Bridging the divide

The United Kingdom is one of the richest countries in the world, and yet, in the second decade of the 21st Century, it still has one million children without access to computers and 2 million with no access to the Internet. The digital divide is real. A Guardian article today reads:

"More than one million children in Britain live in homes without computers and a further two million have no internet connection at home, a charity said yesterday). The e-Learning Foundation said it feared the gap between rich and poor pupils' performance at school would widen unless more was done to ensure that every child can use a computer at home".

This has always been one of the most trenchant problems with technology. The divide between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' may be economic, but it has far reaching social, cultural and political consequences. Relatively, the UK is better off than most other countries in the world, but as the BBC News website reports, there are still a million children who are being left behind. As affluent as it is, the UK still cannot claim to have provided universal access to one of the most basic educational resources. The connection has already been made between access to home computers and learning excellence. It is patently clear that children who do not have home computer/internet access are at a disadvantage when it comes to completing homework, researching assignments and sustaining informal learning. In the last two decades there have been many initiatives in the UK and elsewhere to establish ubiquitous access to the web. It's an essential tool for learning. It seems these initiatives have only been partially successful, and we are still failing many of our children through lack of vision. What should be done next to bridge the digital divide?

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Bridging the digital divide by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.