The New York Times and the Digital Divide Article
I had to think , reflect and calm myself down after I read the New York Times recent article on the digital divide. There have been so many articles that are misleading, and people quote them as if they are a mantra once they are in a newspaper, even if the people themselves have no background in the use of technology. People trust the New York Times and other media to research these topics for them. First, I replied to a couple of listservs to see if others had the same sense of the. The thing is , there is a digital divide and there always will be. I don't say this in a mercenary way. Technology is ever changing. While I wrote I wondered was the motivation for the structure of the ideas of the report. MODIFIERS There are modifiers of infrastructure, use, cultural resources, and personal knowledge, and academic permission for the uses of technology. The digital divide is a catch all phrase for .. many things. I thought perhaps the writer had not read deeply enough, and here is why. WHAT ARE THE TECHNOLOGICAL NEEDS OF AMERICA? Actually, what is technology? Technology is the process by which humans modify nature to meet their needs and wants. Most people, however, think of technology in terms of its artifacts: computers and software, aircraft, pesticides, water-treatment plants, birth-control pills, and microwave ovens, to name a few. But technology is more than these tangible products. Technology includes all of the infrastructure necessary for the design, manufacture, operation, and repair of technological artifacts, from corporate headquarters and engineering schools to manufacturing plants and maintenance facilities. The knowledge and processes used to create and to operate technological artifacts -- engineering know-how, manufacturing expertise, and various technical skills -- are equally important part of technology. Technology is a product of engineering and science, the study of the natural world. Science has two parts: (1) a body of knowledge that has been accumulated over time and (2) a process-scientific inquiry-that generates knowledge about the natural world. Engineering, too, consists of a body of knowledge-in this case knowledge of the design and creation of human-made products-and a process for solving problems. Science aims to understand the "why" and "how" of nature, engineering seeks to shape the natural world to meet human needs and wants. Engineering, therefore, could be called "design under constraint," with science-the laws of nature-being one of a number of limiting factors engineers must take into account. Other constraints include cost, reliability, safety, environmental impact, ease of use, available human and material resources, manufacturability, government regulations, laws, and even politics. In short, technology necessarily involves science and engineering. http://www.nae.edu/nae/techlithome.nsf/weblinks/KGRG-55A3ER?OpenDocument Technology is fluid, that is, ever changing and subject to modification. Its not the same thing as anything there are devices, operating systems, tool, and methods of use that are in the mix. There is a report, that helps to give us an idea of the playing field. It is not level. In the report, we discover and think about technological literacy. Defining Technological Literacy One useful way to think about technological literacy is as a component of the more general, or "cultural," literacy popularized by educational theorist E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Hirsch pointed out that literate people in every society and every culture share a body of knowledge that enables them to communicate with each other and make sense of the world around them. The kinds of things a literate person knows will vary from society to society and from era to era; so there is no absolute definition of literacy. In the early twenty-first century, however, cultural literacy must have a large technological component. Technological literacy is a much richer concept than computer literacy, although the two are often confused. Technological literacy can be thought of a comprising three interrelated dimensions that help describe the characteristics of a technologically literate person. Dimensions of Technological Literacy Technological literacy encompasses three interdependent dimensions: (1) knowledge; (2) ways of thinking and acting; and (3) capabilities. These dimensions can be placed along a continuum-from low to high, poorly developed to well developed, limited to extensive. Every individual has a unique combination of knowledge, ways of thinking and acting, and capabilities that will change over time with education and life experience. The characteristics of a technologically literate person can be described along these dimensions. http://www.nae.edu/nae/techlithome.nsf/weblinks/KGRG-569LNP?OpenDocument ( there is a great illustration on the site. You might be able to tell that the dimensions of technical literacy are also varied. That is, owning a machine, or being connected are just a first step. This report and a companion website ( We who think we know technology ofter have to scramble to keep up. Some people classify the people in the world using it as digital natives, and digital immigrants. If you know any of my writings you know that I add a category to this , and that is the title of those who are in digital difficulty. Some of these people are connected. But they may only have some hardware. They may be in a school where the technology hardware is prescripted. They may have a half an hour's time now and then on a computer. I could go on, but you get the point. I should mention Native American students who have satellite connections to get technology in school but who have no telephones at home. But things are changing. I have heard that they are creating wireless infrastructure in the land of the Navajo (a region that has sections in four states). For a while the communication nodes were chapter houses, sixty miles or so from each other. There are financial barriers: Perhaps the most talked about are the funding barriers. Financial barriers are those that are most often citied as limits to the aquisition and use of advanced telecommunications technologies. I believe that the reporter and many of the people he interviewed were still talking about the first wave of technology.. leaving out so much, but I will only identify Internet 2, Grid, Parallel and Teragrid computing. There's more.. but the transitional stages of the ways in which we use technology have already begun. If we talk about schools we know that there is the problem of upgrading and maintaining what is already there. If we talk about cities we could discuss wireless acquisition and the facing funding for telecenters. We could also discuss the lack of funding for first wave responders , as in Katrina or in 9/11, or other national disasters.Clearly this was one example, Katrina of the digital divide in telecommunications at many levels. All of these are some of the ideas that should have been discussed when the words digital divide were used as a label. Furthermore, in schools. we know that the costs of hardware , training, support, software, and services, the mentioned retrofitting of older facilities to accomodate the new technologies. This is compounded by the lack of experience that schools bring to planning, budgeting. technological barriers, structural barrers, Technology : some of these trends and forces can impact teaching and learning. Some of these trends continue to impact the digital divide, Technology is challenging the boundaries of the educational structures that have traditionally facilitated learning from the schoolroom as the place where learning will occur , to the time limits of the school day and school year, and the role of the teacher as a unique source of expertise. It is possible for the communications revolution to create much more meaningful education but most educators may not have transistioned in to a learning space that makes them feel comfortable. Also , given the construct in the way that government impacts education, with testing as the engine there may simply be no place to go with the state of education in America. Time is also a problem, and the time we ask students to be glued to the seats impact how learning occurs, particularly for students with a variety of learning skills. It is very difficult to hold on to past educational practices and the rigidity of the testing, while also trying to negotiate the use of new learning strategies and initiatives. You would think that we don't know how to impact teaching and learning by imbedded the metadata into meaningful " chunks" of data in just in time learning bits.. this work was also pioneered at NIST in , earlier years, ( the education budget was cut ) and the people in industry continued to develop models. Sorry to say I can't speak for the state of the art of online in the workplace, but I still have the research ties. Some of the problems are the cost of education for each student, the gap between skills and knowledge demanced by the modern workplace, and the skills and knowledge graduating students most possess. In some communities we are still using school as a catch all for social programs, and community outreach. There are also the children coming to school without the skills they need or family support, any kind of educational support on the learning journey may be difficult to find, not even mentioning social programs.So education is becoming an issue of "haves"and "have-nots" and the impact of this widening gap, and the politics of economics affects us all, Who can't find the best schools? Usually you can just follow the money in a community. Where are the best teachers? One may never know, because there are hazards in teaching in communities of learning where allowable practices are determined by someone other than the teacher. The teacher is no longer even a learning guide. She or he has scripted tasks to do, how boring is that? May I politely say there is a teacher problem, that is we no longer have a dependent group of women, or minorities who see teaching and being involved in school systems as their only reliable and dependable employment. In the use of technology funding , support, knowledge, and community understanding play a huge role. Technology challenges the old educational systems. As we wrote in the NIIAC Kickstart document, and in a FOCAS, Aspen report, ( Forum on Communications and Society) , technology has the ability, figurately speaking to tear down the walls of the classroom, forcing people to recognize that learning is not an activitied limited to the physical and administrative confines of the formal educational system. If used well educational technology can be a powerful force, a tool for imporving the motivations and incentives for learning. It can be also an invaluable aid to teachers , revolutionizing the way that they practice their profession.' In our work , we decided that the goals were to improve the incentives for learning inside and outside of the classroom. to promore equity and access in the acquisition and use of these technologies and informed dialogue about the importance and benefits of learning technologies. to identify new sources of funding , as in Erate, and some governmental initiatives to level the technology playing field. to assist educators in understanding and using the new tools for learning that technology offers, and to enhance learning opportunities for people of all ages and backgraounds throught he use of communications and information technologies. This excerpt is from " Creating a Learning Society, Initiatives for Education and Technology, which was a report of the Aspen Institute Forum on Communications and Society. It was done in 1996. ISBN )-89834-197-2 To think about: For the digital divide Connectivity will increase: With the widespread adoption of wireless technologies, connectivity is increasing. More users and more devices are connected to the internet (and each other) than ever before. This connectivity comes in many forms including WiFi, GPRS, and BlueTooth. Consumer electronics as smart, connected, devices: So-called “digital convergence” is accelerating. Increasingly devices that were thought of as entertainment devices (gaming consoles, personal video recorders, etc.) are becoming network connected devices. Constellations of smart, connected devices: More and more, students and faculty are using a constellation of devices. Increasingly, these devices are become smart, connected devices. These devices range from cellular phones, dedicated e-mail devices, music player devices, Pocket PC's, and small form factor Tablet PC devices. Seamless online/offline experiences: As individuals become more mobile, making sure that they have ready access to always up to date information, whether connected to the network or not, is essential. The experience of moving from being connected to being unconnected needs to be seamless and natural for users. Aggregation as important as integration: Educators and learners alike need a single, contextualized view in their lives. Users want a single place to see tasks associated with their full-time job, their child's school activities, and of course, their own class tasks from the courses they are taking. While some of this can be achieved through backend integration between disparate systems, aggregation will continue to be of significant value to end users who lead increasingly more and more complicated lives, with more of their information distributed across systems that do not support integration. Presence integrated throughout: One way to reduce the challenges associated with two people interacting is to overcome barriers of time and space. Being able to determine another person's online presence (while respecting their rights to privacy) can help people interact with each other and thereby support their learning needs. Rights Management: While a great deal of attention has been paid to Rights Management from a software and music piracy perspective, these same core capabilities will be important in controlling access to sensitive data (such as student records) and also assuring the authenticity of digital artifacts (such as an electronic student portfolio. We failed to discuss the problems for students with disabillities. There is a digital divide. Food for thought Bonnie Bracey Sutton bbracey at aol com Bonnie Bracey Sutton _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org 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.
