Customer Reviews

Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide

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This book is a must for people considering the integration of technologies into education. I think that dry, for me anyhow, is a bit harsh. It starts out looking at a case in New Delhi, moves on to a case study in Ireland, and then whisks off to the US. This is just the intro. Chapter 1 reflects on the digital divide, and looks at it from various perspectives and its growth in the world. Chapter 2 look at access. It reviews other technologies such as the telephone, radio, tv, cable, and the vcr as historical examples of technologies that have encroached on society(ies). Chapter 3 looks at the recent history of connectivity and provides once again a global overview. Chapter 4 looks at the resources and languages providing these resources. It considers access for groups with disabilities. Chapter 5 considers Education and literacy. It discusses computer literacy and technological literacy as skills evolving from the 80's and then gets into new multimedia literacies and eventually the need for social and collaborative communities of learning. Chapter 6 discusses social capital and the intimacy shared on the networks of the web nowadays. The final chapter, 7, looks at how technology is becoming embedded with today's society - based on the previous chapters: obviously.

I think that this is perhaps not a book I would buy for my mother, but she would be interested in discussing parts of it. It is not as book that will make the NYT best selling list, but as someone interested in perspectives of 21st century education this book is a unique gift to educators and I personally do not find it dry. It is a well balanced geographic composite of cases from around the world addressing how technology is changing society, and education.

It reminds me a lot of Catalina Laserna's ideas of cybercy, the stage society is now in after first going through a period of oral communication, and the literacy (traditional reading and writing). This is the "new" stage, the stage now - cybercy. It does not address cybercy in a direct sense - but philosophically.

Please read the other review, and then make a decision. I am not selling books here - but if you have interests in technology entering the classroom and the new 21st century literacies - this is a gem.

This book is somewhat dry, but does present alot of information and data concerning the digital divide in countries all over the world. For those unfamiliar with what the digital divide is, it is the lack of "information and communication technology" in developing countries and in underprivedged sections of developed countries.

Warschauer does a good job of presenting the problems and probable causes. He then presents many different types of solutions that have been attempted, their successes and failures, and why they either worked or not. He finally discusses why we should now view this problem as a digital inequality instead of a digital divide.

If you are unfamiliar with this topic, I believe this would be a good breadth-type introduction.