Digital Divide

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Ignore the Potential of Mobile Learning, Risk Widening the Digital Divide

July 22, 2011 | 11:48 AM | By

The Young and the Digital

From S. Craig Watkins’ blog The Young and The Digital. In the following post, Watkins talks about how he’s witnessing these trends in his field work.

By S. Craig Watkins

During a recent research related visit to New York City I decided to take a stroll down 125th Street in Harlem.  Among the assortment of shops and vendors on the famous stretch that is home to the legendary Apollo Theater were an abundance of mobile phone providers.  Even a few of the street vendors offered mobile phone accessories such as cases, covers, and car adaptors. It struck me that while you could easily purchase a mobile phone on 125th Street you could not purchase a desktop or laptop computer.  Not that long ago the assumption that African Americans were a viable market for mobile phones did not exist.

Is it possible that mobile devices are reproducing some of America’s most enduring inequalities?

As far back as 2007 data started to emerge that suggested that black and Latino households were much more likely to go online via a mobile phone than a desktop or laptop computer.  We are also learning that a surging number of poor households are choosing to go with a mobile phone over a landline, largely because they cannot afford both. My fieldwork is consistently suggesting that the future of black and Latinos digital lives are linked, for better or worse, to mobile devices. The growing appeal of the mobile phone among African Americans and Latinos has not gone unnoticed by the press.  In fact, several news outlets have even reported that mobile phones may be closing the digital divide.  Is this true? Is there any evidence, empirical or anecdotal, that mobile is closing the digital divide? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, digital media, digital-divide, Mobile Learning

What Exactly Can You Learn on a Mobile Phone?

June 24, 2011 | 2:28 PM | By

Lenny Gonzalez

A student at Napa New Tech High uses his mobile phone at school.

In my quest to understand how a mobile phone can be considered a learning tool, and whether it can actually help bridge the digital divide between low-income, at-risk kids and those with access to computers, I had an illuminating conversation with Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use in young people. Ito is co-author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, and has been studying the subject of how kids interact with mobile devices.

My conclusion: When it comes to the traditional definition of “learning” — studying a subject like chemistry or literature — mobile phones are not necessarily the best facilitators. Though kids are remarkably facile with phones — texting, researching, Facebooking, Tweeting — it’s hard to imagine anyone being able to focus on a complicated subject with any depth of thought using a four-inch device.

“Social connections are our primary platform for learning in everyday lives.”

The potential magic of the smart phone when it comes to learning lies in its ability to provide instant access to facts and the ability to collaborate with others, as well as provide a fun, mobile platform for educational games.

Take Project K-Nect, for example. The program is a social-media-based curriculum that combines project and collaborative learning with new media learning for 3,000 high schoolers in three states. An Algebra 1 curriculum has been distilled into mini apps that include instant messaging and blogging, assessment tools for teachers, supplemental activities, project-based learning components, problem sets, and cartoon animation. “Students [take] control of the learning process and create personalized learning communities,” said the founder Shawn Gross.

But even Gross doubts that for very high-risk students — such as those who are homeless or are attending school primarily for a free lunch — the technology-integrated math class is as beneficial. In those cases, there’s much more to contend with than academics, and a mobile-phone curriculum alone won’t change that.

I asked Ito to put some of these different pieces of the puzzle into perspective.

Q. Do you see any evidence of mobile phones being a legitimate way for low-income kids to learn?

Mimi Ito: It’s really too early to tell based on technology adoption trends. It’s more like a glimmer on the horizon. We’re pretty early on the research trajectory. We don’t know empirically exactly what’s happening. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, digital-divide, Mimi Ito, mobile, Mobile Learning, Project K-Nect

How Do We Address the Needs of Kids Without Mobile Access?

April 4, 2011 | 3:00 PM | By

Flickr:Shlala

The $64,000 question in education: Does access to mobile technology actually help close the achievement gap?

Bill Ferriter, a sixth-grade teacher in North Carolina, has been thinking about this issue, and writing about it on his blog, The Tempered Radical.

In this recent post, he addresses a question from one of his readers, who sites Ferriter’s source, about how to address the needs of the minority of kids who don‘t have mobile access?

“75% of students are good to go, but do you just leave the other 25% to “fin for themselves”, leave them out of the equation all together, or do you do something to supplement such as the school providing a temporary cell phone” the reader asks.

Here’s his response.

One of the stumbling blocks to almost every reform initiative in schools is our stubborn refusal to move forward until the conditions are perfect for change.

The result: Change never happens.

“If I can have kids work in groups of three—something that I do 9 days out of 10 anyway– I only need one student to have a cell phone with unlimited texting.”

Some of the leading thinkers on change in organizations argue that you have to take the first step somewhere. You can’t let perfection stand in the way of innovation.

For schools considering the use of cell phones, that means taking action and taking action now.

I don’t care if one out of 10 students in your school has a cell phone. That’s still one more device for learning than your teachers had before–and it is one more tool for learning that many schools don’t have to provide.

In most middle and high schools, though, the rates of cell phone penetration really are much higher.  To ignore the fact that 3 out of every 4 kids in our middle and high schools is bringing their own device to school is just plain crazy.

Think about it this way:  If you were a science teacher—which is what I teach—and I told you that I could instantly put 20 dictionaries, calculators, student responders and timers into a classroom of 30 students without costing a dime, you’d jump at it, right? If you were working in most classrooms, you would!

You see, the typical science classroom in most schools has one working computer, no calculators, no timers and about 15 antiquated dictionaries that are really hard to use. That’s a resource failure on the part of schools and it keeps teachers from being effective in their classrooms.

What’s worse–almost unforgivable in my opinion–is that it is a resource failure that can be resolved if our schools didn’t ban cell phones during the school day. Now as far as the nitty gritty details of equitable use go, the fact that the vast majority of kids with cell phones have unlimited texting plans is key.

“They can text Google for definitions and facts. They can text Poll Everywhere with responses to classroom questions so that I can gather formative assessment results. They can use timers for labs.”

What that means for me as a classroom teacher is that if I can have kids work in groups of three—something that I do 9 days out of 10 anyway–then I really only need one student to have a cell phone with unlimited texting. The odds of that are pretty high in most middle schools.

From there, groups can do anything.

They can text Google for definitions and facts. They can text Poll Everywhere with responses to classroom questions so that I can gather formative assessment results. They can use timers for labs.

And if I wanted every child to respond to individual questions, I’ll bet that the students with unlimited text plans—and their parents—would be more than happy to let student with no cell phones use theirs as long as I explained what we were doing and why it mattered. Who is going to argue about sharing a few extra texts when you have an unlimited plan?

I guess what I’m saying is that the majority of teachers will spend the majority of their careers working in classrooms that are under-supplied.

Take my school—which is in an affluent suburb—as an example: The budget for our entire science department—which serves almost 400 students and has to cover consumables for the labs that we like to teach—is $600 in a good year, less in most.

I’ve got one working computer in my room. My academic team—-which includes about 120 sixth-graders—-has close to 70 “working computers” in their lockers that we’re not allowed to use because cell phones are banned during the school day—a policy that is really common in middle and high schools everywhere.

That’s got to change—-especially if people are as hell bent as they say they are to hold teachers accountable for student performance.

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, achievement gap, digital-divide, Mobile Learning

Can Video Games Help Close the Digital Divide?

March 23, 2011 | 10:54 AM | By

Applying African-American boys’ passion for sports video games toward building confidence in a learning environment.

Image credits: Betsy James DiSalvo, Glitch Game Testers and Georgia Institute of Technology

This fascinating article by Liz Losh on Digital Media & Learning looks at how video games as learning motivator can be a completely different experience for different cultures.

A recent report on educational achievement among young black males describes a “national catastrophe” in primary, secondary, and higher education that is reinforced by policy failures and funding shortfalls. “A Call for Change: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Black Males in Urban Schools” uses data largely from the U.S. Department of Education to paint a grim picture of an achievement gap between black and white students, reinforcing the message of recent books like Pedro Noguera’s The Trouble with Black Boys: Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education.

“Game consoles often are the most powerful computational devices and the only Internet-enabled devices in our participants’ homes.”

While the Obama White House has become known for promoting video games as a way to teach science, technology, engineering, math, and as a method to promote healthier eating and exercise among kids with sedentary lifestyles and pop culture habits, often the Presidential message targeted to African-American urban youth emphasizes traditional print culture literacies in reading and writing. Researcher Betsy James DiSalvo from the Georgia Institute of Technology is taking a different approach to the achievement gap. Her work is focused on understanding the role that video games play in urban African-American youth culture.

DiSalvo engages African-American teenage boys with video game design and seeks to provide them intensive college and career counseling that “A Call for Change” argues they might not be getting in school despite a desperate need for intervention. She also takes advantage of the fact that video games can bridge the digital divide in African-American homes, because “game consoles often are the most powerful computational devices and the only Internet-enabled devices in our participants’ homes.”

UNUSUAL APPROACH

Unlike other after-school programs with technology labs, DiSalvo’s “Glitch Game Testers” treats students as paid employees rather than charity cases. Participants have part-time jobs during the school year and full-time jobs during the summer that provide economic as well as educational incentives to pursue careers in computer science and other STEM-related fields. The program makes a long-term commitment to mentoring and economic support and tries to tailor services around stated needs. According to DiSalvo, other programs “parachute-in” with a rescue mentality that shows little respect for existing attitudes in African-American communities.

“Going to a whole classroom of people and assuming that you will find something that everyone likes” is naïve. You have to think about the culture that people come from first.”

DiSalvo has come up with a pragmatic series of solutions designed around symbiotic relationships between corporate products and consumer populations to foster STEM learning around sports video games that are usually not seen as particularly educational. She recruits Atlanta-area youth attending schools that are 99% African-American and where most students are well below the poverty line as play testers for commercial video game companies to search for bugs in new video games. Local mentors from Georgia Tech and historically black Morehouse College are also part of the Glitch Game Testers team and serve as both coaches and role models.

In her work, DiSalvo finds that video game play practices such as “hacking, cheating, and modding,” which provide powerful informal learning practices among self-described “geeks” destined for careers in technology, are often treated with disdain by African-American teenagers. For many black urban youth, DiSalvo says, their notions of masculinity are defined by codes of idealized sportsmanship and pure physical embodiment, rather than the so-called “hacker ethic” that emphasizes subverting systems and authority.

GENDER, IDENTITY AND TECHNOLOGY

DiSalvo’s advisor, Professor Amy Bruckman, has been known for her research on gender and computer gaming that stretches back for more than a decade. (Bruckman also wrote seminal essays questioning cyber-utopianism that were written in the nineties, such as “Finding One’s Own in Cyberspace” and “Cyberspace is Not Disneyland“).

In an interview for DML Central, Bruckman praises DiSalvo’s work because it is “specifically targeting African-American teenage boys” in a larger research environment in which the discussion about gender and technology has often been focused on “women and this, and women and that” without enough serious research on masculinity and how “cultural groups have unique challenges.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Teaching With Tech, achievement gap, digital media, digital-divide, video games