The Digital Divide and Education

One of the “Dreamers” during computer time at the I Have a Dream Foundation of Asheville. Source: www.ihadasheville.org

I should thank you all; our class last week inspired a (hopefully) fun and engaging new activity I’m going to do during library instruction for English Composition students (under construction here). It was really interesting to hear you talk about how you conceptualized yourselves as Digital Natives. It’s a term that gets thrust upon any person of traditional college age right now (as well as K-12 students), but I think there are a lot of nuances to the term that are worth considering.

One of those nuances is the Digital Divide.  When I was preparing for my English Comp class, I turned to Born Digital, a book that addresses the generation gap between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.  I was interested in this quotation because it addresses how everyone of Digital Native age doesn’t necessarily meet the definition:

Children who spend more time online—Digital Natives—are more likely to be better equipped to make judgments about information quality.  Studies show that children who have the most extensive access to the Internet are more likely than their less experienced peers to take a skeptical view of the kinds of information they draw from Web-based sources like Wikipedia.  A possible way to explain this phenomenon is that children with unrestricted access have the time to experience knowledge production as a collaborative experience, while young people who access the internet, for instance, through computers in the library need to get the information very quickly and thus don’t have time to evaluate their sources carefully.

Palfrey and Gasser 166

This quotation gets at the idea that not all young people today are equally adept at using online resources, but it tiptoes around the underlying issue that’s creating a Digital Divide even among Digital Natives–social class.

A few years ago I worked for an organization called I Have a Dream, which is a nonprofit that provides educational support for students in low-income/underserved neighborhoods.  The organization I worked for was in a public housing development in Asheville, North Carolina.

I remember “computer time” very well.  The students (ages 7-11) would get about half an hour of computer time each afternoon, rotating through in small groups.  Most days they had to use a tutoring software that helped them with math and reading skills (but through games that were relatively fun).  On Fridays they got to choose games from a few websites that were just for fun.  Most of the students were adept at playing the games and performing basic computer functions, although I never saw them try to search for or evaluate online information.  Some of the older ones developed elaborate systems for trying to sneak onto their MySpace pages.  And whether they were playing math games or just for fun games, it was always difficult to pry the students away when computer time was over.  None of these students had internet access at home, so that half hour a day was all they got outside of school.  And what they were getting in school wasn’t much–I also worked at the elementary school that many the kids in the program attended, and their computer use was limited to special trips to computer class or the library a few times a month.

Several of our readings address issues with access to internet for K-12 students inside and outside of school.  I’m encouraged by the ConnectED Initiative designed to provide high-speed internet access in (almost) all K-12 schools by 2017.  But the Broadband Imperative Report gives some sobering truths about how difficult it will be to make this happen.  I wasn’t surprised that 80% of E-Rate Schools reported that their current connectivity was inadequate (7).  But I was impressed that this report is making it clear that high-speed access is necessary both inside and outside of school (9).  In Born Digital, Palfrey and Gasser think that “unrestricted access” is what truly makes a digital native.  It’s clear in the Pew Report that many people are internet non-users because of price or lack of access based on location (usually rural) (2).  And of people who use the internet but don’t go online at home, almost half cite financial inaccessibility as the reason (12).  And there’s also the smartphone issue that Susan Crawford discusses: many people choose to have only a smartphone because it is cheaper, but that provides much less access than having high-speed internet at home.

If we’re going to call all young people today Digital Natives, I hope we can start giving them the tools they need to truly fit the definition.