Those of you who know me, know the high regard that I hold for educators who are working in state departments of education and in the federal Department of Ed. They are there because they are good, they are leaders, they can, and they often work miracles under relentless resistance. But sometimes…
I’m sitting in the airport checking e-mail and just read a forward from Brenda, a link to an article from WRAL, one of the Raleigh TV stations. It talks about digital divide and how white children are still far more likely have access to information and communication technologies than minorities. Then I saw something in the report that caused me to question.
So I went to the National Center or Education Statistics, the reported source of the information and found a study, Computer and Internet Use by Students in 2003. The report is dated September 5, 2006.
Now I may be getting this wrong and may be speaking unfairly, but it seems to me that anything dealing with technology, and its application, that is six years old, should be open to questioning. I suspect that this is even more true when we are examining how youngsters are using technology. How many members were there of MySpace in 2003?
Am I being unfair? Or does this published report indicate that people, even in the U.S. Department of Education really don’t get what these technologies mean, the central role that they play in our childrens’ information experience, the pathway that it represents to their future? I’m not finding fault with the report itself. But I don’t think that the problem of digital divide is going to be solved, while the government seems to think so little of technology access that they believe that three-year old data is sufficient for a 2006 report.
While I can understand your “raised eyebrows” at the report’s lack of currency, this could be more the result of bureaucratic layers than a skewed view of the importance of technology access. Witness the U. S. DOE booth at NECC in July, where a large kiosk displayed, in cartoon-style illustrations, drawings of the DOE’s vision of “School 2.0.” Attendees were invited to attach Post-it Notes, available at the kiosk, with their comments and suggestions. They were also encouraged to complete an online survey at the booth.
I was so stunned at the extent of their vision that I took a couple of pictures with my Palm Treo and posted them to Splashblog. They are viewable at http://www.splashblog.com/janep/?albumid=13092
You are not being unfair. This is the information age. If the data isn’t from this year, it is not reliable, and should not be cited.
Moreover, a report about the internet that cites 3 year old data, or 6 year old data, is by that very itself suspect, because it shows that it does not understand the domain it is discussing.
The authors are using pre-internet methodologies, which means that not only are their figures dated, they are skewed by being fed through a pre-internet lens of interpretation. They should therefore not be considered reliable.
I’ve done a lot of work with NCES reports and data. This is their normal time lag. They take a lot of time to collect, clean up, analyze, and report their data because they almost always follow very rigorous research protocols and because their data is so large-scale. This data is probably very accurate, just not very timely. However, it’s the best data we have at the national scale. Welcome to the feds!
I am a teacher at a Title 1 school and have many friends who work in Title 1 schools. Things haven’t changed much since 2003 with access and quality of access. The Digital Divide still exist.
Mechelle,
I am certainly not suggesting that the Digital Divide is behind us. If anything, because of developments during the past three years, it is more critical than ever that we assure that everyone has convenient access to digital, networked information. It is a national problem that I think needs to be addressed at the national level.
I am less than confident, however, perhaps unfairly so, in a national government that has so little comprehension of this new information landscape, inhabited by so many of our children, that they would rely on three year old data.