The Digital Divide

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The Digital Divide

• D. A. Swayne

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2 Components

• Internally
• Internationally

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Internally

• Social agencies know about this
• Many proactive efforts
• Major feature of adult education and retraining
• Libraries

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Internationally

• Much more problematic
• Many people have never used a telephone
• Dispersal into villages, remoteness
• Downloads the digital divide
• Australia works (extreme sparsity, core of East /
  South-East and far West)
• Satellite links, drops, prpoblem of 2-way
  communication

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Issues

• Westernization
• Loss of linguistic diversity (can be enhanced)
• Need for power, need for basics before
  introduction of ICT (information and computer
  technology).

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Westernization

• Has good and bad features
• eg. Malaysia and Indonesia mandated that all
  university instruction be in Bahasa Indonesia.
  Result, TOEFL and other scores to go to
  University in US, Canada, Europe, etc. tanked.
  Short term pain for long term gain?

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Diversity

• Diversity can be promoted, but it is not easy.
  Examples of hagving to have custom fonts, ie.
  Unicode not necessarily well supported on
  internet.
• Legacy languages (eg. tlingit in Western
  Canada). Problem - Canada has many first nation
  languages, for some only a dozen words are left
  (85 year old whose grandmotner was last apeaker
  kind of thing

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Infrastructure

• Power
• notebook style
• Weather
• heat, etc.
• Accessibility
• cost of infrastructure
• Time availability
• how many hours left after basic workday?

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Other

• Keeping up with technology change, computer
  speeds, etc
• Students asked to complete these notes, by group
  remind them.

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Prerequisite to...

• E-voting
• e-commerce, etc.

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Other issues

• ??