How are people differentially enabled or disabled by new information technologies?
chip bruce
(chip@uiuc.edu)
(ready to use)
ASK
Subject Areas
| Educational Technology, Information Science |
Grade Levels
Open Directory Category
|
Society/Issues/Education/Literacy/Literacy_in_the_Information_Age/Access |
Rationale of the Unit
| Excellent technology resources are of little value without meaningful access to those resources. There are many factors limiting access, including financial, political, linguistic, knowledge, and disability barriers. Moreover, technologies can be constructed so as to facilitate or to limit access. |
Background and Resources
BACKGROUND
Langdon Winner in The whale and the reactor , 1986, p. 23, writes: Robert Moses...built his overpasses according to specifications that would discourage the presence of buses on his parkways...Automobile-owning whites of 'upper' and 'comfortable middle' classes...would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not handle the overpasses. One consequence was to to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses' widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly-sure of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach.
READINGS
Bruce, Bertram C. (1999, February). How worldwide is the web?. Reading Online.
Judge, Paul (Ed.) (2000, March 2). A lesson in computer literacy from India's poorest kids. Business Week
Novak, Thomas, & Hoffman, Donna (1998, February 2). Bridging the digital divide: The impact of race on computer access and internet use.
Rheingold, Howard (1999, January). Look who's talking. Wired, 7.01 .
WEB SITES
Access.Edu
The Community Networking Initiative
Girl Geeks
PBS site on the Digital Divide
CTER white papers on these issues, including, but not limited to the one labeled "access"
RESOURCES AND SUPPLEMENT MATERIALS
 Bishop, Ann (1999, Spring). Community access issues, interview - 22 mins. ( text translation)
Law, John (1991). Power, discretion, and strategy. In A sociology of monsters . |
Activities and Open-ended problems
IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES
How difficult can this be? The F.A.T. City workshop
ACTIVITIES OUTSIDE OF CLASS / INDEPENDENT WORK
(1) Check an existing page for accessibility using Bobby.
Discuss the implications of tools such as this in the bboard, including appropriate URLs. Consider the implications of computer-based instruction for democratic education.
(2) Review the IT survey results at the Girl Geeks site. Fill out the Geek-O-Meter. Discuss these issues in the web board. |
If you want to add your comments on this Unit, please login first.
|
