Welcome to K-20 Blog 2018! This year you can look forward to ever-more interesting news and views on the hot ed-tech and e-learning topics currently doing the rounds of academics, pedagogic experts and teachers across the globe.
Today we launch right in with a topic that is on the minds and hearts of many teachers - the “digital divide”; that silent, pernicious socioeconomic gap between students that have and students that do not have access to technology. Today I’d like to air some current facts around the debate, and create perhaps a platform from which we can explore the topic further in future blog posts.
Technology is transforming education, the change is as inevitable as that which the printing press brought to education. This blog is dedicated to highlighting the myriad of ways that technology enhances, and in many cases primarily provides, opportunities for a more constructive, learner-centered, skills-based teaching model. I personally believe that technology-enhanced education is and should be an organic process, where students themselves are the driving force in the adoption, development, deployment and design of ed-tech. We have seen elsewhere in the development of revolutionary technologies that administrators, government, NGOs and policy-makers lag behind the avant-garde of tech development and adoption; (reference cell phones, e-commerce, self-driving cars, the sharing economy, crypto currencies etc.) playing a slow game of catch-up to manage and align legal and policy frameworks around new tech, often with controversial results (reference net neutrality here).
However up to this point most Internet driven technology and hardware development has been a function of pure commerce, in other words it was an economic imperative - I produce an awesome piece of tech, and take it to market to try and sell it for the highest price possible. By creating greater demand for the tech, I can command a higher price. And government policy-makers for the most part have stayed out of the economy’s way; it was not a civic issue whether or not you had the money to buy the latest PlayStation, or could afford to advertise your business on Google Ads.
Now, however, access to technology is becoming a rights issue. In the same way access to basic healthcare is a right, and in the same way defibrillation machines, heart monitors and pathology labs can be considered high tech, and yet also a function of the basic healthcare every citizen has a right to, education and the right to education is fast becoming an issue of access to technology.
The International Telecommunication Union is funded by the UN, and is considered one of the best sources for Internet and communication technology adoption statistics. I mined their 2017 report for some details to guide our thinking on the digital divide with regard to education.
(Source: LEE RAINIE)
Looking through some of the Pew Center's research on this makes for some interesting reading particularly with regard to trends around mobile usage compared with fixed broadband. The above graph details:
As of 2008, 100% of U.S. public schools had one or more instructional computers with an Internet connection, and 58% had carts with laptops. This means that in theory all students have access to the Internet via their school. The discussions of the digital divide are therefore becoming nuanced in the following ways:
The challenges of the “new” digital divide are brilliantly and clearly explained in this journal article. In my next blog we will continue exploring the digital divide, but will take a more practical approach and describe some of the tools and techniques that the individual teacher can use to bridge the gaps in their own classrooms.
So keep an eye on the K-20 Blog!