Digital Inequality

I have to admit that this week's assignment was quite difficult.  After reading the ITU's reports, viewing the Youtube videos, and reading several of the recommended readings, I had a clear understanding of what digital divide and digital inequality were, but it was not apparent how it affected the students at Santa Monica College.  It is true that many of our classrooms are in the stone age of technology but much of the student population for the most part is from middle-class to outright wealthy families, so access to technology is not an issue.  You would be hard pressed to find a student at SMC who doesn't have a laptop and a smartphone at their fingertips.  In addition, the entire campus is wi-fi enabled.

The energy-efficient light bulb in my head started to flicker to life, however, when I thought about my night students.  As I mention in my presentation, night students are different from traditional day students.  Day students, specifically in the ESL department, are between the ages of 18 and 25, are from some of the most wired countries on the planet (South Korea, Japan, China/Hong Kong), and literally have 24 hour access to the internet.  On the other hand, night students are usually older, work full time jobs during the day, have access to the internet but are usually limited in their ability to effectively use the technology available to them, and are from technologically developing countries.  Many of my night students, for example, are from Mexico and Iran with a few from various African nations.  Many of these factors contribute to the limited technological skills of these night students.  Therefore, I decided to focus my presentation on digital inequality rather than digital divide, more specifically, digital inequality rooted in a lack of skills among night students.

In my presentation, I propose four fairly simple solutions to increase technological competence in this specific population of students: implementing a technology tutoring program, using all available computer equipped classrooms (a no-brainer), devoting a portion of classes to technology, and requiring mandatory faculty professional development in the area of classroom technology.

Here is my VoiceThread presentation: Digital Divide VoiceThread Presentation