OU: Digital divide now between clued and clueless The vice chancellor of the Open University has said the digital divide is now between people who do and do not understand how to exploit IT fully. In an opening speech to the Jisc conference in London on 12 April 2010, Martin Bean said that the digital divide was no longer about haves and have-nots in terms of access to IT and …
"In my mind now the digital divide is much more about those that actually understand how to use and apply technology in their lives and their work as a necessity, rather than simply getting access to the technology per se," he said.
I said that in 1998, in a report for the British Library, see http://www.qub.ac.uk/mgt/cicn/beyond/
Lots of other people working in community informatics and community networking were saying the same things 10 years ago.
"The day that Google became a verb, and teachers in primary and secondary schools starting looking at Wikipedia as a trusted source of information, we should all have started to think deeply about the notion of how we longer teach people of all ages where to find information and talked instead about how to make sense of that information," said the vice chancellor.
He predicted that trust in content will be one of the big issues in the future.
"Our libraries collectively ... need to be spending as much time thinking about sense making of information as they do about simple retrieval of information," he told the audience of university and college delegates.
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So, the government must teach its little citizens-to-be how to reason, verify, discuss and use information effectively. Critical thinking, fact checking, reading up properly on important issues, questioning supposedly authoritative sources..... Yeah, we all know where I'm going with this, so I'll just go and get breakfast.
Sounds to me like the same pattern I've seen before. Folks don't want to change the way they do things by learning and adopting the new thing, so they tell the boss that there aren't enough computers, or that the computers are so slow and unreliable that they're unusable.
Once the place is full of shiny new kit, they tell him that they can't do the new thing without being trained on it. Preferably somewhere with nice food and drink, and no exam at the end. This will take time and negotiation to sort out, and can only be offered to a select few. Meanwhile, still, nobody's doing the new thing.
Once the offsite courses get too expensive, an in-house training facility develops and widespread training on the new thing becomes mandatory.
The next step after this is to say that they're just too busy doing the day job for them to be able to keep attending all these pointless courses, and that this is causing workplace stress.
By this time this has been through the union and back, the kit is obviously too old and unreliable again. And, this time, the screens are too small as well.
The biggest differentiator between the clueful; and the clueless is how they regard knowledge. For a lot (the majority?) of people "education" is a bit like a jail sentence. You do your time, but once you're out that's the end of it. For the rest of us, education is an ongoing process - throughout life. And we take the responsibility for self-improvement upon ourselves: rather than expecting others to deliver it to us.
It would also help if our society actually placed a value on knowledge: especially technical know-how, rather than scorning it. That way we might, just, be in a position in a generation or two to start producing engineering and science graduates and (even better) not have to teach them how to flip burgers in order to get a job.
Occasional letter number one [mission statement] - Rockefeller’s General Education Board 1906
In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk......
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You can google the rest. :)
But unfortunately often let down in practice.
While the OU might not succumb to outmoded technologies featuring in "bring technology to the people" initiatives most FE colleges rely on course material and course software that is woefully inadequate yet at the same time claimed to be bringing new technology to the people.
Shame really.
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