Posts Tagged ‘Digital divide’

Target: The new digital divide

July 11, 2008

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I’m finally making my way through a report that’s been sitting on my desk for months, Bridging the Digital Divide: Creating opportunities for marginalised young people to get connected, available from VicHealth. What’s interesting about the report is that its findings in terms of ICT usage by marginalised young people largely support those of reports into other demographics. That is to say, marginalised young people (p. 2):

  • Are confident in their ICT skills
  • Use Instant Messaging, email and social networking services to communicate, and to maintain and build relationships
  • Create profiles on social networking sites such as Bebo and Hi5
  • Are aware of the potential dangers online and have ways of dealing with unwanted contact

Furthermore, in a finding that surprised the reports’ authors, the study showed that ICT plays a larger role in the lives of marginalised young people than previously thought. This surprise reflects a common assumption that I frequently come across when talking to both school and university teachers: that is, that ‘a good number’ of students have poor access to technology, or that a similar number are still on dial-up. Here are some results for the marginalised demographic:

  • 97% of participants in the study had access to the Internet: 44% at home, 30% in a library, 18% at school and 10% each from an Internet cafe or at work (p. 19).
  • 49% had broadband access, and 13% were on dial-up. 5% used wireless (p. 19).
  • Over half of participants accessed the Internet at least a few times a week (p. 40)
  • The young people involved in the study felt they had ICT skills of a high standard (p. 40)

This study reflects what Green and Hannon point out in Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation, that is tbat the new digital divide is more about access to knowledge, than it is about access to hardware (p. 17, pp 59-60). It’s knowing how to use these emerging technologies to best effect (in work and school and life) that’s going to be important from now on.

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Target: Their space: education for a digital generation

April 28, 2008

Target ImageThis is my new favourite report, even though it was published last year. I like it because the authors, Hannah Green and Celia Hannon, have solid opinions — informed by their own research — on how schools must engage with the learning needs of the Net Generation.

Green and Hannon insist that we must stop focusing so heavily on the hardware and instead start responding to the users: in other words, we need to build on what we know is already working with students, and we need to “develop strategies to bridge formal and informal learning” (p. 17), the latter of which is characterised in this context by self-motivation, ownership, purpose, and peer-to-peer learning (pp. 46-47). For Green and Hannon, it’s all about relationships and networks and not about PCs, which leads them to demand that we identify access to knowledge rather than access to hardware as characterising the new digital divide (p. 17, 59-60).

That’s the guts of what they’re saying, anyway. Here are some of the more specific points they make.

  • The Net Gen use new media for strengthening existing relationships, rather than for creating new networks (p. 10). (The Never ending friending research found the same.)
  • They are capable of self-regulation when kept well-informed about risks (p. 10)
  • Debates around moral panic and technological determinism contrast with how Net Gen view and use technologies (p. 15).
  • These technologies are used to facilitate already recognisable social interactions — nothing particularly new or crazy (p. 16).
  • The internet provides a forum for creativity and expression — just as decorating your bedroom was an expression of the same for previous generations (p. 19). The difference is that the creations of the Net Gen are being shared with a worldwide audience (p. 19).
  • There needs to be a focus on ’soft skills’ rather than specific areas of knowledge (pp. 22-23). We need to be able to teach students initiative, intelligence, creativity, problem-solving … and we should lay off promoting the “false disctinction” (p. 24) between knowledge and skills.
  • We must stop trying to figure out how children should be learning from technology; instead, we should seek to learn from their existing practices (p. 25). We need to tap into the students themselves as a resource, rather than thinking about what new resources can be added (pp 25-26).
  • Young people are often concerned about the “unmanageable scale” of the Web and they find it difficult to evaluate and prioritise their search results (p. 68).

And here are some interesting stats:

  • Few seem to value soft skills. Young people rank creativity fairly low: only eighth most important skill for the future (p. 27).
  • Only 50% of parents selected ‘classroom lessons’ as the most important method of learning for their child (p. 30).

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