Digital Divide!

"It is one thing to have mobile phones...
and another thing to know how to use them."

- Villy Wang, BAYCAT

Last night I attended the first public event of Community Technology Network, "Digital Opportunities: Is Access a Game Changer?" in the Mission in San Francisco. I was drawn to the the question of how to close the digital divide, and how the Bay Area tech community perceives the issue. What I liked, is CTN is not focusing on the global digital divide, but on local access to the internet and digital literacy. To address this issue was a great panel that included:

Laura Efurd, Vice President and Chief Community Investment Officer of Zero Divide,
Pankaj Kedia, Director of Global Ecosytem Programs for Mobile Internet at Intel
Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep and founder of Craigslist
Villy Wang, President & CEO of BAYCAT

The discussion was moderated by Kami Griffiths, Executive Director of CTN and Training and Outreach Manager at TechSoup. Here's a snapshot of what I learned:

Federal Stimulus Money

The Director of Technology for the City of San Francisco, publicized that SF was the recipient of $8 million of stimulus funds to support seniors, youth and the disabled to gain access to broad band internet networks. Laura Efurd explained it is part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, BTop Grant, $7.2 billion from the federal stimulus funds for digital access, of which $350 million is focused on technological adoption. While the stimulus money is here over the next 2-3 years there will be well resourced efforts to get more people on-line, but once the federal money runs dry there is still going to be a need to help marginalized communities gain access. I wonder how much of that stimulus money is aimed at supporting internet access in schools?

Smart Phones

Pankaj Kedia from Intel was interesting. He has a very positivist perspective on the benign impact of technology. He marveled at the cost diminishing cost of access to computers and gushed over the penetration of mobile phones to nearly every market on the globe. In India, a nation of 1.2 billion people, he remarked how 1 out of 13 have access to a PC and 1 out of 15 have access to the internet. There are 350 million toilets in India, and now 600 million cell phones. 1 out of 2 people in India has a cell phone, and I guess sanitation is a problem. Personally, I think sanitation is more important than cell phone access, but I assume people are sharing. A true technologist, he described the revolution in computer science that has put a computer on every desk and now a computer into every hand. In five years he says a PC will be as smart as the human brain, and in ten years a cell phone as smart as you. What will happen when a computer or a phone is as smart as, or smarter than you?

Human Capacity

I appreciate that most of the conversation was about how to build the human capacity of Bay Area residents. Villy Wang stressed that it is one thing to have mobile phones, and another thing to know how to use them. Her focus at BAYCAT is to give the Bayview community a voice in the new digital landscape. Her organizations focuses on educating, empowering, employing, and "entertaining" youth. Kids may be turned off to formal schooling, or may have financial or family stresses that bring them down. There are so many ways to get caught up in the streets. But if young people can begin to tell their stories, and learn digital skills like film editing, animation, and music production it can be a connection to get them back on track. She stressed that for kids challenged by the current system, especially kids with disabilities, they are really going to be opened up with access to technology. She encouraged all of us to push our envelopes beyond our immediate circles, to reach out to communities we are not a part of and support their efforts by consuming their media. I like the message!

Digital Divide

Craig Newman has become a consumer advocate and democratic philanthropist on the web. He is supporting a bunch of startups, and his basic effort is to give people access to technolgy so they can find a job. He sees the future as wireless broadband, smartphones and tablets. He admitted that we are always going to have a digital divide, because we have such inequitities in society. Kids who grow up with laptops and access to the internet at home, perhaps parents who work in the IT field, and all of the other experiential advantages that come with an upper middle class lifestyle are always going to be ahead of kids who connect with a school or community center computer a few hours a week.


There are plenty of kids in East Oakland or the Bronx who don't have cell phones, and no computers at home. Our schools do not have functioning computers for every student, or the technology staff to maintain them. Educators are not trained well on how to integrate technology into the class. How many teachers do you know that use Skype, wikis, film production, or blogs to produce knowledge and connect with a wider world? The world is changing and the challenge remains the same, to build the human capacity of developing communities, at home and abroad, so more people can live healthy and socially connected lives. It's not about the tool, but the capacity to do something useful with the tool for your family and community.


As access to the internet and digital literacy become more immersive experiences, essential to our professional lives and maintaining connections with our social networks, this divide has the potential to entrench winners and losers, slowing social mobility.

Competing With China!

Students From Blair International Baccalaureate H.S. in Pasadena with Beijing 181 students in a cultural exchange. Pasadena, CA January, 2008

The talk of U.S. exceptionalism is waning in the early hours of the 21st Century. Certain political stripes hold onto it dearly, the neo-cons launched two wars to defend it, but for most the sobering acknowledgement of a more competitive post-colonial, post-Cold War world are here. A G-8 dominated by the U.S. has been enlarged to a G-20 of more independently minded nation states. The backdrop to this story is that the world’s fastest growing developing economies, the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China are set to overtake the developed areas of the world (U.S., E.U. and Japan) by 2050.

GDP and profitability of Bric countries will overtake developed areas by 2050

Long-term GDP forecasts for Bric countries show that tomorrow's giants, China and India, seem set to take first and third place on a GDP basis by 2050 (with the US in second place), shifting the centre of gravity of the global economy.

The reaction from the front pages of the New York Times is a renewed emphasis on education reform. The results from Shanghai’s latest PISA exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, are intimidating for a nation like ours, which is struggling to engage its young people in formal education. Arne Duncan is calling it a “wake up call”, and other former government officials refer to this as a Sputnik moment.

The knowledge that our educational system is being outperformed in comparison to other developed economies is well known. Thomas Friedman in his Flat Earth rants is calling for a Teach For America West Point academy to train the best and the brightest to teach in our nation’s schools. He is echoing the refrain from the new generation of education reformers that since the early 1990’s have pushed for data driven reforms, teacher accountability, and school choice.

The challenge to educate all of America’s children to high standards is important enough to be the one of the few issues in contemporary politics that crosses political lines. Although it is anathema to ideologies from either side, Obama Democrats and a new breed of mayors are joining with hedge fund managers and Republican governors to embrace the market and implement innovation in an industry that has been resistant to change. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberger’s $100 million parachute of aid to the city of Newark is the most recent public example. Democrats for Education Reform and The Manhattan Institute are on the same side.

"Rather than expecting new funding from Washington or from the cash-strapped state government, Booker has turned to private foundations and charities for help in enacting his agenda." Steven Malanga, The Next Wave of Urban Reform: Mayors Cory Booker and Dave Bing fight to Save two of America’s Most Distressing Cities, City Journal

For the progressive educators who have worked tirelessly to make a bad system more humane, those committed to the Civil Rights agenda of making public education a true source of social mobility, pace of privatization in the system is scary. Stan Karp, from Rethinking Schools, sees the rush to fund unproven and un-scaleable innovations as dangerous to the public good. They have created an entire website to dispel the myths of the Michelle Rhee, Harlem Children Zone, and the No Excuse for Poverty model.

“The larger goal is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.” Stan Karp, Superhero School Reform Heading Your Way, November 29^th, 2010

"There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. Like the rest of us, they know that if we don’t fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye." Jonathan Alter, A Case of Senioritis, Newsweek, November 28th, 2010

The battle over education reform is big business! The Unions are big, the Gates Foundation is big, Rupert Murdock is big, but our children’s future is bigger! Fighting to hold onto the industrial model of education that has served our nation’s children so poorly does not make sense to me. Embracing innovation and redesigning the role of the educator and the learner for 21^st Century learning is paramount.

We need to be careful to have a real conversation about what this change is going to be and who is going to drive it. Private foundations are pushing the agenda, but who are they accountable to? Data driven reform is reshaping how we teach, but what are these exams really assessing? In the end, can we beat China at their own game?

A 259-page Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on the latest Pisa results notes that throughout its history, China has been organized around competitive examinations. “Schools work their students long hours every day, and the work weeks extend into the weekends,” it said.

Top Test Scores From China Stun Educators, New York Times, December 7th, 2010

According to many Middle class parents, probably not… http://www.racetonowhere.com/

Or can we develop an education system that is adaptable enough, supportive enough, and honest enough to do what we have never been able to do… connect our poorest citizens to the people and resource rich environments around them and stop viewing the competition of nation states as a zero sum game. A rising tide lifts all ships and the increasing prosperity of a developing world is not a threat, but a goal we should all responsibly work towards!

The End of Poverty!

"Currently the international-development community is having a love affair with the mobile phone…disseminating technology is easy; nurturing human capacity and human institutions that put it to good use is the crux."
- "Can Technology End Poverty" by Kentaro Toyama, Boston Review November/December 2010

I love the idea that technology can not only produce incredible gains of productivity and prosperity, but that with ubiquitous application it will eradicate extreme poverty and lead to global harmony... I just don't buy it! In Jeffrey Sachs' 2005 book, The End of Poverty, he devotes the first two chapters to painting A Global Family Portrait and The Spread of Economic Prosperity. In graphs and a brief overview he explains how over the past 200 years the world shifted from all regions supporting a relatively equal living standard, to incredible inequities of global winners and losers. The industrial revolution lead to the United States enjoying a twenty-five fold increase in living standards between 1820-1998 (from $1,200 to $30,000), while sub-sahara Africa has increased three fold (from $400 to $1,300). His thesis simplistically stated is,

"I believe the single most important reason why prosperity spread, and why it continues to spread, is the transmission of technologies and the ideas underlying them... The beauty of ideas is that they can be used over and over again, without ever being depleted." (41)

This belief in the benign power of modern technology is fueling a global movement for self-organized learning. The concept children can teach themselves using the web is a powerful idea that is being taken seriously for both the developing world and here in the U.S.

My attention has been peeked recently by University for the People, "the world’s first tuition free online academic institution dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education." A non-profit founded in 2009, they currently have 500 students from over 100 countries. The idea is pretty incredible, to offer people anywhere in the world access to a free education, as long as they have an internet connection, English fluency, and are self-motivated.

Professor Sugata Mitra from Newcastle University, is in the process of developing (SOLE), a Self Organized Learning Environment, based on his research dropping technology off in India, Cambodia and other parts of the developing world. He's the guy who in 1999 put a computer terminal in a Dehli slum and recorded the effect. His belief is that young people can learn to solve problems collaboratively without direct instruction or facilitation from adults. A professor at Newcastle University in England he is sure to grow in popularity as technological autonomy is the zeitgeist.

The democratic possibilities of learning technology is most popularly championed by One Laptop Per Child. Through the development of a cheap, durable portable computer, the XO, it has reached over 1.85 million people around the world. The educational impact and feasibility of programs such as this are attempting to reach the over 1 billion children without access to universal primary education.

You combine these ITC4D, Information and Communications Technology for Development, innovations with the revolution taking place in the education market here in the U.S., and you see just how disruptive the impact of digital learning is on our education system.

The most public example of this movement here in the U.S. is Chancellor Klein's decision to leave the New York City Department of Education to work for Rupert Murdock's new educational technology division. Murdock in one fell swoop bought influence into the nation's largest public school system with 1.1 million students. Klein had mixed success with the Small School movement and increasing efficiency with data driven report cards, but his most lasting legacy may be his investment in the School of One model. Together with the $360 million purchase of 90% of Wireless Generation, the tech platform behind the city's Aris school data port, Murdock is poised to be an immediate player in the personalized online learning revolution.

This rose colored world of autonomous learning is attractive. It promises to close the digital divide and offer learning anytime, anywhere... a transformation of learning through the proliferation of hardware and its ubiquitous application. Kentaro Toyama, from the University of Berkeley's School of Information, critiques this assessment in a forum on Can Technology End Poverty for the Boston Review. I liked it because it questions the frenzy to embrace technological innovations. Here's what I see missing in this debate on the glorification of technology to promote universal education:

The Social Context of Poverty

Kids with schools and access to technology choose not to pursue education! The U.S. has a 70% high school graduation rate and a 30% college graduation rate. For low income communities only 25% of those who start college graduate within six years. Why? It's not lack of access to information, but a lack of understanding of how to navigate the system and support systems to overcome obstacles along the way. Yes, kids love video games, you tube videos and texting their friends, but how many know how to translate their geeking out and entertainment into real value for others. Young people still need adults to role model positive behaviors, to provide a safe haven in an often dangerous indifferent world, and to inspire them to dream a bigger world. Our current factory model of education is broke, but automating the assembly line isn't the solution. Free the workers (ie. teachers) and products (ie. students) from the one size fits all approach, but you need to offer an alternative, more adaptable, and people rich learning environment to take its place.

The reason poor kids struggle with learning is because poverty is stressful and it delays intellectual development. Take a middle class or wealthy child at birth from the global elite and put them in the South Bronx, East Oakland, Southern Sudan, or New Dehli. The struggle to make ends meet, to be emotionally and physically ready to learn, and to understand how to apply knowledge to solving real world problems is not easy. Access to information alone will not solve the resource and experience gap which is at the heart of global inequity.

Content Knowledge & Human Networks

Content knowledge in isolation is not valuable. We learn best in community and for a social purpose. The grammar translation method used in most American high schools to teach foreign language is ineffective, but an immersion experience in a foreign country works. Why? Because relationships with native speakers, the innate desire to communicate, and real world applications of knowledge foster intrinsic motivation and deep learning. The social context of learning counts. Software programs that drill content or skills through games may be engaging, but unless you are connecting with native language speakers from around the world through Skype you are not reaching the potential of the technological tool. Technological tools are only as powerful as the human networks willing to connect with learners on the other side.

Credibility
The value of a college degree is not just a summation of the skills and content knowledge acquired through years of study, but the relationships and credibility a degree confers on the individual. Graduating from an Ivy League school puts you in contact with a certain social class which opens opportunities. Anya Kemenetz, in her book on higher education DIY U (Do It Yourself University) does a fine job describing how a university education became a part of the American dream, and how the proliferation of higher education has not had the intended effect. Private university tuition has skyrocketed, predatory for-profit colleges have loaded the poor with student debt they cannot default on, and public education has buckled under a dwindling tax base. Community college is not a true stepping stone to a B.A. degree and many public state schools like the U.C. system and S.U.N.Y. are raising fees and serving a more priviledged student population.

In order for virtual learning communities to be valuable and allow their graduates to find work and access in the real world these learning communities need to be validated. Our current higher education system uses high costs and selectivity to develop brand scarsity. In a world where a college degree is free and open to everyone, how are employers going to evaluate new hires. What is the value of a college degree when everyone has one? How can virtual learners translate their learning communities into strong social networks that translate into social capital and mobility? In a world where college grads are already driving taxis and waiting tables, what will we do with millions more?

Conclusion:
I know that we are looking at a watershed moment in education, where the rules of the game are about to change. Today we are told that teacher quality is the most important factor in student achievement and at the same time that the internet will do the teaching for us. It cannot be both. We are building the technological platforms, but are we building the human capital to make them work?