NECC 2008 – From digital divide to digital opportunities

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From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities
Dr. Paul Resta, U. Texas-Austin

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• Current estimate of world repository of pictures/words/movies = 7 exabytes (Library of Congress is largest in world = 20 terabytes)

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• It’s not just more information. More is now different.

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• UNESCO Digital Opportunity Index allows the tracking and comparison of countries in different aspects of the information society

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• Essential conditions – access to…

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• Basic literacy skills

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• 26% of world adult population (1 billion people) is non-literate (2/3 are women)

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• ICT devices, software, and sufficient bandwidth for Internet connectivity

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• Most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East has less than 10% of the population with personal computers

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• High-income economies are far ahead (International Telecommunications Union, World Information Society 2007 Report)

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• The top 1,000 companies in the world have over 70 million computers to dispose of

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• Low-cost laptops: OLPC (600,000 orders from Birmingham (AL), Peru, Haiti, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Mexico, Uruguay, Mongolia), EeePC, Intel Classmate (150,000 orders from Nigeria, Libya)

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• Cloud computing (virtual servers) means not much power has to reside on the computers themselves

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• Asia and Europe both have more Internet users than North America; a near-perfect relationship between Internet use and income

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• Broadband access takes up 2.1% of high-income (and 909% of low-income) yearly wages

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• USA is now 15th in broadband penetration (see www.itif.org)

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• Wireless access is increasing exponentially in many developing countries

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• Meaningful, high-quality, culturally-relevant content in local languages

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• 68% of Internet content is in English; next highest is Japanese (6%)

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• 4Directions project is an indigenous model of education to create culturally-relevant curriculum resources

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• Virtual museum partnerships

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• Creating, sharing, and exchanging digital content

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• The majority of the 7 billion videos streamed on the Internet each month are user-generated

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• The number of blogs has roughly doubled every 6 months

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• We need to enable indigenous voices and to use the Internat to foster cross-cultural understandings and share knowledge

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• Educators who know how to use digital tools and resources in pedagogically-sound, culturally-responsible ways

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• UNESCO ICT Competency Standards for Teachers

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• Development of National Plans for ICT in Teacher Education

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• Teacher Learning in E-Learning Age (UNESCO, forthcoming)

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• Effective leadership in policy and planning

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• Removing policy barriers and formulating new policy frameworks

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• Broadband challenges require new thinking

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• There is a need for ICTs customized to the needs of the poor in the developing world

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• How do we ensure that the USA stays competitive?

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• What is our role as educators to help address the global digital divide?

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• From the Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities

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