Hardware Happy

Thanks to Blusher for pointing me to Education Week's Technology Counts report (registration required). There are some good stats there -- especially the chart "Dividing the Pot" which looks at how schools spend money on technology.

Schools spend, on average, $103 per pupil annually for educational technology. More than two-thirds of that money, over $71 per pupil, is spent on hardware.

Whoa! 69% on hardware? And only 6% on staff development and 16% on software? No wonder we have a problem. My guess is that schools are so consumed with looking tech-friendly and having the latest hardware that they've forgotten to train their teachers and staff or find software that will allow them to best integrate technology into the curriculum.

Any teachers here?

Exactly!

This article -- Cyberspace and Race -- does a wonderful job of expressing how I feel about the digital divide as it pertains to race and class issues. My favorite bit:

"...many of the forum's minority participants-both panelists and audience members-didn't experience cyberspace as a place where nobody cared about race. Often, they'd found that people simply assumed all participants in an online discussion were white unless they identified themselves otherwise."

Perfectly stated. When you read your classmates blogs, how do you envision them in your head? Some amorphous blob? If you think about who they are, do you assume they are like you (whatever you are like)? If you disagree with them, do you assume something different?

Sad to say, I've found that those who most appreciate the Internet as a transforming technology are also the most likely to fall into the color-blind trap of wanting to find in the Internet a non-discriminating utopia. As the article puts it:

Perhaps when early white Netizens were arguing that cyberspace was "color-blind," what they really meant was that they desperately wanted a place where they didn't have to think about, look at or talk about racial differences.

...

In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us-white folks and people of color-will have to shed the defensiveness that surrounds the topic of race.

The article also refers to a point I tried to make in my previous post-- that simply bridging the digital divide does not necessarily mean we have made any real progress. Jenkins writes, "...equal access is not the same as equal participation. Giving everybody broadband is a problem of a very different order than broadening our minds." Exactly. If we really want to do something to broaden participation, let's talk about measures like offering websites in Spanish, real changes that will encourage underrepresented communities to join up.

That [insert minority] blogging thing

After my first read of "That African-American Blogging Thing" I was thoroughly confused.. until I realized, after reading the comments, that it was a satire on Matt Stoller's post "The Woman Blogging Thing".

To go back to an earlier conversation in class and my subsequent post, I think we have to be really careful about forcefully diversifying the blogosphere. Technology is great, don't get me wrong, but you can't use it as a cure-all for class or race discrimination. It strikes me as awfully condescending to assume that because technology (such as blogging) has value for one demographic, it will be similarly valuable for all other demographics. We should, of course, always try to make technology as accessible as possible, but if we really want to make a difference in "leveling the playing field" between classes and races, we should start doing that in real life-- only then will it be reflected in cyberspace.

The REAL digital divide?!?

How many of you grew up with computers at home, or in the classroom? I distinctly remember playing Carmen Sandiego on my home PC, and The Amazon Trail at the Mac at my elementary school.

While I think this Economist article is an important and necessary read, I think it's worth pointing out to an American audience that we have a pretty significant digital divide in our own country.

Internet penetration is currently just below 70%, if I recall correctly, and it may not get much higher. In agricultural communities in the Mid-West or in rural Appalachia, the digital divide doesn't have the disastrous effects that it does in our inner cities and suburbs. It is in these latter areas that not having access to a word processor or to Google really hurts students in the classroom and adults who can't compete for IT jobs.

I worked for a few months with the Digital Village project, a Hewlett Foundation initiative in the low-income urban neighborhood of East Palo Alto, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from Stanford. It's bitingly ironic that such a low-income neighborhood with such low levels of Internet access exists in such close proximity to Stanford and Silicon Valley. I worked with Plugged In!, an afterschool program geared towards exposing kids to technology-- not through homework, but through art, music, and other entertaining purposes.

The value here is in introducing people at as young an age as possible to high-tech, so they become comfortable and savvy with it as soon as possible. Even if you have computers at the library, it's not likely that many adults in the community will use it unless they have been previously exposed to the technology in question. This is why our highest priority should be on computers in the classroom.