Addressing the Digital Divide

Module 6
Addressing the Digital Divide

“William Gibson, the man who invented the term ‘cyberspace’, has said, ‘The future arrived. It just wasn’t equally distributed’” (Soloway, n.d.) As a leader in educational technology, my response to this quote is to help make emerging technologies valuable to others by keeping a global perspective in mind and trying to understand different cultures well enough to help people incorporate new ideas about technological access into their culture (Thornburg, 2009). Having only ever lived in the United States of America, I have an enormous learning curve to begin understanding different cultures in other areas of the world. However, I am aware of the inequities and digital divide right here in the United States among different geographic areas of the country, as well as dramatic differences within a single town. I want to understand what technologies are appropriate and realistic in a particular culture while maintaining gender, cultural, and socioeconomic sensitivity.

The first and most important step in addressing these differences in technological access is financial support and education. According to Dr. Soloway, (n.d.) the way to address the issue of leveling the playing field and eliminating the digital divide is to put a cell phone with Internet access in the entire community’s hands for everyone to communicate with each other and to create a climate of acceptance in which people not only have dreams but can actually experience these dreams as a reality in their lifetimes. I completely agree that the cell phone is the future emerging technology globally and it is the single technology device that can close the digital divide in a way no other technology can.

References:

Soloway, E. (n.d.) The digital divide: leveling the playing field [Podcast]. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/courses/14936/CRS-WUEDUC8812-3730077/EDUC_8848_PK_Transcript.pdf

Thornburg, D. (2009). Diversity and Globalism. Laureate Education, Inc. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=4199715&Survey=1&47=5828341&ClientNodeID=984645&coursenav=1&bhcp=1