide:

One idea that I see starting to take root is getting old computers, stripping out all of the old drives, running a Linux thin client and just a Web browser. Right now, you can do 75% of what you do on a store bought computer out on the Web (see thinkfree.com, for instance, or writely.com). And those computers cost next to nothing. So if we could put together a program for that to happen, it might make a difference. But the reality of it is that we are living in a world where one out of every three people in Philadelphia have NEVER BEEN ON THE INTERNET much less have access. For that to change in all parts of this country, it's going to take vision and leadership that just isn't there right now.