Very interesting article. Of course, the Bush administration made eliminating community technology funding a priority from day one of their first administration. The CTC program is gone after several years of minimal support. In fact, the Bushies are trying to eliminate or drastically reduce all community and adult education programs, and they have succeeded in many areas. The ones that weren't eliminated have been changed to school/youth programs, perhaps in response to criticism that No Child Left Behind wasn't funded from the get-go.
Some things that I don't think were mentioned (although I did just skim the article): 1. There is so much stuff out there in Spanish. Plus common software can be installed using the Spanish language version. I have most of my computers set up so one can choose English or Spanish, plus Spanish spell-checkers, Spanish hotmail and yahoo, etc. The reading possibilities are endless--dozens of Latin American newspapers and magazines, chat rooms, email, etc. 2. Adults often get excited by being able to email or IM with family in their home country in their native language. They will learn to use the computer just to do this. Since there are cybercafes all over the world, it is often the family member left at home in the native country who initiates the interaction and insists that the US resident learn to use the computer. It is kind of funny--in developing countries where cybercafes are the only way for most people to go online, lower income people have a much greater opportunity to use the internet and computer. It is here in the US where we rely on personally owned computers and connections that low income people don't have access. There are few cybercafes and the few that exist charge too much. 3. Since virtually all education funding is now directed at the public schools, and very few public schools can open their facilities to the community at nights and on weekends, access may shrink. 4. When latinos and lower income people have computers, they (the computers) are generally old, lack software, are technically challenging, and lack key components like a modem. If they have internet access, it is dial-up. Either broadband is not available, or it is too expensive. 5. Some low income communities in our area suffered from higher ed 'drive by' programming. For example, one of our state universities (located hundreds of miles from the border) was awarded a grant to provide technology labs to the border colonias in Texas. Of course, there are over 400,000 residents in over 2000 colonias stretched across the Texas-Mexico border. One grant wasn't going to make much of a dent. But after that, federal funders said that the colonias were funded, so there was no need for additional funding. Ha! I have created four public access labs in the border colonias, so I speak from experience as much as anything else. Right now I run a very popular lab, and I am struggling with the usual issues: How do we get more teen girls and adult men interested? How do we get the schools to teach more than word processing? Why do boys download everything they find on the net and then complain that the computer is slow? Just because the users are 100% Latino soesn't mean that we do not face many of the same issues as anyone else! BTW, on the DD list, I feel that we have more in common with the community technology centers in India and Africa than anywhere else. Kathleen Muro [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
