By Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
Distance learning has been confronting the problem of digital divides for some time now, but the discussion is heating up again as mobile learning and new techniques seem to offer new hope of transcending technological barriers. It would be great to have a “digital divide-free” approach to providing access to education. The question is, how is the best way to do it? Here are a few thoughts, with some personal experience thrown in.
An experience I had in Mozambique a few years ago illustrates how trying to get an online education or just being a part of the “wired” world can seem like chasing an airplane down a runway. I feel as though I'm trying to hitch a ride on the tail before the plane achieves “wheels up” and I’m left behind forever.
It was 2003, and I was helping a local Mozambican non-governmental organization design training and marketing materials so that smallholder farmers could join together to create economical storage, processing, and transportation services for their agricultural products. My materials had to utilize graphic art because many of the farmers could not read Portuguese, and there were numerous local languages. Most of the farmers I met were at the barest of subsistence level, and had very few tools or equipment. I was staying in the town of Chimoio, which was on the “Beira Corridor” from Matare, Zimbabwe to Beira, which was on the coast of the Indian Ocean. Many of the farmers brought their bananas, manioc, yams, okra, and other products to the town to sell them. I was on vacation, but I needed to have access to the Internet, since I was teaching an online course. As a result, I experienced a few absolutely surreal moments as I sat in an air-conditioned Internet club operated by the national telecom company, and gazed out the barred window on a mud road, and looked across to mud huts with thatched roofs where people lived without electricity, running water, or sanitary services.
Actually, it was not the first time I had witnessed the ironies of uneven technological advances. There was something so utterly unjust about the way the gifts of technology seem to be distributed that it is hard to know where to begin. My sense has been that technology can be used to make the world a better place and to help individuals who do not live near a major library or city center obtain a good education that will help their families have a better life.
But, in Paraguay, Costa Rica, Mexico, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Bolivia, South Africa, Ecuador, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Venezuela, Fiji, and Mozambique, I would sit comfortably in a climate-controlled location sipping on bottled water or freshly prepared coffee in an insulated “wired” bubble while children sold lottery tickets on the street, AIDS orphans covered themselves with newspapers to keep warm at night, children blinded by parasites in the river begged blonde, sunburned tourists (me) for money, men proposed green-card marriage, or tried to sell me contraband, mothers tended to their children with malaria, and pregnant women drank parasite-laden water directly from a half-dry lake. They knew they should boil their water, but firewood was expensive and as it was, they ate only once every two days.
Frankly, I started to wonder what the wired world is really accomplishing, particularly since at every turn, our colleges and universities insist on getting the latest, most complicated software to deliver educational content, and they insist that students have the latest, most expensive computer, a high-speed connection, and lots of peripherals.
I would watch the young men and women who paid to send messages through a computer at an Internet café. Chances are, they lived in a home with intermittent electricity, no phone line, and limited water. They invariably owned cell phones and were able to make money by providing services however and wherever they could.
It seemed to me that if we could follow the lead of some of the health care providers in India, for example, and start utilizing mobile devices (smartphones, etc.) for basic training, and then making content easy to obtain, save, and print, then hybrid forms of learning, and group study could emerge.
Informally, group study and Internet sharing is most certainly happening. Also, lean and mean mobile learning methods are being tried, but sadly enough, there are few colleges and universities who are willing to partner in meaningful ways with low-income and low-access groups, wherever they are. They’re running down the runway, trying to catch that plane before it takes off, but unless the plane has unexpected mechanical problems, they’re not going to get there.
I can tell you that the situation I witnessed in numerous countries around the world is not at all unusual. It happens here in the United States, despite the late 1990s initiatives to bridge the digital divide.
Here in the U.S., sometime in the 1990s when colleges and universities started to seriously investigate online learning, what animated students and institutions alike was the idea that one could use the new information technologies to bridge the barriers that had previously blocked the poor, the working, the deployed, the rurally isolated, the special-needs individuals from getting a college education. All one needed, it seemed, was a phone line and a computer with a 14.4 kps modem.
Accessing online courses via a dial-up connection worked for awhile. In fact, many did not even have to sign up for one of the early plans from Prodigy, Compuserve, or AOL. They could dial into their university’s modem pool and have access via their telephone lines.
Needless to say, this was a model doomed to almost instant obsolescence as technology continued to metamorphose and people demanded more functionality of their websites. Without robust Internet service providers and fast, reliable phone lines, DSL, T1, T3, or high-speed modems, it was impossible for individuals and businesses to access the Internet.
In 1998, the U.S. government issued a report on how some communities were being left behind, and were “falling through the net” http://www.ed.gov/Technology/digdiv.html. The report led to increasing awareness and it encouraged legislators to fund initiatives to bridge the gap and close what were thought of as holes in the net. As in the case of almost all technology, adoption is not uniform and some communities will be technology leaders, while others may be skipped almost altogether. The gap between the “wired” communities and those who did not have any kind of access came to be known as the “digital divide.”
When high-speed internet became almost ubiquitous in urban centers, and then wifi became available in other communities and high-trafficked areas such as airport terminals and upscale coffee bars (!), even communities that had invested in Internet infrastructure were left behind again.
Worldwide, the digital divide was very pronounced. While Internet cafes and clubs could be found in any major urban center, the lack of phone lines, reliable electricity, and reasonably priced up-to-date computers made online access a privilege of city dwellers.
In 1997, thanks to satellite connections, I was able to participate in a live web conference with the CCPA (Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano) in Asuncion, Paraguay from my office at the University of Oklahoma. We were able to launch an online education program, even though most individuals had at best slow dial-up connections. This was only possible because the websites we had developed were very basic. We optimized graphics and we did not have any dynamic web elements.
Ironically, as mentioned before, online education providers “improved” their software and products by making them more dynamic, with more java, javascript, flash, and graphics. Suddenly, it became impossible to load the pages. There was an impassible “second generation digital divide” that threatened to isolate people, communities, and countries yet again.
Distance education has always been plagued by the presence of a “technology divide,” where the technological “have’s” have been able to take advantage of new, high-quality educational programs, while the “have not’s” have struggled to make do with inadequate materials and access.
Again, I’d like to point out that colleges and universities can partner in mutually beneficial ways. They generally don’t. The “haves” of the world tend to wait for a foundation to give them a chunk of money to do so, and as soon as the money runs out, they disappear into the wired equivalent of a gated community.
Sixty years ago, if you did not live near a library, have access to expensive hifi record-players, a movie theater, radio, or television, there was a chance that you would not be able to listen to music, watch films, or listen to the correct pronunciation of the language you were learning. You would have to read texts, and perhaps books of photographs. If you did not have a qualified tutor or guide, you would struggle on your own to make sense of math, chemistry, physics, or other programs.
Thirty years ago, if you did not own a television, or have access to the public educational television station that broadcast your college course, you would have to be satisfied with a correspondence course that consisted of reading a text and then taking a test or sending in papers. Study took place in isolation unless you happened to have friends or family who were taking the class with you. If you paid for an expensive course with additional resources, you might be able to listen to cassette tapes of lectures, or listen to recordings. You could also purchase slides or 8 mm films, but only if you owned a slide projector and a movie projector. It could be possible to transcend the limitations of a correspondence course done in isolation, but only if you had the latest technology.
Not surprisingly, professors teaching at traditional face-to-face institutions considered correspondence courses to be inferior educational experiences, despite the fact that it was very likely that the students they interacted with spent 5 or 6 times as much time studying and thinking about their lessons than the traditional on-campus student. Despite the efforts of the Open University in the U.K. and “low residency” programs in U.S. colleges to demonstrate that students could produce high quality academic writing and intellectual inquiry after studying via correspondence courses, the stigma persisted. Educational films, tapes, and other resources helped bridge the gap, with technology coming more in the fore as “talk back television” and conference calling added a dynamic element. Low residency programs required students to come to campus and to stay for weeks at a time to participate in intensive face-to-face seminars.
The stigma will never be lifted until the haves work side by side with the have-nots. The only strategy that will work is to bring the groups together by means of appropriate technology, which is to say, technology that is affordable, easy to use, and which encourages learners to discuss things and to work with other learners. As long as some professors stay in their wired ivory towers, and students are comprised only of the technological “haves,” our fate seems pretty clear. We will have extreme social inequality, and very few ways to bridge the gap.
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