Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Class divisions among users of Web 2.0 technologies?
One of the commenters on my Web 2.0 posting, Genevieve, posted an interesting link to an article which discusses class divisions in MySpace vs. Facebook. It makes me curious... are other, more educationally-focused Web 2.0 technologies also subject to class divisions? For instance, would we see higher-income schools using different technologies than lower-income schools? I suspect the answer is yes, but I wonder if anyone has done a study to determine which tools are utilized and preferred by which group, and why? I'll do some research in this area, but if anyone can point me to articles or studies on the topic, I'd appreciate it. I believe it's our responsibility as instructional designers to promote equity in educational environments, and if that means championing or making available certain technologies to low-income schools or organizations, I'm all for it.
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I wrote a long comment but blogger messed up.
I'll be concise: check out doostang.com. It's a social networking site for Harvard and MIT grads.
Schools which are dealing with high rates of drop-out and violence (typically lower-income districts) tend to be in crisis mode and unable to create a long-range plan for effective use of technology. Data-driven decision-making depends on quality data and I don't know how much research has been done on Web 2.0 ed tech and class issues. There are a couple of interesting blog posts on this issue of technology and class in general: Education and Class and Dangerously Irrelavent.
More than just providing equal access to the tools, we need talented teachers who are comfortable with the tools and set up systems to use them effectively. For example, one of my classmates is a junior high school teacher. He shares a set of 20 laptops with three other classrooms. The four teachers had to reach consensus on a rule that students wash their hands before using the laptops and there are no drinks allowed. Seems simple, but when I hear about what life is really like at school on the day-to-day level, I understand how the basics matter.
This is from an older article (Technology in K-12 Public Schools: What Are the Equity Issues? 1998) but I quote one of the recommendations here that I think is still applicable, "Provide opportunities for all students -- including lower-income, lower-achieving and ethnic minority students -- to use computers for high-level cognitive tasks (simulations and applications) as well as low-level cognitive tasks (drill and practice)."
Another quote I like is from Chris Dede (Harvard), "One of the persistent mistakes with educational technology is that when students are perceived to be gifted, it's used for enrichment, and when they're perceived to be of lower achievement it's used for remediation."
For students of all performance and income levels, I vote for using technology in its highest capacity-such are for collaborative ill-structured problem solving in a constructivist framework-rather than individuals working alone at the task level.
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