The Digital Divide (A Case Study)

I’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.

Hole in the Wall

I was quite intrigued by that piece.  It goes to show that kids are eager to learn and have a tremendous innate ability to learn what is presented to them.  It harkens the idea that “if you build it they will come.”

What will they learn when just given the tool with no guidance?  Does it matter?  As teachers we think it matters what they learn as much as what they learn from.  If presented with a hammer, does it matter if students build houses or beat each other to a bloody pulp with it.

I think the value of ICT is just as much (or more) of the point of using ICT.  The point of this course is of course to use as much technology as we can to develop a use.  But being teachers, and as I have commented on and others have commented on, we try to seek value in what we are doing.

In any case I am going to try to take off my philosophers hat for a while and concentrate only on the tools and the collaboration part as much as I can.  I think once the course is done we will have more time for reflection.  I found myself wondering why too much and not just gettin’ ‘er done.

Everything Bad is Good for You

The article:  “Everything Bad is Good for You” brought up some interesting points about the adoption of technology.  One is that it is the established technology that is deemed good until the new technology can prove its worth.  Print and written communication has been around for millennia and has proven its worth for generations.  It has been modified and changed to accommodate new materials and methods but has largely remained unchanged.

The point of the article was if another form of communication were first, paper would have to prove itself.  As humans had we discovered electronics and computers first, would electronic media be the defacto standard to be challenged by the newcomer.  (Of course how would we document and organize information about our electronic discoveries so we could improve technology?  But I digress.)  In terms of ICT adoption, a case could be made either way. 

The piecemeal approach to ICT and its tools leaves people hunting around for little bits here and there and has to be put together by the individual who becomes his own expert based on his own experiences.  And since everyone travels the path differently even though they get all the pieces have a different experience.  In this way one can argue that educational goals, even though met by each student can have vastly different cognitive impacts.

If perhaps all the information were presented in one place in a sequential manner, let’s say – a book, then every student and teacher could be clear that they are understanding in the same way as expected.   A so called expert would be the one to put together this book and understands all the ins and outs of the subjects matter and also how others should understand the subject matter.

ICT provides a great way for everyone to be experts by allowing them to put together pieces into a cohesive whole – to synthesize information to form an understanding.  Synthesis, according to one our educational founding experts, Benjamin Bloom, is a higher level thinking that is preceded by knowledge, comprehension and analysis.  Of course because we are graduate students, it is very likely that we do have enough understanding to take the lower level thinking as being adequate for our discussions.  However, I doubt most teenagers can fully grasp what they are discussing or writing in this cut and paste world.

This pseudo-understanding leads to a world of pseudo-experts who have all the pieces, can put them together, come to a conclusion but have no solid understanding of their topic to begin with.  Synthesis without comprehension is baseless literally because there is no foundation to support the higher level deductions or conclusions.

True understanding and true expertise leads to advances in society.  Experts and structured knowledge like in books and libraries concentrate knowledge and power.  This creates a hierarchical society based on those who know and those that don’t.  Those that know lead and those that don’t follow.  It is therefore the development of true expertise and the concentration of knowledge that gave rise to the modern world.  Ergo the book is the physical representation of our western civilization.

Now let’s turn the table and say the internet existed before the book.  Everyone would have access to all the bits (no pun intended) of information out there.  Everyone also has the opportunity to put the information together any way they want.  Since knowledge is power, power would be distributed and in thousands and thousands of places.  Everyone could draw slightly different conclusions and deductions about the information and fight amongst each other for the true interpretation of the information.  (Come to think about it, this is sort of how modern religions got started, but that is another story – or is it?)

Would any true consensus develop over time?  Would there be any experts or in-depth expertise about anything?  No structured knowledge means no structured power.  Without centralized power you would have nothing short of anarchy.

That’s right – I’m saying that if the internet were developed before books there would be no modern civilization as we know it.  In fact it is practically illogical to think you could have an internet without books before it because how could you possibly develop something as complex as the internet without expert knowledge and a knowledge hierarchy in place for many many years to develop the technology to begin with.  And you simply could not have an infrastructure put in place when there may thousands of differing viewpoints as to how to construct such a distributed system.

Is any system of communication bad or good?  Every system has its positives and negatives and certain aspects have been adopted and dropped over time.  We don’t write on cave walls anymore, although you can still get some top notch reading on a bathroom stall.  We don’t write with stone tablets, however we still inscribe headstones. 

Some of you may still remember the BBS system as our internet of the past or still have a 300 baud modem that hooks up to your Commadore 64.  We use chat rooms and DSL modems to get our tech fix now and it has become increasingly easy to use.

As ICT became easier, faster and cheaper, there seemed to develop competition between the old literacy and the new literacy.  I think what we are battling with still is – is it a completely new way of communicating that will supplant literacy or is it just a new form of literacy that will enhance traditional reading and learning?

Dusty haired librarians lament the disappearance of books from their shelves and curse the arrival of more and more of the noisy boxes in their spaces.  Twitchy eyed geeks wallow in the pixel glow of their screens as they google their way through torrents of information.

What the librarians may fail to grasp, is that their beloved books have not disappeared; they are just not on paper anymore.  Just like writing on cave walls, stone, leaves, papyrus and scrolls, the medium may be disappearing, but the information is still there.

What is going to happen to ICT in the next 50 years then?  Is ICT going to supplant literacy entirely and become a new monster entity of some sort?  Is it going to be a sibling to literacy, different but equal?  Or is literacy going to supplant ICT eventually, using ICT as merely a tool for literacy?

I really couldn’t tell you.  I’m just a pseudo-expert putting together pieces of the puzzle in this ICT course.  If you want I could help you get a hold of the guy who wrote some stirring poetry about a man from Nantucket in the men’s room.  I’m sure he’s got that and a whole lot more on his Facebook site.