Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Mapping Digital Learning Access - invitation

Earlier this week I watched a one hour documentary showing the Digital Divide in America, and identifying three key challenges that must be overcome.

I created this concept map to visualize that discussion and add some other issues that were not included in the video.

I'm looking for information that can make this cMap more useful.

First, if you know of articles that provide more information related to hardware, connectivity, or teacher training, I'd like to add links to such articles in the three nodes on the map that focus on those issues.   If you know of anyone writing about the challenges of keeping this stuff updated as kids go through school - 12  years - I'd like to point to such articles.

Second, I am looking for maps that show every school in the US, and provide some sort of indicator that shows what level of digital access that school offers.  Ideally such maps would have overlays showing poverty demographics and legislative districts, such as I've tried to provide in the Chicago Tutor/Mentor Program Locator platform.

A few weeks ago I pointed to the OpenStreet Map Project, in which people from around the world can help upgrade the quality of information for places throughout the world.  It seems to me that a group of students and/or volunteers could create a base map, and that schools from around the country could add their own information with pre-set icons that would show levels of readiness (yellow, red, blue, green, etc?) based on the information in the Digital Divide video.

Maybe someone is already doing all of this?  If so, just share a link and I can point to it.

This information needs to be available on a school by school level or in districts with multiple schools crossing income and wealth divides, the need of poor schools might be overlooked.  Including legislative overlays would build in direct accountability to the people who represent those districts.

We can't help kids get through school and into jobs and adult lives free of poverty if we can't give them a more equal playing field.

11-10-17 update - Here's an article titled "From good intentions to real outcomes: Equity by design in Learning Technologies", which relates to this topic.  It has been set up on Hypothes.is so readers can annotate and share ideas in the margins.

5-28-18 update - Here's an article about a 2018 Google Report revealing the state of CS education in the US

7-16-2018 update - Article titled "The Last Mile" talks about broadband access in rural areas of US.

9-11-2018 update - The Stark Geography of America's Digital Divide, article by Bryan Alexander, summarizes this Pew Research Center Report on the Digital Divide.

11-23-2018 update - Equity, Access and the Distributed Web - relevant blog article from #clmooc network.

4-24-2020 update - map showing broadband accessibility in Chicago census tracks - click here

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