Social divide stays in online learning
July 26, 2016 6:25 PM   Subscribe

BBC: "There are strong social divisions in how young people use digital technology, according to international research from the OECD. The economics think tank found that in many countries wealthy and poor pupils spent similar amounts of time online. But richer youngsters were much more likely to use the internet for learning rather than games. The study argues that even with equal access to technology a "digital divide" persists in how the internet is used.""
posted by marienbad (24 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
We're now in a post-interface computing ecosystem. You "Hey, Siri!" or "OK, Google!" or "Hey, Cortana!" or "Hey, Alexa!" - or tap the mic button on the YouTube Kids tablet app or the Roku remote (OMG! Skeumorphics!). Ask the computer to do what you want, and it will. If it can't figure it out, that's OK, machine learning means that the system will do what you mean, not what you said.

This should be a little bit mind-blowing to 80's kids raised on "GIGO" - Garbage In, Garbage Out. It's now Garbage In, Gold Out... or it will be. These no-interface systems get better and better each year as the software libraries powering them improve and get access to faster equipment.

All of the windows mousing around, from the Xerox PARC Alto to the Chromebook was Old School when Apple introduced the iPhone, and now the tap-swipe-pinch things we're expected to learn and remember are as obsolete as the vt100 terminal when Apple introduced Siri.

My daughter, before she could read, tapped the mic icon on her iPad and demanded more StampyCat videos, which taught her how to pay Minecraft. The touchscreen for Minecraft PE, and then the keyboard and mouse for full Minecraft, were just difficulties Minecraft put in place to make it more fun and advanced.

We have an old Roku, or she'd be hitting the Mic button every time rather than puzzle through the ancient sigils of "play/pause" or "back" or "two forward arrows."

Yup. Being computer literate, in the here and now, no longer means being actually literate.

If that doesn't send a chill down your spine...
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:19 PM on July 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


Many news and information sites are almost unusable on lower-end or older systems. For instance, major news websites, such as the New York Times and the Guardian, and news-ish sites, such as Buzzfeed and AV Club, are essentially inaccessible on an iPhone 4 (a phone that was state-of-the-art 5 years ago). But many games, albeit low-overhead games, still run perfectly fine.

Without controlling for this the study, as described in the article, is about as revelatory as saying that people with Nokia brick phones text less than people with Sidekicks.
posted by clorox at 8:27 PM on July 26, 2016 [10 favorites]


And yes I am assuming that poorer people generally have older systems and that might not be true.
posted by clorox at 8:38 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


My kid has an iPad 2. Very cheap 2nd hand these days. It does very good voice recognition when using the Google apps, like YouTube Kids. I overheard her demand "pumpkin facepaint!" and it showed her a video she saw two years ago, and she decided now it was still funny. The iPad 2 went obsolete this year, and only 'cuz Apple said it was.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:59 PM on July 26, 2016


It's not clear to me from the article whether a lot of the difference could be explained by homework alone. If the wealthier students are in more rigorous educational programs, they may need to use the internet for homework more frequently.
posted by Gravel at 11:35 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]


All of the windows mousing around, from the Xerox PARC Alto to the Chromebook was Old School when Apple introduced the iPhone, and now the tap-swipe-pinch things we're expected to learn and remember are as obsolete as the vt100 terminal when Apple introduced Siri.

I know, it was really creepy to see all those developers at Apple throw away their terminals and start dictating code intentions to Siri.
posted by benzenedream at 11:52 PM on July 26, 2016 [8 favorites]


It's now Garbage In, Gold Out...

I wish I had your sunny disposition
posted by iotic at 3:28 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


I teach at a public open access college. Many (maybe most) of my students do not own a computer and/or do not have internet access at home. They use their smart phones for everything, but many of them run out of data every month. In addition, things like reading pdfs or long articles are really a pain in the ass on a phone, and many websites are just hard to navigate or have scaled down features on their mobile sites. Also, a number of the e-book textbook sites do not work on smartphones--in 2016, several still require you to download and install a piece of software, which means that students can't even go to the library and use them. The digital divide is still real and still another thing that makes pulling yourself up by your bootstraps pretty damn hard.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:47 AM on July 27, 2016 [13 favorites]


has anyone actually found this report? the OECD website is vast, and has lots of information, but I can't find enough information in this BBC article to track down whatever it is that the reporter is summarizing. The only report that I can find is from 2001, which surely is not what they are discussing. It is early morning, and I've been grading research papers, so my brain and searching skills may be dulled, but I can't find the actual report based on the basic information given in the BBC article linked in the post.

which is ironic in its own way. One of the things I have to teach my research students is how to track down the original sources from journalistic summaries like this. We are on the internet, but they don't even show the common courtesy of a link to what they are discussing.
posted by jkosmicki at 5:52 AM on July 27, 2016 [5 favorites]


I believe that the biggest thing missing from the ubiquitous smartphone and tablets is the ability to program for them on them (a concept called "self-hosting" in computer science). Leaving the tools around that enable self-hosting, while cool for nerds and curious folks does tend to conflict with usability, so it makes senses to leave them out.

A Raspberry Pi, at $35 (plus USB power, HDMI display, keyboard and mouse) is an amazingly capable self-hosting machine (which is also really good for surfing the web, not so great at playing games). Just giving a Raspberry Pi to folks on the other side of the divide doesn't seem like a solution. I don't know what the Raspberry Pi foundation is doing on the ground in the UK to address the digital divide, but I bet/hope it's interesting, and making a difference, or plans to. Maybe it's a part of the full report?
posted by dylanjames at 6:17 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


jkosmicki: has anyone actually found this report?

I can't find the source report either, so I sent a Tweet at someone quoted in the article (Mark Chambers, chief executive of NAACE) to ask if he can point to it. Stay tuned...
posted by wenestvedt at 6:44 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


I need to know where fan fiction stands on this information/game scale.
posted by corb at 6:44 AM on July 27, 2016


There are options: Internet Essentials by Comcast: Internet + WiFi Just $9.95/Month for Low Income Families
posted by Carol Anne at 6:45 AM on July 27, 2016


has anyone actually found this report? the OECD website is vast, and has lots of information, but I can't find enough information in this BBC article to track down whatever it is that the reporter is summarizing.

There's a quoted paragraph just before the last photo, which points to this study: Students, Computers and Learning (September 2015)
posted by effbot at 7:24 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]


it was really creepy to see all those developers at Apple throw away their terminals and start dictating code intentions to Siri
A window / mouse UI can still be as obsolete as a terminal though, most of the real work I do every day is typed into a terminal.
posted by idiopath at 7:31 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


thank you effbot - I hadn't gotten to the point of looking for the quotes yet. I appreciate your finding.
posted by jkosmicki at 7:32 AM on July 27, 2016


I'm a public librarian and until I started working here (before I was a school librarian) I never realised how many people don't have their own personal computers or home Internet.
posted by toerinishuman at 7:36 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


(I have been offered a look at the study and await an email, hopefully to corroborate what effbot suggested.)
posted by wenestvedt at 9:07 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


I was going to say basically the same thing as hydropsyche. I teach at a community college in a very poor area. All of my students have smartphones, very few have computers. I almost never see a laptop in class. It's amazing to me how many students try to do all the work for an online class on a smartphone.

I've also discovered that very few of them really understand how the internet works. It's all about apps. On a real computer, Google is their entry point for everything. It would be quicker just to type our college's URL to get to their student email and online classes, but every single one of them goes to Google, searches for the college, then clicks that link. On campus computers, which often have Bing as the default search engine, they type "google" in the address bar, get the Bing search for "google," click on the top link, then search Google for the college. It's fascinating and frustrating. Basic tech literacy passed them by completely.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:19 AM on July 27, 2016 [8 favorites]


I'm not sure how much of it can be explained by having older devices, since a lot of resources don't need the most new thing to work. It's more likely that it's in large part generational and community experience with the internet.

It wasn't until recently that having an internet connection at home was something that only the well-off had. Things like Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM were marketed to those parents and schools. Computers were marketed as an educational investment, but the poor were left out of this.

Now that they're more ubiquitous, I think a lot of that focus on educational opportunities have fallen by the wayside. And I get the impression that a lot of educators just assume kids know about internet resources, because everyone's been on the internet forever, right?

Teaching undergraduates, one of the things I learned is that things I think are pretty simple ideas (ex: check Wikipedia) are actually not that obvious if it's not your habit already.

Of course a lot of people don't have internet or a home computer. One of my friends has to use his cellphone for internet access--and you know, you can play a downloaded game real easy, but it is a pain in the ass to do any sort of educational research on a cellphone.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:22 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]


Self-hosting is a laudable goal, but doesn't really make sense in the context of online learning. In that context, a cloud-based service similar to jsfiddle/coderpad/codepen but with a focus on education makes more sense, given today's Cloud-based Internet where everyone has free access to Google Docs. Unfortunately, typing into a cellphone sucks, and trying to program on one even more so, so there are wider questions to be asked and answered.
posted by fragmede at 11:18 AM on July 27, 2016


I know, it was really creepy to see all those developers at Apple throw away their terminals and start dictating code intentions to Siri.

You can, tho. Almost all syntax, save for APL, is a nod to using every non-alphabetic symbol and glyph on an (American) standard keyboard as syntactic sugar. There are ([{\`|- _::_-|'/}]) many ways to bracket crap on an (American) keyboard, and you better damn well believe even "good" languages run out of them. (Yes, python, we see your double-underscore. Don't try to hide it. Real win for readability there, whitespace-lad.)

You don't need to program that way.

Hey Siri! Set the rate at five percent!

- Setting constant "rate" at 5% (This is a sop to old school coders. No, neither Siri nor the user will be interacting this way while programming. Get used to it.)

Hey Siri! What's my credit score?

- Your credit score is three.

"Three hundred?"

- Your credit score is three. (Siri has now set a constant of "slap/*happy/'sCreditScore" to 3. Haha no it will use a semi-random constant name, probably based on user identity and time. I neither know nor cared it did that.)

Hey Siri! Find mortgage websites. Show me the ones that accept my credit score, and they need to be under the rate!

(The coders in the audience are already formulating, and thinking about the best libraries to import, and the structure of the object classes. Too late. The machine's already done it based on a vast database of user behaviors and software patterns and how they best intermesh. It required a vast amount of computing power - which Apple has - for a very, very, very small slice of time. If it exceeds the time Apple expects of this kind of inquiry, it will error out and Siri will ask the user to rephrase the request. In this case it just generates a background process to scavenge whatever time it can, and warns the user, based on similar searches, it's all out of fucks for his bullshit request, but will do what it can.)

- This will take some time.

Is cool. Get back to me whenevs. It's Apple's hardware crunching this stuff, not my phone.


Yes, that's programming. It's not software engineering, but it will trickle up to the comp-sci pros. Once they can describe their algorithms or object structures in a sentence or two rather than spend a lot of mental contortions into remembering which damn bracket this part of the function goes into, the concept of a "programming language" will recede rather quickly.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:02 PM on July 27, 2016


Forcing humankind to conform to the machine is not the answer. This is why IT remains a shelter to the besieged proletariat. IT folks do the work of contorting to the gear mesh so the rest of humankind does not have to.

When AI can solve real issues, and not just make already bad solutions more 'efficient' and 'productive', say global warming, or the class divides, then you can count me in for uploading to the singularity.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 8:45 AM on July 28, 2016


But richer youngsters were much more likely to use the internet for learning rather than games."

Reading this line I immediately identified with the conclusion. But after reading the first few responses, I thought there was another article everyone was talking about.

For my part I've been volunteering at a social service program in NYC serving adults (young adults all the way to retirement age) for over a year now as "the computer guy" (or computer Chris). I find it very difficult to see our members engage in online education activities.

Of course there are some members who try a course from Coursera or Edx in our computer lab, but shortly drop it because they don't have private access to a computer (or net access).

Others seem to have a different idea of what is necessary part of their life. They'll use computers for work search and resumes, and effectively I might add.

The center has a special peer program where students are given Chromebooks to use for the duration of their course. Reports are this is effective and necessary.

By and large, the rest can be described as those who have a different idea of how to spend their free time.

Being someone who has struggled with periods of under-employment I feel, if I as though i have something to contribute. Even then, the answers are multi-faceted. Without an undergraduate degree in art/design and "maker" roots, would I still be as curious? As engaged with technology? If I didn't believe in the potential for improving my income through education, would I also loose heart and drop out when I found the work harder than I expected (it's always harder than you expect)? If I wasn't an OG at buying second hand before the advent of eBay, would I still know how to buy affordable tech?

This is a very interesting (social) problem and what works for you, or in one context seems to fail in others.
posted by xtian at 4:50 PM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


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