Closing the Divide
November 8, 2011
I attended the annual Digital Inclusion Forum hosted by TLC last week. I really enjoyed meeting some very committed people in a relatively comfortable setting. The sessions were taped and are promised to be available at the TLC web site, soon. I was thrilled when the Twitter hashtag, #Tlc_mn, for the conference was posted on the screen during the opening remarks. The conference I’d been to the week before hadn’t thought of that ahead of time, although they were happy to announce it, #digitalyouthmn, when I suggested one to them. It was a bit disappointing when only two other people managed to post using the #tlc_mn hashtag. I don’t think inclusion is going to happen if the people meeting to talk about inclusion don’t bother to use the tools of inclusion. But, maybe I need to be pleased to note that this was a beginning. I’m impatient for inclusion to really happen.
A couple of important questions were raised during the discussion session at the end. One was why haven’t the people in K-12 been doing more to to close the digital divide. The conference was held at facilities owned by the Minnesota Department of Education, but there very few, if any, representatives of K-12 schools in the room. The people in the room were from non-profits, libraries and other public agencies who attend to k-12 students while they’re not in school. The answer to that question is important, crucial, really. The short answer would be the people in K-12 aren’t all that interested in closing the digital divide.
The technology already exists and is in place and already up and working to allow any Minneapolis Public Schools student to access and respond to any information in almost any media or format that their teacher cares to link to or create. Students and teachers ‘could’ do this from anywhere in the city for FREE; they couldalso do it from anywhere on the planet where they could get wifi access. But the teachers aren’t using it (most don’t know the capability even exists) and the students have been made to feel like the tools that they would use to access information in such a free way is prohibited, something to be avoided.
Another question raised was How do we get ‘the private sector’ involved in helping to close the digital divide. Governor Mark Dayton apparently heard that question and took some steps to get an answer. Yesterday, he announced that Margaret Anderson Kelliher would be leading a task force to ‘expand broadband’ in Minnesota. The question I have is when this task force expands broadband will it close the divide or make it wider.
There are already lots of people in the private sector working on providing broadband, a term which is loosely used to mean connecting people using the best technology available. Too many of the people currently working in the private sector, in my opinion, aren’t at all interested in closing the digital divide. They profit handsomely, obnoxiously, when access to information is controlled. If the best possible access to information were made widely available it would drastically cut the profits of some in the private sector, and probably put some of the non-profits working it the field out of business, too. If there were no digital divide, all of the people working on closing the digital divide would need to find other work. I happen to think there’s plenty of useful things they could otherwise be doing, but it would be a disruption to the status quo.
I’m not convinced that the people on the task force really want to close the digital divide; let’s watch what they do.
