The US currently has an unemployment rate of just under 10 percent, while my home state of California is at 12.5 percent (both according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Families are living in cars and shelters. They aren’t buying their kids tablets or netbooks and schools certainly don’t have a lot of extra cash floating around. Yes, tablets may change a lot of things, but I don’t think we’re going to see radical changes because of them anytime in the next couple of years.

Within a day or two of our conversation I had another chat with an instructor who was telling me about how her students who need to access certain videos that we’ve licensed can’t. They are distance students who live in other provinces and they don’t have high speed at their homes. Their workplaces, which are theoretically supporting their ongoing learning, have high speed, but also have firewalls on their computers which prevent them from accessing the videos from there.

Both of these conversations reminded me of something that I think is a very real problem, but others keep telling me not to worry so much about – the digital divide.

I think that the digital divide has several causes:

Economics
There are still a lot of people in North America alone who can’t afford a computer or high speed Internet access. Even if every school could give a child a laptop and offer them high speed Internet, most schools wouldn’t have the money left in their budgets to support the needed tech support or teacher training. And schools where every child can afford their own laptop or tablet are obviously at an advantage over those who have the rare student with that kind of access.

Geography
Again, just in North America there are regions where you can’t get high speed through either cable or phone lines. You might be able to pay for it through satellite, but that’s certainly not cheap. There are also many regions that you can get it through a cable or phone company, but they’re the only game in town so you’ll pay for whatever service they might offer you.

Knowledge
You may have access to a computer and high speed Internet, but you may not know how to use the hardware or the necessary applications (on computer or in the “the cloud”). One instructor told me about a student who went out and bought a computer just to take an upgrading course, but he didn’t know how to use the computer.

Knowledge Part II
You have access, but while you think that you know enough to be learning online you don’t know how to adequately protect your privacy in “the cloud”or on a public terminal.

Third Party Barriers
You don’t have high speed access from home so go to a library or your workplace, but then you may very well have to contend with filters and firewalls.

In the same week that I had the above mentioned conversations I also had a brief Twitter debate with Will Richardson about whether electronic portfolios would be a good way to evaluate students (at the K-12 level). I asked how parents were going to view their child’s work if they don’t have a computer.

Yesterday the news hit that the Canadian federal government is cutting off the funding that a lot of libraries, senior centers and other organizations that currently provide services to those in rural areas use to offer Internet access. The Globe and Mail reported in their article on this that:

Gary Goodyear, minister of state for science and technology, told the House of Commons on Monday that public libraries and 80 per cent of Canadians now have Internet access.

That means that 20 percent of Canadians are without Internet access, a number that will increase as those libraries lose the funding. The government plans to spend more money on helping increase the number of people who have Internet access at home, but that’s not going to buy them computers or teach them how to use them.

There are some great possibilities for teaching and learning online and we should be exploring and implementing them when appropriate, but we can’t forget that not everyone is going to be able to access that site, or watch that video, or add to that wiki, or protect the password to their Google account.

Note: Thank you to Rob Wall for giving me his opinion of this before I posted.

Update: The Canadian federal government is now saying that it was all a misunderstanding and that the funding will continue under a different program for at least the next year. Read more here.

                        

I’m excited about this project for a number of reasons, but a big one is the format we decided to take. We could have easily have put this on an internal space and made it only available to those with user names and passwords (which is traditionally how we’ve done things). I think that making this a blog that anyone can access will result in more of our own people using it because of the RSS feature, plus, hopefully other educators and students will find it useful as well.

                        

EdTech Posse Podcast 6.2

                        

Clay Shirky noted in his book, Here Comes Everybody, that the cost in money and time to join a group on a site like Facebook is pretty close to zero. Signing an online petition is slightly more than that while sending an email takes a little more effort than signing that petition, especially if you write the email instead of using a pre-formatted message from an advocacy group.

Methods of contacting elected officials with the intent of swaying haven’t changed. It takes more effort and time than any of the previously mentioned methods, and may even cost you some money, to pick up your phone and call your representatives. Writing them a letter and sending it by snail mail will cost you even more in time and money and going into their local office may cost you the most in time, effort and possibly money for gas or bus fair.

Why does it matter how much effort, time and money it costs you to connect with your representatives? Because they will likely put more value on what you have to say based on how much it costs you to reach them. Plus, there is a long-held view that every letter (via-snail mail or dropped off at a local office) represents not just the letter writer, but also many of other people who care about an issue, but don’t put in the effort of writing a letter. Writing an email or joining an online group takes so little effort that each person who does so represents far fewer people than the letter writing does.

So does this mean that these groups are pointless? Of course not. They can act to inform people about issues and should help convey information about how best to contact officials who actually have the power to change things. If people simply join them and never take any further action, then yes, these groups will likely have no impact on what governments do.

                        

We can teach our children / students to engage in social learning, be good digital citizens and life-long learners, but if we don’t teach them early about good nutrition and do all that we can to see that they grow up eating healthy, balanced diets, we are failing them.

                        

Thank you for your interest in the 2010 TLt conference taking place April 26-28 in Saskatoon. Due to the Family Day holiday on Monday, February 15, we would like to extend the deadline for proposals.

Please submit your proposals by end of day, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010. The process is quite simple, and relatively short. Please see http://www.tlt2010.ca/call-for-proposals/ for more information. Be sure to register early as space is limited!

Thank you for sharing this information with your colleagues. We look forward to seeing you at TLt in April.

                        

When I saw this I immediately thought about the idea that we learn so much during coffee breaks and at lunch in school, at work, or while attending conferences. Many important conversations and learning experience start out as idle chatter.

Do we have adequate mechanisms for this in our virtual learning communities. Yes, Twitter, and sometimes Facebook, provide a platform for some of this, but these tools are at the centre of very few learning communities.

I’m talking about the online courses we develop and deliver through Blackboard / WebCT or Moodle. Even some less formal learning communities like SCoPE that is also built around Moodle lack a place for casual conversation to start and evolve (correct me if I’m wrong, Sylvia). If idle chat is so important, which I agree that it is, how can be better facilitate it, and even encourage it, in the virtual learning communities that we are responsible for building / maintaining / facilitating?

                        

Don’t miss this!

                        

In the first post that I wrote about my PLN I referred to it as a PLE. A lot of people seem to be using the term interchangeably these days, but in my opinion, they aren’t the same thing. I wrote that post more than two years (and about 150 posts) ago and my understanding of this concept has grown (I hope) since then. I now consider a PLE to be where the people and tools come together for me. This could be something like a “start” page from Google or Pageflakes, or even just my computer where I access most of my PLN.

The debate over definitions will likely continue, but I don’t want us to get buried in semantics. The most important thing is that we have some sort of PLN to help us continue to be life-long learners and to wade through the mounting piles of information and new tools that come our way on a daily basis.

                        

Registration and the call for proposals are now available on the Web site. Conference fees are cheap ($150 if you’re with a Campus Saskatchewan institution and $200 for others). The deadline for proposals is approaching quickly (February 15) so get on it.

See you there!

UPDATE: Sorry, I forgot to include the dates. The conference will be held at the Radisson Hotel in Saskatoon Monday April 26 (evening only) through Wednesday April 28.