Research Journal 2: The Digital Divide

Thoughts:
I'm reading CISCO's White Paper "Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century" and it's just struck me that I've been thinking about the "digital divide" in terms of intra-national, primarily socio-economic inequality.

But of course the digital era is also adding an extra barrier to equality between the developed and developing world - further disadvantaging people in countries that are already disadvantaged. The "divide" between what used to be called the "first world" and "third world" countries, which used to be a primarily geopolitical, economic divide, is now encompassing the divide in digital literacy which comes about from lack of access to technology.

According to www.internetworldstats.com, only 25.6% of the world's population uses the internet. Twenty-five percent!! North America boasts the largest proportion of internet uses, at roughly 74%. Australia is grouped with Oceania, at 60.4%. By contrast, only 6.8% of Africa's population uses the internet.

All this time I've been thinking about how the digital divide will affect my classroom practice: how can I make assignments fair to students who don't have unlimited access to the internet at home. I realise that the international digital divide is a "big picture" problem, and that my approach to the digital divide in the classroom is very much a "small picture" approach, so the two problems, although related, are in very different spheres.