Divided we fall: addressing the digital divide
January 2008
HM Government PSA Delivery Agreement 11, ‘Narrow the gap in educational achievement between children from low income and disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers’, October 2007“It is a considerable achievement... that the gap between children from lower income and disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers has not widened”
Much has been made of the gap that exists in our society between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ – and as the extract above clearly shows, little or no progress is currently being made on narrowing this gap.
This polarisation is just as real in the area of access to, and use of, technology as it is in economic and social deprivation. With the current fast pace of technological development, we risk exacerbating this distance between the ‘e-haves’ and the ‘e-have nots’ if it is not addressed via radical and innovative approaches.
The most effective are those that empower rather than impose, that seek ways of involving people in finding their own ways of addressing a situation, as co-designers, and that offer fresh routes to participation rather than the traditional ones that may have failed them previously. These issues are no respecters of borders, so good ideas can be found both here and abroad, but all can offer valuable lessons about closing the gaps developing between those able to effectively participate in digital cultures, and those who may be left behind.
Digital learning beyond school
An estimated 800,000 school-age children in England currently don’t have internet access outside school. In response to this Jim Knight MP, Minister for Schools and Learning, announced in January 2007 that he was setting up a Home Access Task Force to find ways to provide it. While it is due to report in March 2008, there are already moves to make this ambition a reality.
The Computers for Pupils project provides 200,000 pupils (and their families) across England with a computer to take home and a connection to the internet. Identified through a formula involving the index of multiple deprivation and free school meals, this initiative confronts the problem in a very immediate and concrete way.
However, providing the kit is clearly only part of the answer. As well as the computer, the recipients - children and families alike - also need the skills to use it and an awareness of the breadth of possibilities now on offer. While schools can provide some of what's needed, their limitations of time, space and curriculum mean that support has to come from elsewhere. One model that may offer some of this support is Club Tech.
Originating in the United States, Club Tech is a collaboration between Microsoft and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Over the five years of the project 2,700 clubs across the country have been equipped with hardware and software, and given training in the skills necessary to use it. Beyond basic computer skills, the initiative has also seen the development of a digital arts suite of programs to boost creativity, and an annual festival to promote their use. So is it a model that could be imported into the UK? That's the question Lizbeth Goodman of SMARTlab, based at the University of East London in Newham, wants to answer.
Having recently completed a quality assurance review of the American set-up for Microsoft, Goodman knows the workings of the project well. She was encouraged initially by the attitude of the funders. “Microsoft is genuinely interested in building, from the ground up, community projects for kids,” she says, and when she approached the users she found a similar view. “Having interviewed thousands of kids, parents and volunteers, the response was predominantly positive.”
Each location has a standard set-up, which comes with an on-screen tutorial, to teach basic user skills. As Goodman points out, “quality and consistency are difficult to assure if you just donate the kit”, particularly in situations where the staff may be volunteers, and certainly not people recruited for their computer skills. “You need a core curriculum, that kids can then leave,” she believes.
While this may be less of an issue in this country, due to the place of ICT as a core curriculum subject in schools, it remains an aspect that Goodman sees as key, particularly as she wants this project in the UK to provide a framework that can be exported to other parts of Europe, and then beyond into Africa and Asia. Scoping how this might work will fall to the two researchers recruited to the project, even before the first location for a club has been identified on this side of the Atlantic (although some clubs exist on US military bases). Already the core skills units are being translated into 100 different languages and dialects in preparation for its further growth, although she would like it to become more accessible for those with special needs, too.
Beyond the core skills is the digital arts suite, a set of programs to encourage creativity, backed up by an annual digital arts competition. While Goodman has some personal reservations about this approach, she acknowledges that it has been very successful, perhaps because college scholarships on offer as prizes for young people from the poorest neighbourhoods are very “real incentives”.
It isn’t just children that have benefited from the clubs. The most successful included instances of wider family involvement, where mums learned computer skills from their sons and daughters, for example. There have also been instances of grandparents volunteering, where members not only built strong relationships but also shared the perspective of an older generation.
As Club Tech starts up here this ‘wraparound’ approach is one aspect Goodman is keen to promote, but she recognises there is a “challenge to transport that to Europe”. Other challenges she and her team face are deciding what should be in the core curriculum, and how that links with schools. However, the first challenge is “to find places where the kit will be looked after”. Everything else will grow from there.
Creating and communicating digitally in rural India
“You can sit in front of a browser and the whole world is at your fingertips. You can find anything in Google,” suggests Matt Jones, before adding the caveat, “but it is only from people like you and me.” This privileged access to technology gives us a skewed view of the world, he believes, one where the stories of the majority of the planet's population are omitted. It is this imbalance that he is seeking to redress through the StoryBank project, a scheme that is “working towards a place where the worldwide web does reflect everyone's concerns and worries. Then social injustice would be more obvious.”
With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, his project is one of four working under the umbrella title of Bridging the Global Digital Divide. Jones and his team are putting digital tools into the hands of people in Budikote, a village in southern India, so they can record and share their stories. To begin with these will remain within the community - “narrowcast yourself” as Jones puts it - but in the longer term they may make it onto the web.
For the first year of the project the emphasis has been on getting the design of the tools right. A touchscreen monitor was installed on the wall of a community meeting place, which could also be operated via a dial, like a radio tuner. Over 100 digital images and ten broadcasts from the local radio station were uploaded to research how users preferred to browse the content. A combination of observations, group discussions and individual interviews with key members of the community then took place to gauge users’ preferences and begin to refine the design to meet them, a process of co-design.
At the same time a number of mobile phones were provided for the villagers to begin to create and upload their own content using Bluetooth. While this is a community with, as Jones puts it, “thousands of years of practice at story telling”, their experience is not within a textually literate medium. “The kind of things we are doing try to understand their values in terms of visual expression and story telling,” he explains. By providing devices capable of recording images and voices people can create stories and share them easily with others. It is here that the process begins to shift from the technology to the content.
“What form of story - what kinds of story – would make sense to create on a phone?” Jones wonders. “What style? A single image and a voice? Video?” The village already has a strong culture of self-help, particularly among the women. “When we were going through designs villagers could think of practical reasons for using this and were excited by them.” He gives the simple example of school children being taught practical information, like the importance of washing their hands and feet after being out all day.
While the focus of the project has been on one, small, part of the planet, Jones recognises the broader impact it could have, both in the immediate vicinity, with ambitions to expand to 40 nearby villages, but also globally; “If we can expose the rest of world to these stories people will learn. Designers will learn.”
Links
Computers for Pupils:
schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=re&catcode=framework_form&rid=13420
Club Tech:
www.microsoft.com/about/brandcampaigns/realizepotential/programs/
boysgirlsclub.mspx
SMARTlab:
www.smartlab.uk.com