EDUC 5353: Blog Week #2 (Learn Tech Digit Divide)

What “dividing factors”  might be impacting community members in your context? 

In my community of my classroom, there seems to be little to no dividing factors that impact their digital divide when looking at the results of my survey. Race, gender, age, family size, assignments from classes, and amount of devices seem to have no correlation to gaps in tech usage. This information seems to also connect to the larger community data of the entire city of Austin and its county.

"Researchers found that quantifying the digital divide was a more difficult task because there are various contributors to the divide" (Brown, 2020).

When needing to identify some type of digital divide in this community, it may be small but is still present. Based on the survey data, it appears to be that the hardware issues are due to the cost of the initial purchases of the product. Without further context, this could be simply a common theme that most individuals face as devices continue to become more expensive as tech and capitalisms advances. For the software, it appears that maintenance of the product is the biggest issue with cost and lack of knowledge equally being the next issue. Connecting this to hardware cost, items with less storage and less maintenance cost less money, so I can see that if items are purchased at a lower price point, then dealing with the maintenance would be a common denominator.

"...the Reverend Jesse Jackson referred to the Digital Divide as 'classic apartheid,' while the NAACP’s Kweisi Mfume called it 'technological segregation.' Al Hammond and others at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration took the 'Digital Divide' one step further, using the term 'electronic redlining' (Rapaport, 2009)" (Brown, 2020).

Lack of knowledge was also a high selected choice as based on the responses to their confidence levels of hardware and software below, we can see that the average numbers were only slightly above the average line. 

As far as the most prominent digital divide issue from these student surveys, its quite evident to my that students largely use internet access at their home, but that access has connection issues. Students were asked to describe a time where they tried to use technology to create/foster their creativity for their personal interest but were unsuccessful. The majority of the issues that they had were largely due to the connectivity issues their household faced. Without getting student's physical address to map out the internet connection issue (which would go against our anonymous data policy) we cannot fully conclude which specific locations or areas that suffer. Seeing as we cannot isolate these numbers, we must make a general case and assumption on certain factors of the data that we DO have:

• Students may struggle for the initial purchase and maintaining of their devices. 
• Once students have tech in their hands, they are slightly above on their expertise to handle and deal with the hardware and software. 
• The most evident digital divide here is that the majority of my students, regardless of all demographic information, struggle with their internet connection at their home (where many of their personal and professional items take place and may place a hindrance on the success of those items). 

Are there solutions to help close these gaps? The first one that came to mind was the utilization of a portable hotspot that haven't been utilized on our campuses since we have returned to campus post pandemic lock down. I believe that students and their families that vocalize issues in this area/gap should be given the proper assistance for students for their entire time under our care, can be successful and have a smaller gap than their peers with no tech issues. As I continue with my Call to Action, I may consider other solutions that are probable and logical. Any feedback in the comments would great! 

"...knowledge is power and that as individuals learn more about the prominence of the digital divide, the call to action will increase. Understanding learning in the digital age means understanding the solutions and problems that arise as the world becomes more digital. Many opportunities to aid in bridging the digital divide exist" (Brown, 2020).

How do findings associated with challenges created by the COVID pandemic relate to the students, teachers, parents, leaders, or other participants in your community?

The COVID pandemic created opportunities for schools and researchers to see how well or ill equipped we were to handle a full remote learning scenario. As one who lived and survived this experience, I can personally say that even as a technology teacher, we were not at all prepared for what came and the ramifications. 

"The urgency and nature of the pandemic caused things to go in overdrive creating a highly dynamic landscape" (Gallardo, 2022).

Prior to the pandemic, our schools had little to no resources in guiding students into technological literacy and usage. Some years we would offer a tech class and some years we would not. Students were given the luck of the draw for their competency in the offering of tech classes. This created an obvious gap and discrepancy between grade levels who were knowledgeable and taught basic tech skills and those who were not. 

During remote learning, students were offered borrowed tech (one-to-one laptops for all scholars) and some were even given hotspots if they lacked the resource at home to access the internet. However, the main issue didn't seem to come from the lack of hardware or software, but the lack of skills and discipline students had to work diligently from home and navigate correctly. 

"But as research on the ‘digital divide’ shows, access to computers and internet are not the main drivers of digital inequalities these days. A second, and currently more important source of digital divisions are the skills to use technology " (van de Werfhorst, Kessenich, & Geven, 2022).

Now in relating how COVID affected my chosen community (my photography class students), I strongly believe that many of the same issues my students during and post remote learning experienced, my current students as well have struggling in the same fashion. Since we returned to campus, students are given their one-to-one devices and have access to many tech items to help them and master more areas of technology. All stakeholders, specifically in the education scope, are still dealing with some form of PTSD that was brought on by the pandemic. Although it's been a few years, we are still picking up the pieces and trying to still adjust to this new normal. As stated in the "The digital divide in online education: Inequality in digital readiness of students and schools" case study, the issue is rooted in the skills not in the lack of hardware or software. From my own experience, I fully agree with this assessment so it is our job to now challenge and guide students to become more technologically competent and efficient. For those students who still struggle with access to internet, it is still our responsibility to handle that as soon as possible. Once I am guaranteed that 100% of my students have full tech access, then 100% of students can focus on how they can be better digital learns and citizens. 

"Since the COVID-19 pandemic, digital education has become more and more commonplace. Even though schools have partly moved back to onsite education, it is highly possible that we may face future situations that will force schools to switch to online teaching again. This, combined with our finding that in many countries important between-school differences exist in schools’ readiness for digital education, highlights the importance of policy makers to monitor, invest in, and equalize the (quality of) digital skills and resources of schools. Moreover, our findings suggest that there are important inequalities in the ability of individual students to accommodate to digital education. The more education is digitalized, the more such inequalities may lead to unequal opportunities to academically perform. To level the playing field, governments may want to provide additional funding to schools so they can offer digital trainings for students who are lacking ICT competencies and knowledge" (van de Werfhorst, Kessenich, & Geven, 2022).

Sources: 

Brown, W. (2020). Digital Divide. Retrieved from https://open.library.okstate.edu/learninginthedigitalage/chapter/the-digital-divide/Links to an external site.

Gallardo, R. (2022). The State of the Digital Divide in the United States. Retrieved from: https://pcrd.purdue.edu/the-state-of-the-digital-divide-in-the-united-states/Links to an external site.

 

van de Werfhorst, H.G., Kessenich, E., & Geven, S. (2022). The digital divide in online education: Inequality in digital readiness of students and schools. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9435462/pdf/main.pdfLinks to an external site.