Digital Divides
Technologies, especially the Internet have become the integral part of our daily lives. In fact, nowadays it is hard to find a company or an organization that can operate without any form of technology.
Schools around the world are integrating more and more educational technologies to enhance learning outcomes. In contrast to the expectation that the growing ubiquity and the rapid decrease in price of technology would mitigate the digital divide which refers to the gap between the underrepresented members of society who have limited or no access to technology and the more privileged population who have access to technology, reports show that the digital divide is still expanding at an alarming rate.
In the article, Kang (2016) discussed how the lack of Internet access impede K-12 students’ learning in the context that more instructional materials and activities are moving from traditional classroom to online. Some solutions that local governments, communities, and schools are using to tackle the issue presented in the article are very interesting to me.
Obviously, the easiest solution anyone can think of is getting access from public libraries and fast-food restaurants. However, this solution seems not to work for elementary students as it is hard for them to go out in the late evening to do their homework. Alternatively, the school buses in Coachella, California and Huntsville, Alabama equipped with free WIFI are driven to residential neighborhoods and parked overnight to bring Internet access to students.
Although the author did not mention the effectiveness of this solution, I personally think it is a great idea as setting up WIFI hot spots on the current school buses is not too complicated and does not require a huge initial investment on building the network infrastructure. In addition, the mobility of this solution is worth discussing. The buses can always be driven to different neighborhoods where they are needed, it means the resources would be utilized in a more efficient way. Though this solution is no doubt not sustainable and it cannot solve the issue completely, it can be implemented easily and quickly to provide temporary access for students while a better solution is considered and planned.
In some remote and rural parts of my country where schools do not even have the library, non-profit and charitable organizations have been bringing the mobile library on the trucks to students there for a long time. It is obvious that there must be a limit on the number of books that those trucks can carry and there might be a chance that the books are not what students want to read. Therefore, I think rather than bringing printed books, they can set up the WIFI hotspot on their trucks and bring Chromebooks and e-reading devices so that the students can access to online libraries and freely choose the books that they want. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the Internet access provided by the trucks benefits not only students but the entire community of those remote areas as well.
The article did not describe specific technology to provide WIFI access on the school bus, so I guess the hotspot relies on cellphone wireless network to access to the Internet. When the bus commuting to the distant or mountainous areas where the phone service is not available, what could the possible alternative solution be?
Reference:
Kang, C. (2016). Bridging a digital divide that leaves schoolchildren behind. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/technology/fcc-internet-access-school.html
