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Digital Equity and Cultural Capital

Page history last edited by Morgan Twiggs 10 years, 11 months ago

 Digital Equity and Cultural Capital

  

 

“Digital equity is the social-justice goal of ensuring that everyone in our society has equal access to technology tools, computers and the Internet. Even more, it is when all individuals have the knowledge and skills to access and use technology tools, computers and the Internet”

(International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Digital Equity Toolkit – Working Draft, 2006).


 

 Digital Equity

     Digital equity refers to the gap created by access or lack of access to and the use of technology by members of various groups. (Bolt & Crawford, 2000). As Clark and Gorski suggest in their article, that the digital divide is commonly revered as being negative in connotation. Do to the fact that race, language, socioeconomic class, sex, and disability are the variables in which digital divide is measured by.  Clark and Gorski’s article attempts to understand and evaluate the large gap between these variable in Education.  

 

 

Analyzing the Gap

 

     Gorski points out in his example of the gap between race relation and technology, 70% of White adult in the United States use the Internet, as for their counter-part African American only 57% percent use the internet.  He further explores and establishes that socio-economic class also contributes to the large gap with his stats of 93% of households in the United States with an annual income of $75,000 or more have internet access at home. Whereas, less than 49% of household with an annual income of $30,000 or less have internet in their homes, as this information is, there is a relatively large gap for disadvantaged children and for children of color.

 

 

 

Cultural Capital

 

     Bourdieu uses cultural capital to explain the disparity in educational achievement of students from weak social backgrounds and minority students. Bourdieu evaluates the educational system and the effect of the different backgrounds students come in with.  Cultural capital is, ‘a theoretical hypothesis which makes it possible to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children originating from different social classes by relating academic success […] to the distribution of cultural capital between the classes and class fractions’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 243). This helps explain the socioeconomic status either can be an advantage or a disadvantage based on the students class. Bourdieu explains that the educational institution ignores the differences between the socioeconomic status's and backgrounds of their minority students. He refers to these students as cultural handicapped students and that schools tend to pass over these students and not make any attempts to adjusting teaching method or approaches. Thus, giving those students of the lower class background unequal opportunity.

 

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For more information

 

Digital Equity

http://www.iste.org/connect/special-interest-groups/sigde

http://www.k12hsn.org/files/research/Technology/national-consideration-DE.pdf

 

Cultural Capital

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-forms-capital.htm

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/cultural-capital/

 

 

Reference

Eamon, M. K. (2004). Digital Divide in Computer Access and Use Between Poor and Non-Poor Youth. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 91-112.

G. Pritchy Smith, C. V. (2001). Guide to New Resources. Multiculural Perceptives , 45-55.

Gorski, C. C. (2011). Multicultural Education and The Digital Divide: Focus on Race, Language, Socioeconomoic Class,Sex, and Disability. Multicultural Perspectives, 39-44.

Gorski, P. C. (2007). Insisting on Digital Equity: Reframing the Dominant Discourse on Multicultural Education and Technology. Hamline University.

Tondeur, J. (2010, June 21). ICT as cultural capital: The relationship between socio-economic status and the computer-use profile of young people. New Media & Society, 1-19.

 

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