Bloggingheads Video Debate: Economic Transformation of the U.S.

John McWhorter (l), of the Manhattan Institute, and Glenn Loury (r), of Brown University debate on whether highlighting root causes of poverty harms the poor.

See

http://video.on.nytimes.com/fr_story=13bf2bd8d65f8eaafc0633cf819df461f7bb21c4

Digital Divide Resources and Strategies

Do resources and strategies address the digital divide by ensuring that all students are engaging in an educational program aligned to the vision? The North Central Regional Educational Center has a new web site to examine these issues.

http://www.ncrel.org/engauge/framewk/equ/equin.htm

What do know of other resources? What would you suggest as a strategy of dealing with the digital divide?

'Free' Broadband Sparks Constitutional Debate

Submitted by Jason Lee Miller on Wed, 08/29/2007 - 16:43.

Though M2Z Networks threatened to take to the FCC to court to force a decision on the company's "family friendly" free nationwide wireless broadband proposal by September 1, a likely "no" vote from the commission has made M2Z decide more public debate is necessary.

M2Z CEO John Muleta, as a former FCC commissioner himself, is no stranger to the regulatory approval game. Nearly a year and a half ago, Muleta and company proposed a revenue-sharing deal with the federal government if M2Z could use a slice of unused TV spectrum to provide an advertising supported broadband network.

The speed wouldn't be blistering, mind you, just 384K, and content would be filtered for decency just like broadcast television. In return for not auctioning off this slice of spectrum like the rest, M2Z would funnel five percent of ad revenue into the US Treasury.

Of course a proposal like this brings up a whole host of issues, and forms unlikely alliances as opposing forces object for opposing reasons. Muleta accused FCC Chairman Martin of dragging his feet, an accusation which nearly sealed an answer in the negative, despite there being no good answer for Martin in this situation.

If the FCC approves M2Z's proposal, it has to answer to AT&T and Verizon and even to the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, made up of Free Press, Media Access Project and Consumers Union, natural opponents of telecom incumbents.

The incumbents don't want competition offering what they offer, albeit much, much slower, for free. The PISC doesn't want an ISP setting a precedent by being allowed to filter Web content.

Sort of defeats the purpose of the whole Net Neutrality debate.

But if the FCC denied the proposal, it risks angering other sets of stakeholders, namely, the poor and the profanity police. Well, it's most likely the latter the FCC's worried about.

So, obviously, M2Z is right that it's a complicated issue. It's interesting, though, that just last week approval wasn't coming fast enough, and this week, a couple of days before the deadline, we're all being too hasty about it.

Interestingly enough, M2Z cited PISC's filed comments that "granting the license subject to a filtering condition… raises serious First Amendment concerns as well as statutory concerns" as reason to extend the debate.

"We applaud PISC’s thoughtful and considered comments. They’ve raised important questions to the FCC and M2Z agrees that additional time is needed for a full and informed debate on the merits of M2Z’s pending application,” said Muleta. "Unfortunately, it’s clear that the full Commission has not yet had adequate time for a full review of our extensive docket. The public interest will not be served by a rushed decision made because of an arbitrary September 1 deadline.”

M2Z disagrees, however, that there are Constitutional concerns with offering a filtered network. The basis for that argument are precedents set by over-the-air television and radio, both of which are regulated by the FCC.

However, if you want to get persnickety about it, that is technically government regulation of speech, which walks a fine First Amendment line as it is, and is peppered with consolidated media selected messaging.

Regardless, the TV and radio is what they're basing their argument upon.

“Similar to free-over-the-air TV, we would have no idea whether a user of the free service is 9 years old or 40 years old," said Muleta. "We also believe, and that includes our investors who are Silicon Valley leaders, that offering Americans free and family friendly broadband makes good business sense since it provides consumers more choices in the broadband market.”

He's probably hit closer to the heart of it there – there are investors and markets at stake. But doin-it-for-the-kids is always a powerful political tagline. Funny how it didn't sway anybody in power when the .xxx domain was proposed and shot down by both family groups and porn peddlers, one side wanting to pretend porn didn’t exist while the other pretended they'd go out of business if they had to move.

Though the .xxx domain proposal had it's own issues – classic ones like the difference between smut and art – at least filtering at home would have been simpler, and best of all, not centrally controlled by a distributor with a vested interest in the content you see.

Again, M2Z's "free" broadband is not free. Nothing is free as long as it is controlled.

M2Z Broadband Net Neutrality FCC Spectrum Wireless Regulation First Amendment Censorship

About the Author

Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.

Internet Access in U. S. Schools

Internet access in classrooms across the country has increased dramatically over the past decade. High-income schools, or those in which fewer than 35 percent of students are eligible for federally subsidized meals, got off to a faster start than low-income schools, in which three-quarters or more of the students are eligible. But the gap has narrowed greatly in recent years.

*Click image to see the full chart. SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, 2006

EditU - A national online support center for people with disabilities

In an effort to provide digital divide support for people with disability, I have been project director since 1999 of Project EditU. EditU at http://www.editu.org serves as a national online support center for people with disabilities and the professionals that serve them. EditU is a public-private consortium including: the Association of Rehabilitation Programs in Computer Technology (ARPCT) the Commission for Accreditation of Rehabilitation (CARF), the Educational Leadership, Research and Technlogy Department and the Career Connection Research Center at my Western Michigan University, and Skillsoft, Inc.m the world largest provider of online learning content.

The results is that EditU offers corporate quality, tuition-free, multi-modal learning in a variety of career related areas. Information Technology, Office Skills, Business Skills, Professional Development and Personal Development are offered to people with disabilities and to the professionals that serve them. ARPCT is an international association dedicated to bridging the digital divide since it started in 1977 under IBM sponsorship. It is estimated that over 2o,000 graduates of ARPCT affilated programs (see http://www.arpct.org) have been trained and found employment to become independent tax paying citizens. Currently, there are about 62 community colleges, technical institutes, state support comprehensive rehabilitation centers, colleges, universities and post secondary organizations that are members of ARPCT and the EditU consortium.

EditU numbers for 2006.

During the 2006 calendar year, EditU had a total of 4,873 users with a cumulative training time of 1073 days, 23 hours and 34 minutes. EditU users completed a total of 2,111 entire courses and 152 full simulations and 57 test preps. The number were about the same as 2005. During the previous 2005 calendar year, 3,398 courses were completed with 348 completed SkillSims and 54 Test Prep Exams given to a total of 4,912 users that spend 1,096 days, 3 hours and 48 cumulative time on the EditU/Skillsoft learning management system.

An Article on the disability divide in Internet Access and Use

Kerry Dobransky & Eszter Hargittai
THE DISABILITY DIVIDE IN INTERNET
ACCESS AND USE
The increasing spread of the Internet holds much potential for enhancing
opportunities for people with disabilities. However, scarce evidence exists to
suggest that people with disabilities are, in fact, participating in these new
developments. Will the spread of information technologies (IT) increase equality
by offering opportunities for people with disabilities? Or will a growing reliance
on IT lead to more inequality by leaving behind certain portions of the
population including people with disabilities? In this paper, the authors draw
on nationally representative data regarding Americans’ Internet uses to (1) identify
the extent to which people with disabilities are embracing use of the Internet;
(2) how their use of the Internet compares with the Internet uses of the rest of the
population; (3) how having a disability relates to and interacts with other social
statuses (e.g. socioeconomic status, age, gender) with regard to Internet use; and
(4) what explains these trends. They draw on representative data collected by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census of the United States to answer these
questions. It is found that people with disabilities are less likely to live in households
with computers, are less likely to use computers and are less likely to be
online. However, once socioeconomic background is controlled for, it is found
that people with hearing disabilities and those who have limited walking
ability are not less likely to be Internet users. This research enables a deeper
understanding of both the use of the Internet by people with disabilities and
the spread of new IT more generally. For the full article see:
http://www.eszter.com/research/pubs/dobransky-hargittai-disabilitydivide.pdf

As the PC becomes stronger and more powerful with always on Internet connection, how will that impact the Digital Divide. Will it mean that everyone will be able to afford very cheap and powerful PCs and high speed wireless access, or will it mean that the "have" will have even greater always on connection to communications and information. This is an image that was provided as part of a keynote at 2003 E-learn conference in Washington, DC by Hermann Maurer, one of Europe's greatest technical thinker and science fiction writer, including Xperts: The Paradoppelganger of what the PC will look like by 2010.

Why is Digital Equity Important?

New information and communication technologies have been shrinking the world. Board band pipes can now pass a terabyte of data is 1,000 gigabytes about 5 hours of high quality DVD. In comparison a 56 K modem transfer rate would take 56 hours to down 1,000 gigabytes of information while Internet II is reported to have a transfer rate = 6 sec, according to the Internet II consortium.

Information and Communication is Power. The CISCO Networking Academy has developed a short video intended to open students' minds to ICT careers they can have as a result of CISCO Networking Academy training that does a good job to illustrate the power and reach of the Internet in all parts of the world’s economic, information and communication systems.

http://www.academynetspace.com/video.php

Meanwhile there is a direct correlation between Internet access and levels of both literacy and poverty. In 2005, only 13.9 percent of the world’s population has internet access according to the 2005 Internet World Stat. The World Bank says that

Two billion people live on less than two US dollars a day

Two thirds of the world's 840 million illiterate adults are women.

In a 2004 Benton Foundation study, it is reported that in the U.S. 78.6 percent of Americans went online in 2003 but for 80% of U.S. families with annual household income greater than $75,000 were on-line, compared with 25% of the poorest families with annual incomes under $25,000.

Immigrants and the digital divide

A look at the growing gap in computer and Internet access between young immigrants and non-immigrants.

Digital Equity in a Connected World

A Look at Digital Equity and Social Justice in a Partially Connection Global Community

“Digital equity is a social justice goal of ensuring that all students have access to information and communications technologies for learning regardless of:

–

- socioeconomic status,

– physical disability,

– language,

– race,

– gender, or

– any other characteristics that, have been linked with unequal treatment.”

G. Solomon 2002