The Digital Divide
It’s days like this that you realise how data-hungry today’s web has become.
Stupidly, I overshot my download cap for this month - way overshot it - and have been relegated to the lowest of low dial-up connection speeds until the first of February. The result has been painfully slow internet navigation. This has driven me largely offline out of frustration.
At the same time though it’s provide a unique insight into the realities of dial-up, and the limitations of low-speed internet connectivity. This in turn has lead me to thinking about the digital divide.
When people talk about the digital divide they refer to the growing issue of technology haves and have-not’s. In this world, users who have access to computers and internet - and importantly, have the skills to effectively use them - have begun to excel in the digital age, whereas the portion of the population without access is being increasingly isolated and left behind.
“The term digital divide refers to the gap between those people with effective access to digital and information technology, and those without access to it. It includes the imbalances in physical access to technology, as well as the imbalances in resources and skills needed to effectively participate as a digital citizen.”
In the most extreme cases, households have no computer, no internet, and lack the skills in use of the technology. However the digital divide arguably contains shades of gray, in which certain aspects are present, yet others are not.
In the case of internet connection speed, my experiences have highlighted the realities of high-speed versus low-speed data connectivity. Typically I have a 1.5 mbps download rate. When I initially upgraded to this it was amazingly fast; but equally amazing was how fast I started to take it for granted.
Fast forward to one week ago when my download speed was reduced to 60 kbps download and you have a major reality check. Pages that used to load in a virtual instant took half a minute to load, or would sometimes time-out and fail to load at all.
Importantly, it became clear that the reduction from high-speed to dial-up rendered many sites unusable. This included data-intensive content such as streaming video on sites like YouTube and Google Video; web conferencing/VOIP applications like Skype; and graphic intensive or photosharing sites like Flickr.
In an instant a substantial portion of the web became inaccessible, despite the fact I had a computer with an internet connection. Even some largely text-based pages were unavailable as a result.
When you place this discussion within a framework of distance education, or flexible education the implications are severe. The Wikipedia article continues:
“Technology offers a unique opportunity to extend learning support beyond the classroom, something that has been difficult to do until now. ‘The variety of functions that the internet can serve for the individual user makes it ‘unprecedentedly malleable’ to the user’s current needs and purposes’”
The internet has a phenomenal capacity to expand learning outside the traditional walls of the classroom through use of images, streaming video, web conferencing, virtual worlds, blogs and wikis. However the reality of digital divide introduces a learning field which is anything but level, and there are major issues of accessibility and equal opportunity.
So the issue for educators and the Australian government is how to bridge this divide the most effectively - and hopefully eliminate it completely.
