My town wants to liquidate a large parcel of land that was once intended for a comprehensive high school, and it is considering selling it to a large discount chain. I get on the Internet looking for information about the chain and its impact on small towns when it moves in. I find a number of reports from other towns that have experience with the company, mostly produced by local action groups and mostly negative. They all provide data on the impact, but I decide not to use that data, because of the emotional flavor of the reports.
One report, however, points to data from a study that was supported by a grant from the federal government, and managed by a college professor who, I learn from my research, has managed a number of other government funded studies. I am able to import the raw data from the report into a spreadsheet program, and use some formulas to filter out irrelevant data. Then I run some statistical function to measure and test trends, and produce some graphs that reveal some startling information about job patterns in the studied towns.
I want to share my findings with other residents of my town, but know that we are all too busy to pay a lot of attention to such information. We all have too much to read. So I produce a set of presentation slides that include some animation, convert the presentation into a movie file, and publish it on my blog, which is read by others in my town. I hope that they will link it to their blogs.
Are the skills that I utilized in this story basic skills. Is the ability to make decisions on the information sources I would use a basic/universal skill. Is the ability to take data and make it tell its story by using statistics and information processing technologies a basic skill today? I could certainly write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, but I decided instead that I might better influence more people by producing a video. Should anyone have these skills? Should everyone have these skills? Is this literacy?
I was certainly not taught to do these things when I was growing up. We didn’t have these technologies. But is it simply advanced in technology that should cause us to rethink literacy, or has something happened to the nature of information — as a result of technology?
I’ve come to understand that “information” is sacred. People much smarter than me have thought and talked and written about information for a long time. Commentors to my blog are right. Information has not changed. But I think that it’s nature has. It now flows through networks, so it can come from almost anywhere, any time, and from almost anyone. That’s new. It exists as ones and zeros rather than scratched or stamped ink. We can work information in ways that were impossible fifteen years ago. And there is so much of it. We are overwhelmed by the vast supply of information and must constantly made decisions on what information we’re going to use and what we’re going to ignore.
I think that this all affects what it means to be literacy.
By the way, this is a great conversation —-
Interestingly, this in many ways parallels what we are going through in K12 education. When I first started teaching, I knew next to nothing of my students’ past performance. We have access to so much more information about our students and their progress and we are using it in very important ways. As a central office administrative team, we are constantly working with trying to build the capacity in all of our employees to use data about student performance to make corrections in instructional programming. Sometimes that means providing the data warehouses and analytical tools to do it, and sometimes it means very lengthy data retreats to discuss what the data suggests.
What is very clear to me though, is the importance of what “basic” literacy means in this context. What we want to do is be in a place where our teachers do not spend large amounts of time entering, arranging, filtering and eventually representing data. While those are all important, they are only important as a means to an end. Our teachers need to actually understand the information which in turns changes what we do in practice and this tends to happen through conversation, disagreement, and hopefully consensus.
Being able to arrange and represent data is indeed becoming a very basic literacy skill. Without it, it becomes very difficult to get to where we really want to go, which is to use information to better guide our practice. I don’t want to minimize the idea that we also need some pretty heavy intellectual horsepower to analyze data in MEANINGFUL ways (in the hypothetical analysis above, the mental work went into evaluating sources and analyzing the audience to best select a medium for presentation – not in using spreadsheets to arrange and represent the data), but we at least need to all have a certain foundation of basic literacy skills to even get to the point where we can use our mental horsepower.
I’ve been following this conversation and I keep coming back to the idea of a change in information. Information is defined (Merriam-Webster 10th edition) as “the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence.” I think, perhaps, what Dave Warlick is saying is that the communication and reception has changed as a result of the technological advances that have occurred in the last couple decades.
I am sitting at a home computer using a broadband connection to enter into a discussion which would not have been feasible except through a print medium until a few years ago. I would not have had access to these ideas except by reading them in a book, a magazine or a newspaper, and I would not have been moved to participate in a discussion of this type because of the complex nature of the opportunity to respond.
So I agree that the substance of knowledge may not have changed, but the communication of that knowledge has certainly changed, and we must educate all of society to accept the changes and become prepared to participate in the current discussions.
David,
I think you hit the nail on the head here with, “I was certainly not taught to do these things when I was growing up.”
The story is about thinking about a problem and acting on your desire to do something by creating a piece of work you felt solved the problem.
Other people faced with the same situation would come to other conclusions and do very different things, and all could be “correct.” If you did identify a “basic skill” set you needed as you went through this process, would it apply to anyone else’s problem, process, or solution?
So in a search for a definition of new literacy, are you just seeing the qualities of a curious mind and a can-do attitude? I guess I’m failing to see how “the changing nature of information” fully illuminates a quest for a new definition of literacy. Do you ever worry that you are holding an information hammer and all you are seeing is data nails?
For me, we exist in a “both/and” scenario. Certainly the context of information has changed–it is ubiquitous and it is much easier to get quickly, unlike previous times where information dissemination depended on books, libraries, magazines, etc. And the nature of information has changed. It’s nature used to be controlled by a elite group of authors and puclicists. Now, however, a 15 year old beekeeper in Indiana can easily make a contribution to others by simply posting his unique knowledge to a blog, available to everyone with a computer who is interested.
At the heart of our modern technological society lies an unacknowledged paradox. Although the United States is increasingly defined by and dependent on technology and is adopting new technologies at a breathtaking pace, its citizens are not equipped to make well-considered decisions or to think critically about technology. As a society, we are not even fully aware of or conversant with the technologies we use every day. In short, we are not “technologically literate.†See the definition at the end)
Heck we just got the technology funds through congress. Maybe it was the part about other countries eating our lunch, and outsourcing.
Biggest Divide?
Our biggest divide in education is that of the teachers who do and those who don’t and don’t want to. Professional development is a joke in lots of places, and not available in many. The money has been spent on testing and hardware. Not our fault for sure, but the truth.
We can say that technology has become so user friendly it is largely “invisible.†Americans use technology with a minimal comprehension of how or why it works or the implications of its use or even where it comes from. ( that is IF they have it!)We drive high-tech cars but know little more than how to operate the steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake pedal. We fill shopping carts with highly processed foods but are largely ignorant of their content, or how they are developed, grown, packaged, or delivered. We click on a mouse and transmit data over thousands of miles without understanding how this is possible or who might have access to the information.
Available evidence shows that American adults and children have a poor understanding of the essential characteristics of technology, how it influences society, and how people can and do affect its development. Neither the educational system nor the policy-making apparatus in the United States has recognized the importance of technological literacy.
Truth be told, the content , information and resources are overwhelming to some.
We have gone from the horse and buggy to a man on the moon , and lots of people want to still teach as if it is 1893. And do.I like to quote that senator who in cutting the budget for NASA said, we can get weather from the television, and
the airlines have their own technologies. He didn’t know about supercomputing that links the television stations to NASA and NOAA, or about ASEC. His staffer should since everyone is telling us that there are digital native and immigrants.
I say, what about the digitally deficit and the digital “dumbed” those who get the media beamed to them but have no way of being interactive.
Do we know about Internet toasters? We could use OLPC in many rural and
and urban areas.. but … but… I digress.
Thus the paradox: Even as technology has become increasingly important in our lives, it has receded from view. Americans are poorly equipped to recognize, let alone ponder or address, the challenges technology poses or the problems it could solve. And the mismatch is growing. Although our use of technology is increasing apace, there is no sign of a corresponding improvement in our ability to deal with issues relating to technology.
To take full advantage of the benefits and to recognize, address, or even avoid some of the pitfalls of technology, we must become better stewards of technological change. Unfortunately, we are ill prepared to meet this goal. This report represents a mandate—an urgent call—for technological literacy in the United States.
Technically Speaking: Why All Americans Need to Know More About Technology (2002) There are updates but you can just read Compete.org, or the Convocation for the Gathering Storm, or Innovation Proclamation to know that
we are not USING the information that is available. Perhaps we super bloggers are…but the average citizen?
There are tons of reports that show we don’t get it.
The report goes on to say this”
Learning about technology should begin in kindergarten, and the connection between all subjects and technology should be emphasized throughout a student’s education, the report says.
Technology content should be infused into curricula, teaching materials, and student assessments. At the federal level, the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Education should provide incentives for publishers to include technology content in new science, history, social studies, and language arts textbooks. Likewise, technologically focused agencies such as NASA and the National Institutes of Health should support the development of curricula for teachers of all subjects and grades, especially to help make clear the connections between technology, science, and other school subjects. ( Dept of Education , right? wink, wink.. not in this administration)
All educators should be better prepared to teach about technology, the report says. Schools need to move beyond the perception of technology as a separate subject to be taught in “shop class.” Science teachers in particular need a solid education in technology and engineering, and even history and social studies teachers should be required to know how technology relates to their subjects. ”
We know that there has been a stop sign on the Superinformation highway.
We know that for some children the only connectivity is in schools.
We know that most of the teaching force , may not create a learning landscape using the numbers and variety of resources available to them for many reasons, NCLB for one. Emphasis on testing using one modality for the other , fear of
AYP… I could go on.
Maybe everyone has a lot more time than I have to go to the so many blogs and answer them all and to pursue communication, information.. I am here because I was teaching a course at American University and the students brought me to it.
There is still a digital divide. The businessmen talking to the congress have a new phrase for it.. called broadening participation. Participation in what? Information about what? I talked to some people about emerging technologies and they think I mean wikis, and moodle, and second life, when in reality I am talking about the next wave of technology. I mean HPC, the Grid, Teragrid, and LHC. Petascale..
how will we use it?
ICT’s role in spurring development is positive, but it has also been seen as asymmetric. While it has the potential to be the great equalizer and democratizer, those who have been left outside its purview, or who fail to harness its potential, are increasingly at risk of falling further behind.
p between those who benefit from digital technologies and those who
In response to increasing concerns about the “digital divide†– the ga do not – a growing number of technology initiatives have emerged over the past decade, realizing the potential of digital technologies to underserved community members.
The Digital Divide
The digital divide, however defined, is a stark divide and a challenge for development and technology
professionals. It is actually a manifestation of other underlying divides, spanning economic, social, geographic, gender, and other divides.
1 Attempting to address the digital divide as a cause instead of a symptom of other divides has led to many failures of ICT driven development projects. If we consider the digital divide, it can be at four levels: Awareness, Availability, Accessibility, and Affordability.
a. Awareness: relates to knowing what can be done with ICT; people must also be open to using ICT (attitudes)
b. Availability: ICT must be offered within reasonable proximity, with appropriate hardware/software
c. Accessibility: relates to the ability to use the ICT (spanning literacy, e-literacy, language, interfaces, etc.) d. Affordability: All ICT usage together should, ideally, be only a few percent of one’s income (under 10% maximum); this covers life-cycle costs (termed total costs of ownership—TCO), spanning hardware, software, connectivity, education, etc.
Reducing the divide requires improvements across all the dimensions of ICT (dubbed the 4C Framework: Computing, Connectivity, Content, and human Capacity.
a. Computing: Personal computers (PCs) are prohibitively expensive for most people, and shared access (e.g. schools, community centres or cybercafés) becomes inevitable. PCs today are very difficult to use, and even “experts†spend a lot of time maintaining their machines, worrying about upgrades, security, compatibility of hardware, etc. As a complementary (but not substitutive) technology, non-PC devices are an important option, e.g. mobile phones.
b. Connectivity: While mobile telephony is improving worldwide (witness in Africa it is now twice the number of landlines) it remains expensive, limited in rural areas, and poor at providing data connectivity. Many areas are now grappling with limited connected options, such as dial-up. Instead, broadband connectivity can be affordable, even in rural areas, with the right network and business models (detailed subsequently).
c. Content: Meaningful content is lacking in many languages, and most content is not locally relevant. Today’s systems tend to make people passive consumers of information, instead of enabling the generation of local information. In addition, rich content demands multimedia (useful to overcome literacy issues), which, in turn, requires broadband connectivity. d. Human Capacity: Users need to be aware, literate, and innovative to harness the power of ICT. They also should be empowered to use ICT, societally and governmentally. Of course, ICT usage does not occur in a vacuum, rather within social and cultural norms that also shape the divide. In addition, ICT usage is based on policy and business models, especially regulation. In the long run, ICT must provide value and be sustainable from both a user and a provider perspective. As the Markle Foundation’s Report on National Strategies of “ICT for Development†(2003) states, “Digital divides are not just the result of economic differences in access to technologies (Have’s vs. Have-Not’s), but also in cultural capacity and political will to apply these technologies for development impact (Do’s vs. Do- Not’s).â€
2 However, affordability is certainly a limiting factor, since we have seen that many people could access of some form of ICT but do not (e.g. mobile telephony’s footprint extends to over 80% of developing country populations, but the actual usage rates are much lower).
Access is a fundamental requirement. (Raul Tongia, Carnegie Mellon)
If the World Were a Village of 100 People
If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:
The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
51 would be male, 49 would be female
82 would be non-white; 18 white
67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian
80 would live in substandard housing
67 would be unable to read
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
33 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do
have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth; 1 near death
5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
33 would be receiving –and attempting to live on– only 3% of the income of “the villageâ€
ï¬ http://www.familycare.org/news/if_the_world.htm ICT appropriate to local needs and conditions
You certainly made me think.. Seventeen people send me the link to this.
Doesn’t mean that I am right. They just wanted me to see it.
Today, however, the popularity and pervasiveness visual and moving images in digital media produced by ubiquitous digital cameras, cell phone cams, webcams, streaming video, audio, etc., means that everyone knows if you’re a dog on My Space and elsewhere in the digital domain. How race and ethnicity intersected with post 9-ll political economies, and today’s online hate-speech pratices (direct and indirect)? What is the significance of race and ethnicity in digital youth and music cultures? Where do we stand on matters of universal access (class matters) and the racial and ethnic digital divide in the 21st century, especially in terms of digital media learning (DML) and youth?
Academic? Real knowledge of the content we teach?
But I digress….
Bonnie Bracey Sutton
I was taught to do these things when I grew up.
I came home from college during my freshman year and read in the newspaper that the school board voted the night before to eliminate school music programs. The vote was 9-0.
Two nights later I stood before the school board and got them to reverse their vote, 9-0 in favor of restoring the funding for music education. I then formed an organization, The Friends of Music, that advocated for music education in the town and sponsored student concerts (some at Senior Citizen housing) the week before school budget elections.
Best of all, the initial taste of political participation led me to attend several hundred school board meetings; learn a ton about life, education and politics; advocate on behalf of my beliefs and gain a unique insight into public school governance – all by my early 20s.
I’m not at all sure that information is sacred. I know that participation is and that knowledge is a consequence of experience – of doing. Democracy is dependent on actions, not just information.
Here is deep….
Educating Responsible Citizens in the Information Society
Gary Marchionini
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Introduction
The recent decades have witnessed repeated elaborations on the trend towards an information society. From the early efforts of visionaries such as H.G. Wells (World Brain), Vannevar Bush (Memex) to more recent acclamation of the information society arrival by authors such as Daniel Bell (post-industrial society) and John Naisbitt (Megatrends), the popular culture has increasingly accepted that the industrialized world is being transformed into a knowledge-based world. The proliferation of electronic information technologies for computation and communication has accelerated this transformation in the workplace and more deliberately in the school. As with any social change, there are conflicting goals, perceptions, and developments associated with emphasis on abstractions such as information rather than on traditional tangibility’s such as the production of food and material goods.
On the one hand, the promises of the information society include increased productivity, increased collaboration and participatory democracy, and improved health and quality of life. These promises are based upon:
* rapid and comprehensive access to information (e.g., online resources, personal and corporate monitoring and transaction logging),
* new storage and organization tools and techniques (e.g., disk arrays & optical discs; powerful indexing techniques and interoperable indexes),
* powerful analytical tools (e.g., spreadsheets and statistical packages; textual parsers for spelling, grammar, and pattern feedback; data mining procedures), and
* global communications (e.g., universal email, teleconferencing, chat rooms, MUDs/MOOS.
On the other hand, our present experience with the information society has also brought a host of new challenges to productivity, democracy, and quality of life. These challenges include:
* information overload and multi-tasking stresses (both volume and complexity of information flow; growing expectations for concurrent processes such as cell phone business conversations in traffic);
* various inequities (access to hardware, software, and repositories; educational opportunities);
* disorientation, distraction, and addiction (lost in hyperspace and lack of task closure in electronic environments, off-task seductions during work and learning, couch potatoes and web surfer addicts);
* privacy and security (especially health and legal information, viruses and electronic crime); and
* social control (ubiquitous broadcasting with no backchannels, naming authorities).
These conflicting but interrelated elements of an information society juxtapose the fundamental limits of human attention with the exponentially expanding volume of information. Our human limitations of 86,400 seconds in our day is strictly fixed, and our limited bandwidths for reading (200-300 words per minute), speaking/listening (120 words per minute), visual recognition (50-300 milliseconds), and cognitive cycling (70-100 milliseconds) have not changed dramatically in the course of recorded history . On the other hand, Moore’s Law (computing power doubles every 18 months) continues to apply, the number of Internet packets sent each day continues to increase dramatically (Cerf estimated that there were 3 million domains, 45 million hosts, 240 IP countries, and 100 million users of the Internet in July 1998, there were 1.5 million web sites and 350 million web pages early in 1998, he also noted 200 terabytes per week are exchanged on the MCI Internet backbone alone), and governments and institutions generate increasing volumes of information (single projects such as the Earth Observing System promise to generate a terabyte of raw data per day). In industry, continuing education demands huge investments (e.g., technology and pharmaceutical companies offer thousands of courses and seminars per year for employees who must keep up with latest products). Clearly, the information society requires citizens to be life-long, self-directed learners with filtering skills and tools perhaps even more powerful than finding skills and tools. The confluence of these issues has led some to advocate information literacy as a basic skill that must be addressed in the formal learning environments at all levels. The purpose of this paper is to differentiate and illustrate three important concepts central to responsible citizenship in the information society. First, information literacy is a lowest common denominator set of skills and concepts that all citizens must attain to be functionally competent. Second, information seeking is a basic human process that has always contributed to survival but takes on additional value in the information society. Developing students’ understanding of the information-seeking process is one key element of information literacy instruction. Third, information science is an emerging interdisciplinary field that aims to discovery new principles and invents new systems that advance the quality of life in the information society. Just as computer literacy and programming are strongly dependent on the field of computer science, information literacy and information seeking are dependent on the broader field of information science. Like any field of study, information science principles and practices will increasingly become embodied in curricula at all levels of education.
Information Literacy
Although there can be little doubt that people who work and live in developed countries will benefit from various information-specific skills, there are a variety of propositions on what those skills are and how they should best be developed. Some see information literacy as an extension of computer literacy, but more people are looking at what people do with the technology. This view that computer literacy is not enough for good management is represented in the current attention to knowledge management in industry and government. Drucker opined in a Wall Street Journal editorial (1992) that executives must become data literate—to know what to know about their job and how to find that knowledge.
Many in the library community see information literacy as an extension of bibliographic instruction, which has a rich tradition of research and practice. Breivik & Gee (1989) see information literacy as promoting good information consumers who understand how information resources are managed and manipulated. This tradition has yielded taxonomies of library skills (e.g., Jakobovits & Jakobovits, 1987), and evidence of the effectiveness of libraries and bibliographic instruction when it is tied to project goals (Mancall & Drott, 1983; Shoham & Getz, 1988). Others have investigated the cognitive strategies of information seekers of various ages in electronic environments (e.g., Marchionini, 1989; Neuman, 1993) to develop general models of information seeking. Recognizing that information seeking is embedded in larger tasks, researchers have developed models that encompass affective and other contextual attributes in addition to the cognitive aspects of information seeking. Kuhlthau (1997) has conducted longitudinal studies in the educational context and developed a staged model of the search process. Other work has offered comprehensive models of the roles that information plays in education (e.g., Eisenberg & Small, 1993).
A broader view of information literacy is advocated by Shapiro & Hughes (1996). They argue that information literacy is a liberal art that includes many factors beyond the technical skills promoted by computer literacy and bibliographic instruction traditions. They list seven types of literacy that in aggregate make up information literacy: tool literacy (traditional computer literacy), resource literacy (a major aspect of bibliographic instruction), socio-structural literacy (recognizing the contextual nature of information in group/institutional settings), research literacy (methods and tools), publishing literacy (writing, producing content), emerging technology literacy (adaptability, life-long learning), and critical literacy (evaluate information and information technologies). These literacies map well onto the concepts, principles, and processes central to the developing field of information science. Marchionini (1995, p. 12) argues that people develop personal information infrastructures that are composed of mental models for knowledge domains, search systems, and past information-seeking events; general cognitive skills and specific information-seeking skills; attitudes and mental control mechanisms; and material resources such as time, money, equipment, and physical documents. Our personal information infrastructures are applied to information problems in an array of contexts and continue to evolve as a result of our struggles with and conquests of these problems. The development of our personal information infrastructure is roughly equivalent to our level of information literacy. Thus, information literacy is best considered to be a continuum of skills, concepts, attitudes, and experiences related to information access, understanding, evaluation, communication, application, creation, and value (see sidebar).
Regardless of how information literacy is defined, the educational community has begun to grapple with how best to incorporate relevant principles and skills into an already over-crowded curriculum. Marchionini & Maurer (1995) have argued that as information resources and technologies are integrated in digital libraries, we will see a confluence of formal (K-12 and tertiary), professional (inservice), and informal (incidental, self-directed) learning. Formal instructional settings that recognize this trend will provide problem-centered, guided exploration, collaborative learning experiences for students, and will foster collaborations among teachers, parents, media specialists, and students beyond the classroom walls. Christel and Pendyala (1996), Marchionini et al, (1997), Soloway & Norris (1998), and Taylor, (1996) provide reports of digital libraries created for use in schools. Information industry companies that recognize this trend will provide rich, alternative interfaces to their products and services, and build help and context-sensitive guidance into their products that not only allow users to solve their information problems but also consciously build their personal information instrastructures to improve future performance (i.e., learn).
When people tell me to do second life.. I laugh. I am not against it, I just
have my plate full. I am doing Supercomputing ( HPC) see
Try http://www.tryscience.org/grid/home.html,
There is also Teragrid. It is deep. http://www.teragrid.org
There are still people across the digital divide who get the media beamed at them.
We must not forget that the school, community center or learning place is the only access for lots of people so they don’t have the rich resources that you speak of. We are all working hard to get that for them. Now digital divide is called broadening participation. Just another name. Same problem. Because we have an international audience we should remember this.
From time to time someone invents a product or develops a practice
which has had an unforeseen and massive impact on society. The printing press, created by Johann Gutenberg approximately five and one half centuries ago, was such an invention.
“Who would have predicted that a press initially devoted to publishing the Bible and other religious texts would someday be seen as one of the forces undermining church authority? Who would have imagined that books, then owned by few and treasured as symbols of wealth and power would someday be accessible to nearly everyone? And who could have foreseen a system of public schools organized primarily for the purpose of teaching children to read and to help them absorb the knowledge books contain?â€
“The results of the printing press and all of its modern successors are so much a part of our lives, it is difficult to imagine how one could organize instruction without textbooks and various assorted readings. For teachers and students alike, learning at all levels of education has been primarily a process of reading what experts have written, discussing what has been read and listening to teachers explain or expand upon textbooks. In most courses schooling has become a process for understanding, retaining and reporting what is found on the printed page.â€
Through technology we are able to break down the walls of the traditional classroom to build a global community facilitating cultural understanding and overcoming differences of language, custom and religion.
But there are those who are digitally deficit and who cannot access, download or use the information you talk about. Their access is restricted.
Raul Tongia of Carnegie Mellon says this.
The digital divide, however defined, is a stark divide and a challenge for development and technology
professionals. It is actually a manifestation of other underlying divides, spanning economic, social, geographic, gender, and other divides.
1 Attempting to address the digital divide as a cause instead of a symptom of other divides has led to many failures of ICT driven development projects. If we consider the digital divide, it can be at four levels: Awareness, Availability, Accessibility, and Affordability.
a. Awareness: relates to knowing what can be done with ICT; people must also be open to using ICT (attitudes)
b. Availability: ICT must be offered within reasonable proximity, with appropriate hardware/software
c. Accessibility: relates to the ability to use the ICT (spanning literacy, e-literacy, language, interfaces, etc.) d. Affordability: All ICT usage together should, ideally, be only a few percent of one’s income (under 10% maximum); this covers life-cycle costs (termed total costs of ownership—TCO), spanning hardware, software, connectivity, education, etc.
Reducing the divide requires improvements across all the dimensions of ICT (dubbed the 4C Framework: Computing, Connectivity, Content, and human Capacity.
a. Computing: Personal computers (PCs) are prohibitively expensive for most people, and shared access (e.g. schools, community centres or cybercafés) becomes inevitable. PCs today are very difficult to use, and even “experts†spend a lot of time maintaining their machines, worrying about upgrades, security, compatibility of hardware, etc. As a complementary (but not substitutive) technology, non-PC devices are an important option, e.g. mobile phones.
b. Connectivity: While mobile telephony is improving worldwide (witness in Africa it is now twice the number of landlines) it remains expensive, limited in rural areas, and poor at providing data connectivity. Many areas are now grappling with limited connected options, such as dial-up. Instead, broadband connectivity can be affordable, even in rural areas, with the right network and business models (detailed subsequently).
c. Content: Meaningful content is lacking in many languages, and most content is not locally relevant. Today’s systems tend to make people passive consumers of information, instead of enabling the generation of local information. In addition, rich content demands multimedia (useful to overcome literacy issues), which, in turn, requires broadband connectivity. d. Human Capacity: Users need to be aware, literate, and innovative to harness the power of ICT. They also should be empowered to use ICT, societally and governmentally. Of course, ICT usage does not occur in a vacuum, rather within social and cultural norms that also shape the divide. In addition, ICT usage is based on policy and business models, especially regulation. In the long run, ICT must provide value and be sustainable from both a user and a provider perspective. As the Markle Foundation’s Report on National Strategies of “ICT for Development†(2003) states, “Digital divides are not just the result of economic differences in access to technologies (Have’s vs. Have-Not’s), but also in cultural capacity and political will to apply these technologies for development impact (Do’s vs. Do- Not’s).â€
2 However, affordability is certainly a limiting factor, since we have seen that many people could access of some form of ICT but do not (e.g. mobile telephony’s footprint extends to over 80% of developing country populations, but the actual usage rates are much lower).
Access is a fundamental requirement.
If the World Were a Village of 100 People
If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:
The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
51 would be male, 49 would be female
82 would be non-white; 18 white
67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian
80 would live in substandard housing
67 would be unable to read
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
33 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do
have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth; 1 near death
5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
33 would be receiving –and attempting to live on– only 3% of the income of “the villageâ€
http://www.familycare.org/news/if_the_world.htm ICT appropriate to local needs and conditions
Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Dave,
Did I miss it? I’m looking for the link to the presentation you made for residents in your town as I’m dealing with an issue in my town where I would love to impact change. Is it possible to share the link?
Karen
We ask the question a lot… what are the necessary literacy skills of the 21st Century? I think we watched how presentation skills were added to “basic” reading and writing skills, now we are seeing multi-media skills added, and as Dave points out, “basic” research skills probably need consideration. All to handle to ability to make sense of the “information” society. I think Gary Sager makes the most cogent point, though. Unless, or until, you are involved and actively participate in the democratic process, you really don’t need much. Heck, you don’t really need to even read – TV will be happy to “give” you the news and information. However, as soon as you find a reason to participate, you also typcally find a need for more appropriate info (to your interest or issue) and you also find a need for greater literacy in order to be more successful with your interest or issue (just as Dave was in his town).
What we need and want will determine what we learn and use – just as it has since the beginning of time. Schools struggle because forced learning is never successful. So, what is “basic” literacy for the 21st Century? – The skills necessary to do what you want or need to do. Oh, and by the way, wwhen a human being wants or needs something, their brain has the ability to help them get it.