The Digital Divide (A Case Study)
November 2, 2007I’ve told some of you my deep dark secret, but I think it has some relevance to ICT and inclusion. Please get your nose off the screen – it’s not that kind of deep dark secret although to serious techies it might be the ultimate sin. And I thought I might be able to hide it from the rest of you but with all the collaboration and using all the new tools an explanation for my behavior may be in order.Now I’d really like to set up Skype sessions with you and look at your Jing lessons and all your wonderful podcasts. The fact is it’s not really possible to do many of the activities, especially downloading all the new software on my home computer. Well, beside the fact that my two kids take up a lot of my evenings, there is one more compelling reason…
Ok, ok, I’ll say it for all to hear. My internet connection at home is…(sigh) dial-up. Yeah, yeah, I hear you, and after you recover from fainting, it’s something we could discuss. When I signed up for the course I saw the list of activities to complete and thought: “Hey, I could do all that,” and I decided to do the course on my school computer (I actually have a lab of 28 computers all connected to DSL).
When the pressure was put on us to have much more collaboration, that’s when my strategy was not working so well. Adding and installing and playing with software can be done on an ad hoc nature whenever you have a second here or there, but collaborating using Skype is just not possible during the school day with all the demands on my time. And of course with dial up at home, it is simply impossible.
So I find myself between a tech and hard place. Which illustrates that even in this day and age, someone can be stumped by access problems. I thoroughly examined my requirements to take this course and because of the nature of interaction, I am finding myself left out of part of the equation.
This is of course the Digital Divide in action. It may not be a dial-up situation for your students, it may be the fact that they have no computer at all! What I’ve found over the years of teaching technology that its often basic literacy skills that prevents students from learning technology. (What reading levels are the Lawrenceville Press books or Adobe’s Classroom in a Book series if you use those as resources?). I’m sure there is a continuum of accessibility problems for students which leaves many of them unable to use many of our “cute” tools. Some kids are just hoping they get breakfast and that their step-dad won’t beat them today.
Teachers themselves are often stymied by their computer systems at work for security reasons. At our school, most teachers do not have program install rights and have to call the school technician to install any software. Just that fact alone would exclude most teachers in our school doing what I’m doing. Luckily, I’m a teacher technician (teacher tech mentor, etc.) and have install rights on my lab computers.
We also have filters applied to the internet which helps to filter out inappropriate sites which is good for the school. However, in using some of the services and tools, there have been anomalies when doing certain things which usually involves embedded content. For example, I could upload a Picassa Web album, but I couldn’t view them because the filters were disallowing the embedded slideshow viewer. I have been having trouble viewing Jing presentations because of the embedded player being blocked. Luckily, I have been able to get around the filters (like the kids!) in some cases and not in others. (I’ve tried to break through but flickr.com will not budge.) And when in crap adapt, so I used alternate tools that the filters don’t bother with.
My point is that most teachers would not have the access or experience to work around some of these difficulties and to change the current security model to allow teachers to install software for whatever purpose would be like pushing adapt uphill. Even if you had a completely open system with DSL, I doubt that many teachers would be able to progress as far as the majority of us have. The technical aspects of installing and using the tools is enough of an obstacle for most teachers who are not nearly as enthusiastic as our geekish cohort.
What do we do about this disparity of access? We do what teachers have always done when teaching – we compromise. We cannot exclude certain students from activities because they don’t have access to tools others have. You must consider what technology students are comfortable using or can be trained to use easily. When I first started as an enthusiastic tech teacher teaching HTML, I would give HTML assignments for homework because all you need is a computer with Windows which had notepad included. Bada Bing Bada…Bad… Of course, many students didn’t even have computers, that’s why they came to the class in the first place – to use a computer!
So before you get anyone to blog or wiki or Skype or podcast or Jing or Transmorgify (don’t look it up – I just made it up) make sure it is an all-inclusive activity. Because there could be someone like me sitting in your classrooms (CUE: violins).
Addendum: Perhaps that is one thing that could be included on the next course outline when this course is run again – a set of technical requirements.
Thanks again for another considered entry.
The digital divide is a persistent concern for our society as a whole. The divide exists along so many lines and access to hardware and bandwidth are just part of the issue.
One of the larger concerns is the way that the digital divide exacerbates the existing divisions and structural inequalities in society.
if you are rich (comparatively) and urban you are far more likely participate fully in an economy which is increasingly web based. If you are poor and/or live in a rural or remote setting you are probably keenly aware of the world evolving past you.
We keep telling disadvantaged people that education is the key to improving their lot but at the same time making that education only available in an urban setting. Digitally distributed education can help but as yet it isn’t the complete answer.
This issue is even more apparent in third world countries. Initiatives like the One Laptop Per Child project is dedicated to providing access to the worlds economic and educational resources.
I was aware of this issue when constructing this course and I have tried to make the main tools as light weight as possible. If you set up your blog with the plainest theme with no graphics it will work on dial up. Similarly the wikispaces wiki is text based and so fairly light weight. This might make it especially useful in low bandwidth teaching situations. More elaborate wikis with a lot of graphics might create problems.
I had to make some choices when designing this course so I specified in the prerequisite section that participants have access to high speed Internet connection.
That being said, I am very interested in the strategies that people have employed to get around the limitations of bandwidth and institutional network security.
Your entry is very much to this point and I know that others in this course are in similar positions. I hope your post generates more discussion.
I am in no way complaining about my lot in the course, I knew what I was in for. However, just by looking at the blogs (and some inside knowledge) I can tell just where in the pecking order the class participants are. They range from divisional computer consultants, to computer science teachers to regular classroom teachers. What I understand or hope is that this course is for the regular classroom teacher trying to improve their ICT skills. But often it is the regular classroom teacher that has the most roadblocks in place, either by infrastucture or by prior technical knowledge.
I was very interested in reading your take on the ‘have nots’ amongst the student community. I have some prior knowledge and experience of them. Yeah, I can understand the difficulties you must be encountering with dial up. It’s pretty impressive that you’ve worked around them. Personally I am challenged and struggling in the course. I’m not expecting this to change. If nothing else I’ll gain some additional skills, a confidence to share them and empathy enough to be patient.(Yikes! That last bit sounds like the making of an ICT ‘Serenity Prayer.’)
I think we take for granted many things as educators. We forget that not every student comes to school with an opportunity to have breakfast. Some do not come from loving homes. Some have the above but do not have the opportunity to “keep up with the wikiJones”.
We have to keep in mind the same issue as you have brought up when we try to employ these tools we are learning. Some kids just don’t have access to the technology. They are going (do) to feel like many of us right now. Some kids will be left behind if we are not taking steps to be fully inclusive in our technology training for students. We cannot simply give kids a crash course in blogs and wikis and expect all to succeed.
So while we gleefully make Jing presentations and the like, hoping to create more interest and hopefully deeper understanding, we may actually be setting some up for frustration and failure.
As I write this I realize that I am currently guilty of doing it!
Very impressive blog: “Solid as an Oak”! I agree with all that you say and, unfortunately, this “Digital Divide” is getting wider. The one positive I see in it all is that the good stuff keeps getting downloaded into the cheap pile, which to a certain extent, allows some to begin “barking” from the porch as the big dogs run by…
Yours in Tin Cans and String: AKA – Dial Up! Did you find it in the cheap pile?
One of these days we’ll just “beam it down” from a Satellite and we’ll have access anywhere and everywhere 24/7. For now though we need to make sure that our students have alternate ways of accessing information so they’re not at a disadvantage.
I have had to make a number of compromises as I have been in a similar situation. I did however, get permission from our tech to use a different LAN setting. This allows me to bypass most, but not all of the security in our school system. I have time in Period 1 to work and some days after school. I purchased a satellite wireless hookup at home, but again the technological difficulties have defeated me again and my “high speed” is not. I am posting more about this on my blog, but I was impressed with your entry as you have voiced many of my own concerns about this course.
A very interesting blog entry. Yes, I would agree that many people do not have access to computers at home and a lot of people here in the north use the dial up for shaw or have no internet connection. Students then come to school so that they can use computers at school. The filters prevent them from seeing many sites and msn, hotmail sites are then blocked so they cannot access them.
Another problem I have noticed is that when schools invest the money for computers they then buy cheap knock offs because they do not have the money to purchase the rights for the school/district. So in order to get around this they buy cheaper knock offs. I was teaching a consumer math course which used ecxcel speadsheets. I was st the school using some other version, so I had to complete the assignment at home on excel and then go back to school and do the assignment on the spreadsheet program that was installed in the lab. I had to spead a huge amount of time preping for what would be considered a simple assignment. The programs are not the same so all indstructions had to be converted so the students could do the assignment. Then the students did not have the capability to save their documents overnight and startup the next day because the techians did not give us the capability to save these documents. It was a very fustrating experience.
The Great Divide is larger than what most people think.